Sporting Futures USA | SAT Prep | Critical Reading 1.1

Please Read the Passage below and answer the Question at the bottom -

Topic: Short Single Passage

1 Since the dawn of fashion in the West some seven
2 hundred years ago, probably no other article of clothing
3 has in the course of its evolution more fully served as a
4 vehicle for the expression of ambivalences and
5 ambiguities than blue jeans. Some of the social history
6 supporting this statement is by now generally well
7 known. First fashioned in the mid-nineteenth-century
8 American West by Morris Levi Strauss, a Bavarian
9 Jewish peddler newly arrived in San Francisco, the
10 trousers, then as now, were made from a sturdy,
11 indigo-based cotton cloth said to have originated in
12 Nimes, France. A garment similar to that manufactured
13 by Levi Strauss for gold-miners and outdoor laborers
14 is said to have been worn earlier in France by sailors
15 and dockworkers from Genoa, Italy, who were referred
16 to as "genes;" hence the term "jeans." The distinctive
17 copper riveting at the pants pockets and other stress
18 points was the invention of Jacob Davis, a tailor from
19 Carson City, Nevada, who joined the Levi Strauss firm
20 in 1873, some twenty years after the garment's intro-
21 duction. Years later the working man's garment
22 attained the prominence and near-universal recogni-
23 tion it possesses today. For it was not until the late
24 1960s that blue jeans, after several failed moves in
25 previous decades into a broader mass market, strik-
26 ingly crossed over nearly all class, gender, age,
27 regional, national, and ideological lines to become the
28 universally worn and widely accepted item of apparel
29 they are today. And since the crossover, enthusiasm
30 for them has by no means been confined to North
31 America and Western Europe. In former Soviet bloc
32 countries and much of the Third World, too, where they
33 have generally been in short supply, they remain highly
34 sought after and hotly bargained over.

35 A critical feature of this cultural breakthrough is, of
36 course, blue jeans' identity change from a garment
37 associated exclusively with work (and hard work, at
38 that) to one invested with many of the symbolic
39 attributes of leisure: ease, comfort, casualness,
40 sociability, and the outdoors. Or, as the costume
41 historians Jasper and Roach-Higgins (1987) might put
42 it, the garment underwent a process of cultural
43 authentication that led to its acquisition of meanings
44 quite different from those with which it began. In
45 bridging the work/leisure divide when they did, jeans
46 tapped into the new, consumer-goods-oriented,
47 postindustrial affluence of the West on a massive
48 scale. Soon thereafter jeans penetrated those many
49 other parts of the world that emulate the West.

Question: Which of the following would provide the most fitting subject for a subsequent paragraph to the passage?

Please Read the Passage below and answer the Question at the bottom -

Topic: Short Single Passage

1 Since the dawn of fashion in the West some seven
2 hundred years ago, probably no other article of clothing
3 has in the course of its evolution more fully served as a
4 vehicle for the expression of ambivalences and
5 ambiguities than blue jeans. Some of the social history
6 supporting this statement is by now generally well
7 known. First fashioned in the mid-nineteenth-century
8 American West by Morris Levi Strauss, a Bavarian
9 Jewish peddler newly arrived in San Francisco, the
10 trousers, then as now, were made from a sturdy,
11 indigo-based cotton cloth said to have originated in
12 Nimes, France. A garment similar to that manufactured
13 by Levi Strauss for gold-miners and outdoor laborers
14 is said to have been worn earlier in France by sailors
15 and dockworkers from Genoa, Italy, who were referred
16 to as "genes;" hence the term "jeans." The distinctive
17 copper riveting at the pants pockets and other stress
18 points was the invention of Jacob Davis, a tailor from
19 Carson City, Nevada, who joined the Levi Strauss firm
20 in 1873, some twenty years after the garment's intro-
21 duction. Years later the working man's garment
22 attained the prominence and near-universal recogni-
23 tion it possesses today. For it was not until the late
24 1960s that blue jeans, after several failed moves in
25 previous decades into a broader mass market, strik-
26 ingly crossed over nearly all class, gender, age,
27 regional, national, and ideological lines to become the
28 universally worn and widely accepted item of apparel
29 they are today. And since the crossover, enthusiasm
30 for them has by no means been confined to North
31 America and Western Europe. In former Soviet bloc
32 countries and much of the Third World, too, where they
33 have generally been in short supply, they remain highly
34 sought after and hotly bargained over.

35 A critical feature of this cultural breakthrough is, of
36 course, blue jeans' identity change from a garment
37 associated exclusively with work (and hard work, at
38 that) to one invested with many of the symbolic
39 attributes of leisure: ease, comfort, casualness,
40 sociability, and the outdoors. Or, as the costume
41 historians Jasper and Roach-Higgins (1987) might put
42 it, the garment underwent a process of cultural
43 authentication that led to its acquisition of meanings
44 quite different from those with which it began. In
45 bridging the work/leisure divide when they did, jeans
46 tapped into the new, consumer-goods-oriented,
47 postindustrial affluence of the West on a massive
48 scale. Soon thereafter jeans penetrated those many
49 other parts of the world that emulate the West.

Question: Which statement, if true, would best support the author's argument in lines 23-29?

Please Read the Passage below and answer the Question at the bottom -

Topic: Long Single Passage

1 Introversion is a personality attitude identified by the
2 Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung. For people with a
3 preference for introversion, internal processing of an
4 experience is more important than the experience
5 itself; hence, introverts seek a lot of time alone to do
6 that processing. They can process in the presence of
7 others, but they must be detached and quiet so their
8 attention can be turned inward. A crucial thing to
9 understand about a relationship with an introvert
10 is not to take his or her need for "cave time" personally.
11 It is like a need for food or sleep.

12 Extroversion is also a personality attitude identified
13 by Carl Jung. Extroverts are talkative, enthusiastic,
14 sociable, and confident; they often have many friends.
15 They are very interested in the external world and want
16 to spend lots of their energy exploring it. They tend
17 to act first and think later, unlike introverts, who usually
18 do the opposite. They recharge by getting out of the
19 house, going out and being active.

20 Since we all have both an introvert and an extrovert
21 inside of us, we may be presented with only the extro-
22 verted side of someone when we first meet him or
23 her. Once you get to know an introvert better, he or she
24 may seem like a different person. The primary way to
25 identify a preference for introversion is to look at where
26 the person goes to recharge. If the person seeks soli-
27 tude, he or she is probably an introvert. (Note that extro-
28 verts have an introverted side that needs some quiet
29 time too; it's just not their primary orientation.)

30 Probably seventy-five percent of Americans are
31 extroverts, as you might guess from even a cursory
32 inspection of our advertising, news, and other
33 aspects of our culture. Not all societies are so
34 biased toward extroversion. American children
35 with a propensity for introversion may not be allowed
36 to indulge their preference; instead, they may be
37 encouraged to put their books down and go outside,
38 told by their parents to "get out there," "get involved,"
39 and "just do it."

40 Different eras and occasions of our life require us
41 to be more extroverted than others. For example,
42 adolescents, who are preparing to leave home
43 and meet new people, tend to be extroverts. However,
44 if an adolescent extrovert has not yet discovered
45 his or her introverted self, he or she will probably
46 find a healthy need for more downtime as he or she
47 ages. Jung believed that the psyche seeks balance. A
48 Jungian scholar writes, "Until we become thoroughly
49 aware of the inadequacy of our extroverted state and of
50 its insufficiency in regard to our deeper spiritual needs,
51 we shall not achieve even a measure of individuation,
52 through which a wider and more mature personality
53 emerges."

Question: The best meaning of the word "cursory" (line 31) is ________.

Please Read the Passages below and answer the Question at the bottom.

Topic: Short Paired Passages.
PASSAGE 1 -

1 When Americans are asked to rank professions in
2 terms of honesty and ethics, insurance agents
3 routinely end up near the bottom of the list-some-
4 where between politicians and car salesmen.
5 Generally, insurers are seen as clever hucksters who
6 prey on insecurity and ignorance to sell people what
7 they don't need at prices they shouldn't have to pay.
8 So you might have thought that the industry's image
9 couldn't get much worse. Then Eliot Spitzer, the New
10 York State attorney general, filed a lawsuit against
11 the giant insurance broker Marsh & McLennan,
12 describing instances of bribery, price-fixing, and all-
13 around corruption. The suit forced the resignation,
14 last week, of Jeffrey Greenberg, Marsh's C.E.O., and,
15 by implicating Marsh's collaborators and rivals, made
16 the insurance game appear even seamier than before.

PASSAGE 2 -

17 Insurance agents do not have a monopoly on getting
18 customers into fraudulent investments. But right now
19 a confluence of factors has made insurance agents
20 catalysts for peddling them. They have a clientele of
21 willing, sometimes desperate buyers, since interest
22 rates on safe, fixed-income investments have
23 declined practically to zero. Many people, particularly
24 the elderly, are now looking for income to replace
25 what they've lost. Con artists with investments to sell
26 have capitalized on insurance agents' all-too-human
27 hunger for extra earnings, convincing many of them
28 to defraud their clients by promising to share profits.
29 Con artists focus on insurance agents because the
30 agents, having earned the trust of their customers,
31 have intimate knowledge of their clients' finances;
32 however, by recommending investments that they
33 know to be swindles, the insurance agents prove
34 themselves to be undeserving of that trust.

Question: The authors of Passage 1 and Passage 2 would most likely agree on which of the following statements?

Please Read the Passages below and answer the Question at the bottom.

Topic: Long Single Passage.

1 Weather forecasts specific to wild land fire have been
2 provided since as early as 1916, when the U.S. Weath-
3 er Bureau was still a part of the U.S. Department of
4 Agriculture. In the last decade, though, the fire weather
5 program has been a repeated target of budget cuts.
6 An agreement between the National Weather Service
7 (NWS) and federal land management agencies speci-
8 fies that meteorological support will be provided for
9 wild land fire. The NWS, however, is struggling through
10 a nationwide Modernization and Associated
11 Restructuring (MAR), and the fire community is more
12 than a little worried about the degradation of services
13 that may result.

14 One of the key pieces of MAR is the phasing out of
15 meteorologists who specialize in fire weather. These
16 people are being moved, transferred, re-assigned, or
17 otherwise attritioned out of fire weather forecasting.
18 The NWS contends that its core staff of generalists can
19 do a better job than the fire weather specialists did,
20 with the help of new forecast technology. This new-
21 and-improved technology, however, has proved to be
22 less helpful than expected; it wasn't ready on time and
23 its quality is questionable. In addition, MAR will close
24 the former specialized fire weather offices; the fire
25 meteorologists, or "fire mets," will be absorbed into the
26 staffs of the new modernized offices, where they will
27 take on additional forecast duties including aviation
28 meteorology, hydrology, marine forecasting, and
29 severe weather warnings. MAR's planned transition,
30 though, has been stalling, partly because of problems
31 with the technology, partly because of budget short-
32 falls, and partly because of objections from the wild
33 land fire community.

34 The fire agencies -- the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of
35 Land Management, National Park Service, U.S. Fish &
36 Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Indian Affairs -- see
37 clearly the connection between fire weather and safety.
38 But the NWS has not acknowledged the value of or the
39 need for dedicated fire weather specialists who are
40 familiar with local conditions and weather patterns,
41 and their relevance to fire behavior. The NWS does not
42 seem to understand the connection between these
43 meteorologists and safety -- in fact, the NWS does a
44 dismal job of tracking statistics on the injuries,
45 fatalities, and property damage caused by fire weather.
46 Private for-profit weather companies lobbied Congress
47 to transfer weather services away from government
48 agencies without any understanding of the program-
49 matic structure which is needed in order to maintain
50 timely and accurate fire weather forecasts, and Con-
51 gress has, in turn, slashed funding for the programs.
52 The cumulative effect of these factors has created an
53 explosive situation that has fire agencies worried, and
54 NWS management scrambling for a solution.

Question: According to the passage, how is MAR creating problems for fire forecasting?

Topic: Sentence Completion, Vocabulary-in-Context

Question:

The ________ cream should help to ________ the pain caused by your dry skin.

Select the words that best complete the sentence.

Read the Passage Below and Answer the Question at the Bottom.

Topic: Short Single Passage

1 Photographer Lori Hyde defended criticism that said
2 her latest work is too pedestrian. "My vision for this
3 project was to capture images of everyday people in
4 everyday situations. I want my art to be very
5 accessible," stated Hyde. She went on to say, "I don't
6 create art by committee. And I will not ignore the gray
7 area of our lives. I believe artistic expression is alive
8 everywhere." Still, some of Hyde's longtime, ardent
9 supporters acquiesce that her technique is uninspired.

Question: The word "acquiesce" in line 9 best means which of the following?

Read the Passage Below and Answer the Question at the Bottom.

Topic: Long Single Passage

1 In the retrospective "Drawn from Life" at the NAB
2 Gallery, Marion Kryczka, Tom Robinson, and Bob Horn
3 showcase their drawings, paintings, and mixed media,
4 reflecting their life-long fascination with the figure as
5 conceptual art. The artists pay homage to the NAB
6 tradition of "holding figure drawing workshops for art-
7 ists to hone their perception and to use drawing as a
8 starting point as well as a point of departure to see
9 what is possible." And what is remarkable about this
10 show is not just the focus on drawing and the use of
11 traditional materials, but also the depiction of a
12 "Baroque style" portraying drama, vitality, and move-
13 ment--filtered through a modern sensibility. This show
14 is an allegory of art as poetry, transformation, and
15 social commentary.

16 Marion Kryczka's series begins with "Emperor of Ice-
17 Cream," a study in pastel on paper and another in oil
18 on canvas. Kryczka believes that "painting is like poetry
19 because both are filled with symbolism and both tell a
20 story." His series is named after the Wallace Stevens
21 poem "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," which has been
22 interpreted by some as celebrating the triumph of life's
23 pleasures and sensualities over the absoluteness of
24 death. Stevens re-emphasizes in the poem's last line
25 that "the only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream,"
26 perhaps meaning that what matters most is enjoying
27 life with all one's senses fully engaged, as they are
28 when eating ice-cream. Kryczka begins his story with a
29 chair in the foreground of a dimly-lit sitting room, beck-
30 oning the viewer to come into his world with a front row
31 seat. In the background, we see two women in profile,
32 one sitting and the other standing, both looking intently
33 at what appears to be a painting on the wall.

34 There is a bowl of ice-cream and a sheaf of wrapped
35 flowers on a long table, dividing the sitting room and
36 the doorway to the kitchen, which is bathed in natural
37 light. We are engaged in a painting that resembles the
38 17th-century Dutch master Pieter de Hooch with the il-
39 lusion of real perspective, portrayal of natural light, and
40 subtle use of color and tone. But, at the same time, the
41 painting also allows for a sense of modernism with
42 gestural drawings, a blend of realism and abstraction,
43 and a push and pull of intimate, close-up space and
44 receding space. Kryczka draws us deeply into the
45 world of poetry as painting.

46 Tom Robinson's series, including portraits, mixed me-
47 dia figures, and a video presentation of his models,
48 is "a newer form of art" for the artist. "Hannah" is a
49 larger-than-life portrait, first drawn gesturally with char-
50 coal on paper, then enhanced with Adobe Photoshop,
51 and finally printed on special paper, giving the portrait a
52 lithographic quality. The drawing resembles the real
53 person (seen on the video) but seems to emerge as a
54 character from a Kafkaesque landscape drawn in
55 Manga.* Her eyes are looking to the side as if she is
56 attempting to peer over her shoulder without moving
57 her head, trying to see if someone is following her.
58 We look closely at her enlarged pupils, trying to un-
59 cover any hidden images, but there is nothing there
60 except for reflected light. She could easily become a
61 Japanese anime heroine, with shifting features and
62 flowing hair, or a William Kentridge study of sustained
63 ambiguity. Robinson's drawings, enhanced by his use
64 of technology and mixed media, engage us with his
65 view of art as transformation.

66 Bob Horn's series includes large-scale frontal por-
67 traitures and smaller drawings of toys and cultural
68 icons, all drawn with charcoal and white pastel on fine-
69 art paper. Horn's "Expulsion from the Garden" brings to
70 mind the early-Renaissance artist Massacio's fresco
71 of Adam and Eve, and Michelangelo's "The Fall and
72 Expulsion from the Garden of Eden," with the entice-
73 ment of the snake and the fall occurring simultane-
74 ously in the same painting. What is memorable about
75 these Renaissance-era paintings is the artists' ability
76 to express real emotional turmoil in the figures--Adam
77 and Eve feel fear, shame, guilt, sadness, and despair.
78 But in Horn's tongue-in-cheek interpretation, the expul-
79 sion reveals a Humpty-Dumpty apple figure looking for-
80 lornly in the distance, as a bewildered Homer Simpson
81 in his underwear and a smiling "dime-store Barbie"
82 march in single file away to oblivion.

83 In another series, Horn's "Man with Ring" and "Woman
84 with Ring" evoke Rembrandt's use of chiaroscuro**
85 and his ability to bring a naturalness to his subjects to
86 highlight their personalities. Horn's realistic style
87 brings to mind the 19th-century realist Henri Fantin-
88 Latour, who painted traditional portraits with great
89 detail in austere, understated compositions. However,
90 in Horn's portraits, both the man and woman are wear-
91 ing rings not on their fingers, as they might have in a
92 Fantin-Latour portrait, but in their noses. Dressed in a
93 New York Yankees T-shirt, the young African-American
94 man carries an expression of intelligence, serious-
95 ness, and wonderment at the same time. Although the
96 young woman is wearing only a nose ring, her coun-
97 tenance tells us that she is strong, smart, outgoing,
98 and playful. Welcome to Bob Horn's world.

*Manga is a Japanese print cartoon.
**Chiaroscuro is using light and shadow for dramatic effect.

Question: Which series of lines presents the best thesis for the passage?

Topic: Sentence Completion, Logic-Based

Angela ________ checked her work for any ________ errors.

Select the words that best complete the sentence.

Topic: Long Paired Passage

PASSAGE 1 -

1 In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt, campaigning for pres-
2 ident on the Progressive Party ticket, endorsed
3 compulsory health insurance as part of his platform.
4 The same year, an organization of progressive econo-
5 mists started a crusade to make health insurance
6 mandatory for workers who earned less than $1,200 a
7 year (about $25,000 today). The cost of the premiums
8 would be shared by employer and employee (two-fifths
9 each) and the state. Compulsory health insurance,
10 proponents argued, would eliminate sickness as a
11 cause of poverty.

12 For a few years, it looked as though health-insurance
13 legislation in the U.S. was inevitable, and advanta-
14 geous for workers and doctors. With access to prompt
15 medical care, laborers would be able to return to their
16 jobs more quickly, keeping their families fed. And
17 doctors would prosper if a growing number of patients
18 could pay their fees. More than a dozen state legisla-
19 tures began considering compulsory health insurance
20 based on a model bill drafted by a labor group.

21 But the "professional philanthropists, busybody social
22 workers, misguided clergymen and hysterical women,"
23 as an opponent described them, hadn't reckoned on a
24 mighty resistance movement of some the unlikeliest
25 political bedfellows in history. They included commer-
26 cial insurance companies; fraternal organizations;
27 pharmacists; manufacturers; Samuel Gompers, then
28 president of the American Federation of Labor, and
29 some other labor unions; Christian Scientists; assort-
30 ed xenophobes and anti-Communists; and -- the coup
31 de grace -- doctors.

32 Although united in their goal to defeat mandatory insur-
33 ance, the challengers had wildly different motives.
34 Commercial insurance companies and fraternal or-
35 ganizations sold sickness and burial policies and
36 feared losing business. Pharmacists suspected the
37 government would start telling patients what medi-
38 cines to take and how much they should cost. Samuel
39 Gompers argued that the solution to the problem of ill-
40 ness was not compulsory insurance but higher wages.
41 Management didn't want to pay for another benefit,
42 especially if, as a representative of an industry trade
43 group argued, "the sickness had been contracted
44 either through intemperate or licentious living."

45 America's entry into World War I in 1917 provided an-
46 other knock against health insurance: It was unAmeri-
47 can. As California prepared for a referendum on the
48 issue, commercial insurers published pamphlets
49 picturing Kaiser Wilhelm II with the caption, "Made in
50 Germany. Do you want it in California?" (Voters re-
51 jected the measure.) In Albany, an insurance bill under
52 consideration by the state Legislature came "straight
53 from Germany" and was "devilish in principle and
54 foreign to American ideals," argued Henry W. Berg, a
55 New York doctor. It never got out of committee.

56 The AALL also neglected to woo physicians, often ig-
57 noring their opinions when negotiating the legislation
58 Most doctors became convinced that health insurance
59 would insert the dubious judgment of the government
60 between patient and doctor, and cut their pay. Charles
61 H. Mayo, president of the American Medical Associa-
62 tion, urged physicians to be wary of "anything which
63 reduced the income of the physician" because that
64 would "limit his training, equipment and efficiency."
65 In the end, not a single state passed a health insur-
66 ance law. Henry Seager, one-time head of the AALL
67 and a Columbia University professor, said, "We are
68 still so far from considering illness as anything beyond
69 a private misfortune against which each individual and
70 each family should protect itself, as best it may, that
71 Germany's heroic method of attacking it as a national
72 evil through government machinery seems to us to
73 belong almost to another planet."

PASSAGE 2 -

74 Politicians and pundits lump the terms "health care"
75 and "health insurance" together as though they are the
76 same thing. For example, Sen. Max Baucus, Montana
77 Democrat, recently said, "One in 6 Americans does not
78 have access to health care. And in my home state of
79 Montana, an even greater percentage of people have
80 limited access to health care: 1 in 5 Montanans lack
81 health insurance."

82 In reality, however, health care and health insurance
83 are quite different. Health care is the products and ser-
84 vices used for the prevention, treatment and manage-
85 ment of illness. Health insurance, on the other hand, is
86 a way of paying for health care. Specifically, it is an
87 agreement whereby the insurer pays for the health
88 care costs of the insured.

89 Believing health care and health insurance are the
90 same thing easily leads to some mistaken, if not
91 dangerous, notions. It leads to the beliefs that (1) uni-
92 versal health care and universal health insurance are
93 the same; and (2) that if a nation has universal health
94 insurance, where the government pays for every citi-
95 zen's health care, that nation will have universal health
96 care, where citizens will have ready access to health
97 care whenever they need it. As the experience of other
98 nations shows, however, universal health insurance
99 often leads to very restricted access to health care.
100 In nations where the government provides universal
101 health insurance -- such as Canada, Sweden and the
102 United Kingdom -- there are few restraints on citizens'
103 demand for health care. This leads to many citizens
104 overusing health care and creates a strain on govern-
105 ment budgets. To keep the costs from exploding, those
106 governments must restrict access to health care by
107 using waiting lists, canceling surgeries or delaying
108 access to new treatments such as prescription drugs.
109 The consequences can be quite harmful.

110 In 1997, three patients in Northern Ontario, Canada,
111 died while on a waiting list to receive heart surgery.
112 One patient had been waiting more than six months to
113 receive bypass surgery. In Britain, patient Mavis Skeet's
114 cancer surgery was canceled four times, during which
115 time her cancer became inoperable. It is important to
116 note, however, that all these people had health insur-
117 ance -- that is, their governments would pay for their
118 health care. What they did not have was ready access
119 to treatment. As the Canadian Supreme Court said
120 upon ruling a ban on private health care as unconstitu-
121 tional, "access to a waiting list is not access to health care."

Question: The "proponents" (line 10) of compulsory health insurance in Passage 1 argue that:

Topic: Short Single Passage

1 Talk to the handful of "doughboys" who are still alive
2 today--the youngest of which is 105 years old, having
3 lied about his age in order to enlist as an ambulance
4 corpsman in 1917 and they still cannot bring them-
5 selves to discuss the brutal horror that was trench
6 warfare. "I don't want to think about it," one veteran
7 said, though he added that he thinks about his fallen
8 comrades every day of his unnaturally-long life.
9 The experience of any warfare, from our American
10 Civil War to the present conflicts in Iraq and
11 Afghanistan, often leaves veterans dumb, but there
12 was something exponentially more terrible, indeed
13 unspeakable, about the mass slaughter that marked
14 "The War to End All Wars," so named because it was
15 (to that point) that bloodiest conflict known to man.
16 Nearly 10 million soldiers died, and more than 20
17 million were wounded in four years of fighting. It made
18 folks so sick of war that they hoped against hope no
19 new war would ever erupt again.

20 The lethal drones and computerized smart-bombs of
21 today, the napalm and jungle warfare of Vietnam, the
22 frozen tundra and stalemate of the Korean peninsula,
23 or the aerial fire-bombing of The Second World War--
24 for all their selective butchery, they are pale in com-
25 parison with the impassable mud, denuded land-
26 scapes, endless barbed wire and infected vermin, the
27 the mustard gas and killing field in between enemy
28 trenches forever known as "No-Man's Land" that
29 marked this particular conflict as the worst hardship
30 that soldiers ever had to endure. "All this madness,"
31 the British philosopher Bertrand Russell once said,
32 "all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization
33 and our hopes, has been brought about because a
34 set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly
35 stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have
36 chosen that it should occur rather than that any one
37 of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his
38 country's pride."

39 Of course World War I did not "end all wars," but it did
40 awaken nations to unite initially as the League of
41 Nations and later as the United Nations in order to
42 take steps to correct some of the worst outrages of that
43 barbaric conflict, such as trench warfare, and in that
44 sense endures as the crucible of man's inhumanity to
45 man.

Question: What is signified by the fact that the word "doughboys" (line 1) is in quotation marks?

Topic: Sentence Completion, Logic Based.

Despite the initial ________ with which Andrea approached the cross-country train ride, she found the experience quite ________ .

Select the words that best complete the sentence.

Topic: Long Paired Passage.

PASSAGE 1 -

1 Sarah Lam, an eighth-grader at Presidio Middle
2 School in San Francisco, has learned to manage her
3 time better since sixth grade, when she spent three to
4 four hours toiling over nightly assignments, she said.
5 But her schedule these days--which includes orches-
6 tra, working as a tutor, plus two to three hours of
7 homework--is packed. Her father has occasionally
8 had to use college texts to help her answer science
9 homework questions.

10 Yet there's no evidence that lobbing on the home-
11 work in elementary grades boosts test scores later,
12 according to Harris Cooper, a psychology professor
13 at University of Missouri, who reviewed dozens of
14 studies and concluded homework may begin to pay
15 off in junior high. Cooper said giving large amounts of
16 homework in elementary school may have "negative
17 benefits" such as frustration, negative self-image and
18 not enough time to do other important activities. The
19 National Parent Teacher Association has
20 recommended 10 minutes per grade level, but
21 acknowledges that some kids have less and some
22 have a lot more. So why are schools doing it?
23 "There seem to be two sources," said Cooper. "Some
24 of the pressure is coming from parents who are
25 highly achievement-oriented. The other source is new
26 state standards, which are requiring teachers to
27 teach more, while at the same time requiring more
28 non-academic activities. In my district, for example,
29 fourth-graders learn swimming." There are parents
30 who protest, but principals and teachers say just as
31 many ask for more homework. Many believe that
32 heavy homework, while stressful, is a necessary bur-
33 den in a world that's increasingly competitive. They
34 assist when they can. Some hire homework coaches
35 to help their kids keep up and relieve the stress that
36 arguing over doing it can cause. Others sign up their
37 kids for test-taking classes or enrichment courses.
38 Businesses like Kumon and Score--which give kids
39 test practice--and the Report Card in San Rafael,
40 which sells educational materials and offers both
41 regular tutoring and enrichment classes, have
42 sprouted around the Bay area.

43 "The amount of homework kids are getting is out-
44 rageous," said Donna Gray, a tutor who offers not
45 only remedial help to students, but also enrichment
46 work some parents feel is necessary for their kids to
47 stay competitive. "If you don't develop physically,
48 emotionally and socially as well, it's not good . . ."
49 said Gray, a retired teacher who has a waiting list of
50 clients in Tiburon. "It's society today. I believe that
51 teachers today wouldn't give homework like this if it
52 weren't for the parents. The young teachers here
53 worry about the parents. They're smart, high-
54 achieving. It's hard for them to live up to what the
55 parents expect."

56 Now that homework appears to be at a peak, the
57 pendulum is bound to swing in the other direction,
58 said Gill, who believes reasonable amounts of home-
59 work can be a useful learning tool and give parents
60 "a window into the classroom." There already may be
61 a modest backlash brewing. Take, for example, Gill's
62 research colleague Steven Schlossman, head of the
63 history department at Carnegie Mellon University. He
64 said he had pulled his ninth-grade son out of private
65 school near Pittsburgh because of the unwieldy
66 amount of homework. One week, as an experiment,
67 Schlossman did the homework himself. It took him 35
68 hours. "That's what stimulated my interest in the
69 subject of homework," he said. "This is one of the
70 dramas going on throughout middle class America
71 that very few people want to talk about. They fear if
72 their child can't do it, he's destined to failure. But the
73 amount of trauma, if anyone wants to measure it, I'll
74 venture is extraordinary."

PASSAGE 2 -

75 A comprehensive review of academic performance
76 around the world gives bad marks to excessive
77 homework. Teachers in Japan, the Czech Republic
78 and Denmark assign relatively little homework, yet
79 students there score well, researchers said this week.
80 "At the other end of the spectrum, countries with very
81 low average scores--Thailand, Greece, Iran--have
82 teachers who assign a great deal of homework," says
83 Penn State researcher David Baker. "American stu-
84 dents appear to do as much homework as their peers
85 overseas--if not more--but still only score around the
86 international average," said co-researcher Gerald
87 LeTendre. Baker and LeTendre examined the Third
88 International Study of Mathematics and Sciences
89 (TIMSS), which in 1994 collected data from schools
90 in 41 nations on performance in grades 4, 8 and 12.
91 Additional similar data from 1999 was factored in.
92 The homework burden is especially problematic in
93 poorer households, where parents may not have the
94 time or inclination to provide an environment condu-
95 cive to good study habits, the researchers conclude.
96 In particular, drills designed to improve memorization
97 may not be suited to many homes.

98 "An unintended consequence may be that those chil-
99 dren who need extra work and drill the most are the
100 ones least likely to get it," Baker said. "Increasing
101 homework loads is likely to aggravate tensions within
102 the family, thereby generating more inequality and
103 eroding the quality of overall education."

104 In the early 1980s, U.S. teachers began assigning
105 more homework, the researchers say. The shift was
106 in response to mediocre performance in comparison
107 to Japanese students. At the same time, the trend
108 was going the other way in Japanese schools. The
109 new study found U.S. math teachers assigned more
110 than two hours of homework a week in 1994-95,
111 while in Japan the figure was about one hour per
112 week. "Undue focus on homework as a national
113 quick-fix, rather than a focus on issues of instruc-
114 tional quality and equity of access to opportunity to
115 learn, may lead a country into wasted expenditures of
116 time and energy," LeTendre says. The homework
117 burden might also affect performance among children
118 of higher-income parents. "Parents are extremely
119 busy with work and household chores, not to mention
120 chauffeuring young people to various extracurricular
121 activities, athletic and otherwise," LeTendre said.
122 "Parents might sometimes see exercises in drill and
123 memorization as intrusions into time."

Question: In line 65 of Passage 1, "unwieldy" most nearly means ________.

Topic: Short Single Passage

1 Being ashamed is a more ambivalent phenomenon
2 than the sense of shame. If discretion-shame sustains
3 the social ordering of the world, disgrace-shame is a
4 painful experience of the disintegration of one's world.
5 A break occurs in the self's relationship with itself
6 and/or others. The self is no longer whole, but divided.
7 It feels less than it wants to be, less than at its best it
8 knows itself to be. Sartre finds the effect of this
9 disruption so radical that he calls it an "internal
10 hemorrhage, the regrouping of all the objects in my
11 universe." Even when the advent of shame is less
12 dramatic, there is a disruption nonetheless that
13 manifests itself in a sense of confusion. The
14 disorientation that triggers shame always involves a
15 reflexive movement of consciousness. What is
16 actually experienced is a relation of distance. In some
17 cases the relation is interpersonal, between the self
18 and others who look at it; at other times the relation
19 occurs intrapersonally, as the self sees itself. In these
20 instances, the persons concerned are initially unself-
21 conscious, involved in, and given over to, an external
22 situation. They are conscious not of themselves, but of
23 the objects before them. But suddenly, the situation
24 changes, the mood is broken, and they are made
25 acutely aware of themselves as they are at that mo-
26 ment. Something happens that turns their attention to
27 themselves in such a way that they are not simply
28 there, but see themselves there, and this seeing
29 arouses shame.

30 Shame opens up a new level of consciousness of the
31 self. The undivided self in action gives way to the
32 doubled self. Shame is an act of self-attention. Each of
33 these elements of shame (disruption, disorientation,
34 and painful self-consciousness) manifests the rela-
35 tional character of the shame experience. This
36 relational nature of shame, in turn, contains a revel-
37 atory capacity. In the reflexive movement of conscious-
38 ness, a part of the self is revealed to the self. Sartre
39 has captured this quality of shame: "[Its] structure is
40 intentional; it is a shameful apprehension of some-
41 thing and this something is me. I am ashamed of
42 what I am. Shame therefore realizes an intimate rela-
43 tion of myself to myself. Through shame I have discov-
44 ered an aspect of my being. I recognize that I am as the
45 Other sees me."

Question: The author uses the term "relation of distance" (line 16) to distinguish between which of the following?

Topic: Short Single Passage

1 Being ashamed is a more ambivalent phenomenon
2 than the sense of shame. If discretion-shame sustains
3 the social ordering of the world, disgrace-shame is a
4 painful experience of the disintegration of one's world.
5 A break occurs in the self's relationship with itself
6 and/or others. The self is no longer whole, but divided.
7 It feels less than it wants to be, less than at its best it
8 knows itself to be. Sartre finds the effect of this
9 disruption so radical that he calls it an "internal
10 hemorrhage, the regrouping of all the objects in my
11 universe." Even when the advent of shame is less
12 dramatic, there is a disruption nonetheless that
13 manifests itself in a sense of confusion. The
14 disorientation that triggers shame always involves a
15 reflexive movement of consciousness. What is
16 actually experienced is a relation of distance. In some
17 cases the relation is interpersonal, between the self
18 and others who look at it; at other times the relation
19 occurs intrapersonally, as the self sees itself. In these
20 instances, the persons concerned are initially unself-
21 conscious, involved in, and given over to, an external
22 situation. They are conscious not of themselves, but of
23 the objects before them. But suddenly, the situation
24 changes, the mood is broken, and they are made
25 acutely aware of themselves as they are at that mo-
26 ment. Something happens that turns their attention to
27 themselves in such a way that they are not simply
28 there, but see themselves there, and this seeing
29 arouses shame.

30 Shame opens up a new level of consciousness of the
31 self. The undivided self in action gives way to the
32 doubled self. Shame is an act of self-attention. Each of
33 these elements of shame (disruption, disorientation,
34 and painful self-consciousness) manifests the rela-
35 tional character of the shame experience. This
36 relational nature of shame, in turn, contains a revel-
37 atory capacity. In the reflexive movement of conscious-
38 ness, a part of the self is revealed to the self. Sartre
39 has captured this quality of shame: "[Its] structure is
40 intentional; it is a shameful apprehension of some-
41 thing and this something is me. I am ashamed of
42 what I am. Shame therefore realizes an intimate rela-
43 tion of myself to myself. Through shame I have discov-
44 ered an aspect of my being. I recognize that I am as the
45 Other sees me."

Question: All of the following are effects of disgrace-shame except:

Topic: Short Single Passage

1 In their ongoing battle against evolution, creationists
2 argue that because there are no eyewitnesses re-
3 garding what occurred at the beginning of time and at
4 every stage since, creationism is just as plausible a
5 theory as evolution. In fact, creationists argue that the
6 Bible provides written evidence supporting their posi-
7 tion. Scientists counter that failure to physically see a
8 scientific phenomenon does not make it unfounded.
9 Many generally accepted scientific theories cannot be
10 witnessed, such as the existence of atoms and the
11 Earth's movement around the Sun, yet scientists infer
12 their existence through the use of "extensive
13 observation and experimentation."

Question: The claim made by scientists that "failure to physically see a scientific phenomenon does not make it unfounded" (lines 7-8) serves as a counter argument to what creationist claim?

Topic: Long Single Passage.

1 Ever since the Census Bureau released figures
2 showing that married-couple households are now a
3 minority, my phone has been ringing off the hook with
4 calls from people asking: "How can we save mar-
5 riage? How can we make Americans understand that
6 marriage is the most significant emotional connection
7 they will ever make?"

8 I think these are the wrong questions--indeed, such
9 questions would have been almost unimaginable
10 through most of history. It has only been in the last
11 century that Americans have put all their emotional
12 eggs in the basket of coupled love. Because of this
13 change, many of us have found joys in marriage our
14 great-great-grandparents never did. But we have also
15 neglected our other relationships, placing too many
16 burdens on a fragile institution and making social life
17 poorer in the process. In fact, according to the Census
18 Bureau's figures, the number of people who depended
19 totally on a spouse for important conversations, with no
20 other person to turn to, almost doubled, to 9.4 percent
21 from 5 percent. Not surprisingly, the number of people
22 saying they didn't have anyone in whom they confided
23 nearly tripled.

24 The solution to this isolation is not to ramp up our
25 emotional dependence on marriage. Until 100 years
26 ago, most societies agreed that it was dangerously
27 antisocial to elevate marital affection and nuclear-
28 family ties above commitments to neighbors, extended
29 kin, civic duty and religion.

30 From medieval days until the early 19th century, diaries
31 and letters more often used the word love to refer to
32 neighbors, cousins and fellow church members than
33 to spouses. Victorian novels and diaries were as
34 passionate about brother-sister relationships and
35 same-sex friendships as about marital ties.

36 By the early 20th century, though, the sea change in the
37 culture wrought by the industrial economy had
38 loosened social obligations to neighbors and kin,
39 giving rise to the idea that individuals could meet their
40 deepest needs only through romantic love, culminat-
41 ing in marriage. Under the influence of Freudianism,
42 society began to view intense same-sex ties with sus-
43 picion and people were urged to reject the emotional
44 claims of friends and relatives who might compete with
45 a spouse for time and affection.

46 The insistence that marriage and parenthood could
47 satisfy all an individual's needs reached a peak in the
48 cult of "togetherness" among middle-class suburban
49 Americans in the 1950s. Women were told that
50 marriage and motherhood offered them complete
51 fulfillment. Men were encouraged to let their wives
52 take care of their social lives.

53 But many men and women found these prescriptions
54 stifling. Women who entered the work force in the
55 1960s joyfully rediscovered social contacts and
56 friendships outside the home. And women's lead in
57 overturning the cult of 1950s marriage inspired many
58 men to rediscover what earlier generations of men had
59 taken for granted -- that men need deep emotional
60 connections with other men, not just their wives.
61 Researchers soon found that men and women with
62 confidants beyond the nuclear family were mentally
63 and physically healthier than people who relied on just
64 one other individual for emotional intimacy and
65 support.

66 So why do we seem to be slipping back in this regard?
67 It is not because most people have voluntarily em-
68 braced nuclear-family isolation. Indeed, the spread of
69 "virtual" communities on the Internet speaks to a deep
70 hunger to reach out to others. Instead, it is the expan-
71 sion of the post-industrial economy that seems to be
72 driving us back to a new dependence on marriage.
73 According to the researchers Kathleen Gerson and
74 Jerry Jacobs, 60 percent of American married couples
75 have both partners in the work force, up from 36 per-
76 cent in 1970, and the average two-earner couple now
77 works 82 hours a week. This increase in working
78 hours is probably why the time Americans spend
79 socializing with others off the job has declined by
80 almost 25 percent since 1965. Their free hours are
81 spent with spouses.

82 As Americans lose the wider face-to-face ties that build
83 social trust, they become more dependent on romantic
84 relationships for intimacy and deep communication,
85 and more vulnerable to isolation if a relationship
86 breaks down. In some cases we even cause the
87 breakdown by loading the relationship with too many
88 expectations. Marriage is generally based on greater
89 equality and deeper friendship than in the past, but
90 even so, it is hard for marriage to compensate for the
91 way that work has devoured time once spent cultiva-
92 ting friendships.

93 The solution is not to revive the failed marital experi-
94 ment of the 1950s, as so many commentators noting
95 the decline in married-couple households seem
96 to want. Nor is it to lower our expectations that we'll
97 find fulfillment and friendship in marriage. Instead, we
98 should raise our expectations for, and commitment to,
99 other relationships. Paradoxically, we can strengthen
100 our marriages the most by not expecting them to be
101 our sole refuge from the pressures of the modern work
102 force. Instead, we need to restructure both work and
103 social life so we can reach out and build ties with
104 others, including people who are single or divorced.
105 That indeed would be a return to marital tradition--not
106 the 1950s model, but the pre-20th-century model that
107 has a much more enduring pedigree.

Question: The author emphasizes the spread of "virtual" communities (lines 68-69) in order to achieve which of the following?

Topic: Sentence Completion, Logic-Based

Instead of hiring a controversial speaker, the school hired a(n) ________ speaker, and his speech didn't lead to any subsequent ________ amongst the students.

Select the words which best complete the sentence.

Topic: Sentence Completion, Vocabulary-in-Context

Joseph was ________ of his sister's ________ ability to quickly learn new concepts in math because Joseph lacked the same natural-born ability.

Select the words that best complete the sentence.

Topic: Sentence Completion, Logic-Based

The tire popping within the first five minutes of the trip was a(n) ________ of the other obstacles to come.

Select the word which best completes the sentence.