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The reason that graphs of asteroid rotation rates lack the expected statistical tail associated with high rotational rates is that
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Compared to regulations in other countries, those of the United States tends to be narrower in scope, with an emphasis on manufacturing processes and specific categories of pollution, and little or no attention to the many other factors that affect environmental quality. An example is the focus on controlling pollution rather than influencing decisions about processes, raw materials, or products that determine environmental impacts. Regulation in the United States tends to isolate specific aspects of production processes and attempts to control them stringently, which means that some aspects of business are regulated tightly, although sometimes not cost-effectively, while others are ignored. Other countries and several American states have recently made more progress in preventing pollution at its source and considering such issues as product life cycles, packaging waste, and industrial energy efficiency.
Environmental regulation in the United States is also more prescriptive than elsewhere, in the sense of requiring specific actions, with little discretion left to the regulated firm. There also is a great reliance on action-forcing laws and technology standards.
These contrasts are illustrated nicely in a 1974 book that used a hare and tortoise analogy to compare air quality regulation in the United States and Sweden. While the United States (the hare) codified ambitious goals in statutes that drove industry to adopt new technologies under the threat of sanctions, Sweden (the tortoise) used a more collaborative process that stressed results but worked with industry in deciding how to achieve them. In the end air quality results were about the same. Similar results have been found in other comparative analyses of environmental regulation. For example, one study of a multinational firm with operations in the United States and Japan found that pollution levels in both countries were similar, despite generally higher pollution abatement expenditures in the United States. The higher costs observed in the United States thus were due in large part, not to more stringent standards, but to the higher regulatory transaction costs. Because agencies in different countries share information about technologies, best practices, and other issues, the pollution levels found acceptable in different countries tends to be quite similar.
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It can be inferred that, compared to the United States, Japan spent less on
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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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It can be inferred from the passage that had the scaglia rossa not exhibited a certain geological property then which of the following would most likely have been true?
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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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According to the passage"the American conception of what happiness is"at least partially results from
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More capacious than ponderous, the most recent incarnation in a line of Melville biographies, Philbrick`s"Moby Dick"(a barefaced titular homage to Melville`s iconic novel on a white whale) has the wild and unpredictable energy of the great white whale itself, more than enough to heave its significance out of what Melville called "the universal cannibalism of the sea" and into the light.
According to Philbrick, Melville, in his rightly lionized novel,"Moby Dick", challenged the form of the novel decades before James Joyce, and a century before Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace. Calling for tools befitting the ambition of his task -"Give me a condor`s quill! Give me Vesuvius`s crater for an ink stand!"- Melville substituted dialogue and stage direction for a chapter`s worth of prose. He halted the action to include a parody of the scientific classification of whales, a treatise on the whale as represented in art, a meditation on the complexity of rope, whatever snagged his attention.
Reporting the exact day and time of his writing in a parenthetical aside, he "pulled back the fictive curtain and inserted a seemingly irrelevant glimpse of himself in the act of composition,"the moment Philbrick identifies as his favorite in the novel. Melville may not have called this playfulness metafiction, but he defied strictures that shaped the work of his contemporaries.
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The function of the lines beginning with "Melville substituted dialogue..."is to illustrate the way in which Melville
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In his magnificent biography of Keats, Nicholas Roe chronicles a forward-looking spirit, whose poetry offered a strikingly modern amalgam of the arts and sciences. Medical allusions to nerves, arteries, bone and blood developed in tandem with deepening thoughts on human pain and suffering, says Roe. Keats`s vaunted "negative capability" allowed him to engage imaginatively with life`s transience and his own consumptive state (he suffered from tuberculosis and was not expected to live for long). The rueful melancholy of"To Autumn"and"Ode to a Nightingale"speaks of a courageous reckoning with mortality.
Lord Byron, with customary disdain, regarded Keats as a mere dilettante of sensation and "his imagination". Roe will have little of this. The imagination at work in a poem such as"Isabella, or, the Pot of Basil" derived from Keats`s professional exposure to dissecting-room corpses. As the son of a Moorfields livery stables manager, Keats knew how the poor could serve as fodder for scalpels. Hospitals were complicit in the body-snatching trade, as the science of anatomy was in its infancy and trainee surgeons were required to practice their skills.
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According to the passage, Lord Byron`s attitude toward Keats is suspect primarily because
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Even though physiological and behavioral processes are maximized within relatively narrow ranges of temperatures in amphibians and reptiles, individuals may not maintain activity at the optimum temperatures for performance because of the costs associated with doing so. Alternatively, activity can occur at suboptimal temperatures even when the costs are great. Theoretically, costs of activity at suboptimal temperatures must be balanced by gains of being active. For instance, the leatherback sea turtle will hunt during the time of day in which krill are abundant, even though the water is cooler and thus the turtle`s body temperature requires greater metabolic activity. In general, however, the cost of keeping a suboptimal body temperature, for reptiles and amphibians, is varied and not well understood; they include risk of predation, reduced performance, and reduced foraging success.
One reptile that scientists understand better is the desert lizard, which is active during the morning at relatively low body temperatures (usually 33.0 C), inactive during midday when external temperatures are extreme, and active in the evening at body temperatures of 37.0 C. Although the lizards engage in similar behavior (e.g., in morning and afternoon, social displays, movements, and feeding), metabolic rates and water loss are great and sprint speed is lower in the evening when body temperatures are high. Thus, the highest metabolic and performance costs of activity occur in the evening when lizards have high body temperatures. However, males that are active late in the day apparently have a higher mating success resulting from their prolonged social encounters. The costs of activity at temperatures beyond those optimal for performance are offset by the advantages gained by maximizing social interactions that ultimately impact individual fitness.
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It can be inferred from the passage that the metabolic costs of an activity during the middle of the day are
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In 1883, the Indonesian island Krakatoa, home to a massive volcano, seemingly disappeared overnight as an eruption rent the entire island apart, catapulting rock and debris into the atmosphere. For the next years, as ash circled the entire globe, the average world temperature dropped by several degrees Fahrenheit. Therefore, an eruption of similar power in terms of the amount of debris ejected into the atmosphere will likely cause the average temperature around the world to drop by several degrees.
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Which of the following, if true, best challenges the main claim of the argument?
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The waters off the coast of Iceland are filled with pods of killer whales, which migrate there during the summer. Wildlife parks that rely on the killer whales for entertainment hunt the killer whale almost exclusively in the water of Iceland, because strict sanctions forbid them from doing so off the coast of North America, an area also abundant in killer whales. Since Iceland recently gave into pressure from international groups opposed to the hunting of killer whales, it too will forbid the hunting of killer whales off its coast. Therefore, all wildlife parks will be forced to end their shows featuring killer whales once their current killer whales are unable to perform.
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All of the following cast doubt on the conclusion of the argument EXCEPT?
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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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The author objects to the five-paragraph essay as a means of instilling certain positive writing habits on the grounds that it does which of the following?
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Vladimir Nabokov, the scientist and the author have been treated as discrete manifestations of a prodigious and probing mind, until now. In her recent biography on Nabokov, Temoshotka makes the bold assertion that these two apparently disparate realms of Nabokov`s polymorphous genius were not so unrelated after all. While Temoshotka cannot be faulted for the boldness of her thesis-Nabokov`s hobby as a lepidopterist (a butterfly collector) and his experience as a novelist informed each other-she fails to make a convincing case. Surely, with enough ingenuity, one can find parallels, as Temoshotka does, between the creative products of Nabokov the naturalist and Nabokov the writer: the intricate butterfly wings that he pored over in his laboratory and the intricate prose that he crafted with sedulous care. But to say the prose of?Lolita?and?Speak Memory?would not have coalesced into their current incarnations had Nabokov`s hobby been, say, lawn tennis is simply reaching too far.
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