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Which of the following, if true, most helps to explain why acting on the government inspectors' recommendations failed to achieve its goal?
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Freudianism sits alongside Marxism and Darwinism in the pantheon of modern theories held to be so revelatory that they not only gained the adherence of Western intelligentsia but shaped the broader culture. During the first half of the twentieth century, an air of intrigue and mystery hovered around Freud`s newly anointed practitioners: psychotherapists. They occupied a strange universe, speaking in a language so incomprehensible but seemingly authoritative that it alternately awed and scared the average man on the street. Psychotherapy is no longer an intellectual movement today as it once was. But in the form of modern professional "caring," it has assumed a new role, which is to provide a peculiar sort of substitute friendship - what we might call "artificial friendship" - for lonely people in a lonely age.
To understand why this occurred and what it means for American culture, one must study the fractious history of the mental health field over the last six decades. It is a complicated story, with a staggering variety of terms, schools, leaders, and techniques, so any overview must necessarily leave out many important details. But from even just a synopsis of the conflicts that gave rise to today`s culture of psychotherapy - battles over who would hold the truest title to physician of the mind, tensions between scientists and clinicians, academics and professionals, elites and the public - we can see more clearly how psychotherapy has profoundly shaped the American conception of what happiness is and how we can achieve it.
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In the context in which it appears `fractious` most nearly means
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In the mid-1970`s, Walter Alvarez, a geologist, was studying Earth`s polarity. It had recently been learned that the orientation of the planet`s magnetic field reverses, so that every so often, in effect, south becomes north and vice versa. Alvarez and some colleagues had found that a certain formation of pinkish limestone in Italy, known as the scaglia rossa, recorded these occasional reversals. The limestone also contained the fossilized remains of millions of tiny sea creatures called foraminifera. Alvarez became interested in a thin layer of clay in the limestone that seemed to have been laid down around the end of the Cretaceous Period. Below the layer, certain species of foraminifera-or forams, for short-were preserved. In the clay layer, there were no forams. Above the layer, the earlier species disappeared and new forams appeared. Having been taught the uniformitarian view, which held that any apparent extinctions throughout geological time resulted from `the incompleteness of the fossil record` rather than an actual extinction, Alvarez was not sure what to make of the lacuna in geological time corresponding to the missing foraminifera, because the change looked very abrupt.
Had Walter Alvarez not asked his father, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez, how long the clay had taken to deposit, the younger Alvarez may not have thought to use iridium, an element rarely found on earth but more plentiful in meteorites, to answer this question. Iridium, in the form of microscopic grains of cosmic dust, is constantly raining down on the planet. The Alvarezes reasoned that if the clay layer had taken a significant amount of time to deposit, it would contain detectable levels of iridium. The results were startling: far too much iridium had shown up. The Alvarez hypothesis, as it became known, was that everything-not just the clay layer-could be explained by a single event: a six-mile-wide asteroid had slammed into Earth, killing off not only the forams but also the dinosaurs and all the other organisms that went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period.
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Proponents of the uniformitarian view would most likely argue that
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The average size of marine life that washes up on the shore of the Japanese island Ryukyu is smaller than the average size that washes up on the Western coast of Australia. Giant squid have recently been found washed up on the shores of Ryukyu as well as the Western coast of Australia. It can be concluded that the average size of the giant squids on the shore Ryukyu must be less than that of giant squids washed up on the shores of Western Australia.
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The argument above can be attacked on the grounds that it does which of the following?
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An unknown simian virus recently killed off nearly half the human population of a remote jungle town. Because the disease spread at an alarming rate-victims usually exhibited signs within 8 hours of exposure, and many died within 36 hours-the simian virus, if an outbreak occurs again, is likely to cause more deaths than has any other previous virus.
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Which of the following pieces of information most effectively calls into question the validity of the conclusion?
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The US Constitution established both gold and silver as the basis of US currency: that is to say, it established a bimetallic standard for currency. This remained in place for about a century, until the Coinage Act of 1873, which embraced a "gold only" standard, a monometallic standard, effectively dropping silver as the basis of currency. Over the next several decades, advocates of bimetallism and advocates of the "gold only" standard fiercely debated.
The "gold only" advocates, such as William McKinley, argued that shifts in the relative value of the two precious metals could lead to wild fluctuations in the values of currency in a bimetallic system. Early in the United States history, Alexander Hamilton had tried to fix the gold-silver exchange rate by fiat, but of course, such restraints only inhibit the natural development of a free market.
Unemployment was high in the depression caused by the Panic of 1893, and many argued that these economic challenges had been triggered by abandoning bimetallism. One of the more prominent advocates of bimetallism was William Jennings Bryant: indeed, bimetallism was the very center of his presidential campaigns in 1896 and 1900, both of which he lost to McKinley. Bryant articulated the popular view that a "gold only" standard limited the money supply, and thus favored those who were already quite wealthy, against the interests of working people of all professions. He famously expressed this argument in his "Cross of Gold" speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention, in which he argued that continuing the "gold only" standard would "crucify" the honest laboring classes on a "cross of gold."
Despite the eloquence of Bryant's arguments, history strongly favored the "gold-only" standard. The argument that increasing the money supply would lead to greater prosperity strikes us now as na?ve: of course, we now understand that increasing the monetary supply can lead to runaway inflation, which hurts everyone. Furthermore, gold did not remain as limited as the advocates of bimetallism imagined. In the 1890s, scientists discovered a cyanide process that allowed workers to extract pure gold from much lower grade ore, thus significantly increasing domestic gold production. Additionally, the discovery of two immense gold deposits in South Africa substantially increased world gold supply. Thus, the "gold only" standard allowed for ample currency, and even robust prosperity in the 1920s, so bimetallism died a quiet death.
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It can be inferred from the passage that the author believes that government attempts to control exchange rates
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The problem with treating the five-paragraph essay form as a relatively benign aid to clarity is that like any habit it is very hard to break. Students who can not break the habit remain handicapped because five-paragraph form runs counter to virtually all of the values and attitudes that they need in order to grow as writers and thinkers-such as respect for complexity, tolerance of uncertainty, and the willingness to test and complicate rather than just assert ideas. The form actually discourages thinking by conditioning writers to be afraid of looking closely at evidence. If they look too closely, they might find something that does not fit, at which point the prefabricated organizational scheme falls apart. But it is precisely the something-that-doesn`t-seem-to-fit, the thing writers call a "complication" that triggers good ideas.
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In the context in which it appears "conditioning" most nearly means
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One reason we are able to recognize speech, despite all the acoustic variation in the signal, and even in very difficult listening conditions, is that the speech situation contains a great deal of redundancy-more information than is strictly necessary to decode the message. There is, firstly, our general ability to make predictions about the nature of speech, based on our previous linguistic experience-our knowledge of the speakers, subject matter, language, and so on. But in addition, the wide range of frequencies found in every signal presents us with far more information than we need in order to recognize what is being said. As a result, we are able to focus our auditory attention on just the relevant distinguishing features of the signal-features that have come to be known as acoustic cues.
What are these cues, and how can we prove their role in the perception of speech? It is not possible to obtain this information simply by carrying out an acoustic analysis of natural speech: this would tell us what acoustic information is present but not what features of the signal are actually used by listeners in order to identify speech sounds. The best an acoustic description can do is give us a rough idea as to what a cue might be. But to learn about listener`s perception, we need a different approach.
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The primary purpose of the passage is to
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The `trophic contamination hypothesis` posits that shorebirds accumulate industrial and urban pollution at stopover sites, toxins that are subsequently released in sudden high doses as fat is burned during migratory flights, disrupting the bird`s ability to make migratory decisions. For example, large contaminant doses might hamper refueling by reducing the satiation signal in shorebirds so that they do not accumulate sufficient fat for migration. A recent study found that, out of those shorebirds that were unable to migrate, some weighed as much as 20% less than the average migrating bird of their species. Whether such findings are a result of shorebirds suffering from trophic contamination, or whether such birds simply cut their migrations short by landing in a foreign ecosystem is unlikely to be resolved until further studies are conducted.?
One promising line of research involves organochlorines, toxins deposited on mudflats in the 1970s and 1980s, now buried by sediments but finally close enough to the surface to be of issue to foraging shorebirds. Organochlorines should be more accessible to long-billed shorebirds that probe deeply for prey than to short-billed species that forage at or near the surface. We predict that an increased number of long-billed shorebirds will either be unable to migrate or will be found along an aberrant flight path.
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According to the passage, the long-billed shorebird is expected to be more likely than the short-billed shorebird to have trouble migrating because
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Dark matter and dark energy have little effect on conventional matter over familiar distances. Instead, they make their presence known through their prodigious gravitational effects. In tracking them down, therefore, astronomers have had to study gigantic assemblages of matter, extending across spans of millions and billions of light-years. Perhaps the first to take that sweeping viewpoint was the Swiss-American astronomer Fritz Zwicky. In the 1930`s, Zwicky traced the motions of individual galaxies within great clusters of galaxies and made a remarkable discovery: the individual galaxies are moving too fast to be held together in a cluster by the force of gravity exerted by the starry matter visible within them. From his measurements, Zwicky concluded that the great clusters of galaxies must be held together by the gravitational effect of some unseen mass, which he dubbed "dark matter."
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Scientists studied "gigantic assemblages of matter, extending across spans of millions and billions of light-years" in order to
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The digital revolution has given us, for the first time, the image in its pure form, an image without body. The image conveyed by a painting, on the other hand, is always a material entity, however unobtrusive, a particular thing made out of pigments, binders and a support. Sculpture, in turn, is often far more physically obtrusive than painting, and to the extent that it offers a multiplicity of possible viewpoints, it generates many images, but typically none of them are the image of the work. The physical impression a sculpture makes is more powerful than its imagistic content, which seems merely transitory by comparison. The digitization of culture has only made this more evident.
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