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Some economists suggest that all firms would be expected to pay workers doing identical jobs the same wage. However, studies show that high-profit industries tend to pay more. While some of this observed wage gap could be due to difficulties in measuring workers` talent, it is unlikely that such measurement problems can explain everything. Although talent is hard to measure, factors with which it is presumably correlated, such as education and tenure, are not. Yet studies that control for those factors still find big wage disparities. Moreover, although receptionists, for example, do not become less talented when they leave a high-profit industry to work in an industry with lower profits, their pay tends to drop in line with the wage gap between the two.
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According to the passage, which of the following is true regarding difficulties in measuring workers` talent.
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Which of the following best describes the function of the highlighted sentence in the context of the passage as a whole?
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Comets-detritus from the formation of outer solar system bodies-represent one possible source of Earth's water. Although hundreds of Earth masses of comets now reside in orbits far from the Sun, early in the history of the solar system comets were more commonly in orbits that intersected the orbits of Mars, Earth, and Venus (based on computer studies of solar system formation). Collisions of comets with the planets would have released the cometary ices and gases into the atmospheres of the target planets. Early in Earth's history, the first couple of hundred million years, cometary material including water might have been episodically added to the atmosphere. However, the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen(D/H) in the water ice portion of most (but not all) comets that have been measured is twice that in ocean water on the Earth. No plausible way has been found to lower the value after it has been added to the Earth. Therefore, comets do not appear to be the primary source of Earth's water.
Two alternative possibilities have been proposed. Bodies in the asteroid belt would have been richer in water than material near the Earth, and Jupiter perturbed that material into orbits that could have allowed accretion by the Earth. Most of this material would have been in the form of bodies as large as the moon or even Mars, so that these collisions would have been violent. Nonetheless, the net effect would have been the addition of water to the growing Earth. Carbonaceous meteorites, some of which may have been derived from the asteroid belt, have a D/H range that averages out to the value present in the Earth's oceans. However, some of the details of the elemental and isotopic abundances in the carbonaceous chondrites [a type of meteorite] limit to 1 percent the amount of this material that could have been added to the Earth. It is possible that other types of chondrites were present in the asteroid belt that today are poorly known, such as a new class of bodies represented by a handful of so-called "main belt comets, but for the moment this is speculative. Alternatively, water could have been absorbed [gathered on a surface in a condensed layer] on rocky grains closer to the Earth, and brought in through a gentle rain of this material. While laboratory studies show that enough water might have stuck to the grains to explain the abundance of the Earth's oceans, the presence of such a water-laden dust laver in the nebula remains speculative.
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The "carbonaceous meteorites" are important to the first of two alternative possibilities discussed in the passage because these meteorites.
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It can be inferred from the passage that an important difference between the “two alternative possibilities" is that the second one
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Which of the following can be inferred about the "carbonaceous meteorites" discussed in the passage?
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The author discusses “other types of chondrites" primarily because
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Editorial
A year ago, the government of Fortran predicted that Torre City would experience strong net job growth for the following year but that Glanville, Portran's other major city, would not. Events have clearly proved otherwise, however, in Torre City, but not in Glanville, the number of people who are unemployed is greater now than it was a year ago.
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Which of the following is an assumption on which the editorial's argument depends?
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As they unearth long- ignored women's writings, some feminist literary scholars have a tendency to evaluate those writings according to current ideological standards. This tendency, however understandable, has certain pitfalls, as feminist response to three late-seventeenth-and early-eighteenth-century English female playwrights demonstrates. Mary Pix, Catharine Trotter, and Delarivier Manley each wrote at least four plays and were known collectively as the "Female Wits." These women saw themselves as participating in a common endeavor, but feminist scholars have evaluated their works in very different terms. Trotter and Manley have been praised for their depiction of "feminist" themes一Trotter because of her insistence on feminine virtue, and Manley because of her depiction of strong, if sometimes villainous, heroines-while Pix's works, because they depict women in ways now considered stereotypically "feminine," are often dismissed.
Yet Pix is conservative only within a present-day context: within the context of late-seventeenth-and early- eighteenth-century English drama, Pix's plays were more formally innovative than Manley's and more successful than either Manley's or Trotter'. She also broke new ground regarding subject matter, addressing contemporary social issues such as class upheaval. However, these acts are rarely acknowledged by scholars of the Female Wits.
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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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According to the passage, feminist literary scholars of the Female Wits have a tendency to
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The author's reference to Pix's "addressing contemporary social issues such as class upheaval" serves primarily to
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In European lowland heathlands, heather bushes, grasses, and bracken compete with one another for the sandy soil's scarce nutrients, with none acquiring permanent dominance. In Dutch heathlands, however, atmospheric nitrogen pollution produced by intensive animal farming has turned heathlands into grassland, the result of an interaction between nitrogen pollution and heather-eating beetles. Additional nitrogen usually increases growth of both grass and heather, and at first heather usually thrives because the grasses cannot penetrate the canopy of its bushes. Heather beetle population size, like that of many herbivorous insects, varies from year to year. When heather beetles are abundant, their larvae grow particularly well on the nitrogen-enriched heather shoots. Voraciously feeding larvae and adults then defoliate the bushes, tipping the competitive balance between heather and grasses irrevocably.
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It can be inferred from the passage that an abundance of heather beetles in Dutch heathlands
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Which of the followings best describes the function of the highlighted sentence in the author's explanation?
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To evaluate any given intellectual property policy, we must weigh the costs and benefits of awarding copyright protection. If an innovation and the benefits of the protection are nonexistent, then, by the cost-benefit criterion, it is unwarranted. Such a situation arose in 1998, when the United States Congress extended the term of copyright from 50 years after an author's death to 70. Book buyers are harmed by this. A book's price is higher under copyright because the publisher continues to owe royalties to the author's heirs and does not compete with others printing the same book. Against that drawback, there is no countervailing benefit. Authors are hardly likely to find motivation in the prospect of earnings that will arrive more than 50 years after their death. Moreover, the extension was applied retroactively to existing copyrights一but authors do not need incentives to write books they have already written.
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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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The author mentions “royalties” primarily in order to identify
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