Read the following excerpt from E. O. Wilson’s “The Environmental Ethic.”Species are disappearing at an accelerating rate through human action, primarily habitat destruction but also pollution and the introduction of exotic species into residual natural environments. I have said that a fifth or more of the species of plants and animals could vanish or be doomed to early extinction by the year 2020 unless better efforts are made to save them. . . . As the last forests are felled [destroyed] in forest strongholds like the Philippines and Ecuador, the decline of species will accelerate even more. In the world as a whole, extinction rates are already hundreds or thousands of times higher than before the coming of man. They cannot be balanced by new evolution in any period of time that has meaning for the human race.Why should we care? What difference does it make if some species are extinguished, if even half of all the species on earth disappear? Let me count the ways. New sources of scientific information will be lost. Vast potential biological wealth will be destroyed. Still undeveloped medicines, crops, pharmaceuticals, timber, fibers, pulp, soil-restoring vegetation, petroleum substitutes, and other products and amenities will never come to light. Based on the excerpt, which statement best summarizes the author’s beliefs about the disappearing species?
Read the excerpt from E.O. Wilson’s “The Environmental Ethic.”Species are disappearing at an accelerating rate through human action, primarily habitat destruction but also pollution and the introduction of exotic species into residual natural environments. I have said that a fifth or more of the species of plants and animals could vanish or be doomed to early extinction by the year 2020 unless better efforts are made to save them. . . . As the last forests are felled in forest strongholds like the Philippines and Ecuador, the decline of species will accelerate even more. In the world as a whole, extinction rates are already hundreds or thousands of times higher than before the coming of man. They cannot be balanced by new evolution in any period of time that has meaning for the human race.What message does the author convey in this excerpt?
Read this excerpt from Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics. The incentive scheme that rules sumo is intricate and extraordinarily powerful. Each wrestler maintains a ranking that affects every slice of life; how much money he makes, how large an entourage he carries, how much he gets to eat, sleep, and otherwise take advantage of his success. The sixty-six highest-ranked wrestlers in Japan, comprising the makuuchi and juryo divisions, make up the sumo elite. A wrestler near the top of this elite pyramid may earn millions and is treated like royalty. Any wrestler in the top forty earns at least $170,000 a year. The seventieth-ranked wrestler in Japan, meanwhile, earns only $15,000 a year. Life isn’t very sweet outside the elite. Low-ranked wrestlers must tend to their superiors, preparing their meals and cleaning their quarters and even soaping up their hardest-to-reach body parts. So ranking is everything.A wrestler’s ranking is based on his performance in the elite tournaments that are held six times a year. Each wrestler has fifteen bouts per tournament, one per day over fifteen consecutive days. If he finishes the tournament with a winning record (eight victories or better), his ranking will rise. If he has a losing record, his ranking falls. If it falls far enough, he is booted from the elite rank entirely. The eighth victory in any tournament is therefore critical, the difference between promotion and demotion; it is roughly four times as valuable in the rankings as the typical victory.Based on the excerpt, which of the following statements best summarizes the incentive system that ranks sumo wrestlers?
Read the excerpt from Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s Freakonomics.The incentive scheme that rules sumo is intricate and extraordinarily powerful. Each wrestler maintains a ranking that affects every slice of his life; how much money he makes, how large an entourage he carries, how much he gets to eat, sleep, and otherwise take advantage of his success. The sixty-six highest-ranked wrestlers in Japan, comprising the makuuchi and juryo divisions, make up the sumo elite. A wrestler near the top of this elite pyramid may earn millions and is treated like royalty. Any wrestler in the top forty earns at least $170,000 a year. The seventieth-ranked wrestler in Japan, meanwhile, earns only $15,000 a year. Life isn’t very sweet outside the elite. Low-ranked wrestlers must tend to their superiors, preparing their meals and cleaning their quarters, and even soaping up their hardest-to-reach body parts. So ranking is everything.Which sentence from the excerpt best supports the idea that the high-ranking sumo wrestlers enjoy many luxuries?
Read the excerpt from Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s Freakonomics.Let’s now consider the following statistic, which represents the hundreds of matches in which a 7–7 wrestler faced an 8–6 wrestler on a tournament’s final day: 7–7 WRESTLER’S PREDICTED WIN PERCENTAGE AGAINST 8–6 OPPONENT: 48.77–7 WRESTLER’S ACTUAL WIN PERCENTAGE AGAINST 8–6 OPPONENT: 79.6So the 7–7 wrestler, based on past outcomes, was expected to win just less than half the time. This makes sense; their records in this tournament indicate that the 8–6 wrestler is slightly better. But in actuality, the wrestler on the bubble won almost eight out of ten matches against his 8–6 opponent. Wrestlers on the bubble also do astonishingly well against 9–5 opponents:7–7 WRESTLER’S PREDICTED WIN PERCENTAGE AGAINST 9–5 OPPONENT: 47.27–7 WRESTLER’S ACTUAL WIN PERCENTAGE AGAINST 9–5 OPPONENT: 73.4The authors use the statistics in this excerpt to
Read the excerpt from E.O. Wilson’s “The Environmental Ethic.”Why should we care? What difference does it make if some species are extinguished, if even half of all the species on earth disappear? Let me count the ways. New sources of scientific information will be lost. Vast potential biological wealth will be destroyed. Still undeveloped medicines, crops, pharmaceuticals, timber, fibers, pulp, soil-restoring vegetation, petroleum substitutes, and other products and amenities will never come to light. It is fashionable in some quarters to wave aside the small and obscure, the bugs and weeds, forgetting that an obscure moth from Latin America saved Australia’s pastureland from overgrowth by cactus, that the rosy periwinkle provided the cure for Hodgkin’s disease and childhood lymphocytic leukemia, that the bark of the Pacific yew offers hope for victims of ovarian and breast cancer, that a chemical from the saliva of leeches dissolves blood clots during surgery, and so on down a roster already grown long and illustrious despite the limited research addressed to it.Which techniques does Wilson use in this excerpt to convey important information to his readers?
Read this excerpt from Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics. The incentive scheme that rules sumo is intricate and extraordinarily powerful. Each wrestler maintains a ranking that affects every slice of life; how much money he makes, how large an entourage he carries, how much he gets to eat, sleep, and otherwise take advantage of his success. The sixty-six highest-ranked wrestlers in Japan, comprising the makuuchi and juryo divisions, make up the sumo elite. A wrestler near the top of this elite pyramid may earn millions and is treated like royalty. Any wrestler in the top forty earns at least $170,000 a year. The seventieth-ranked wrestler in Japan, meanwhile, earns only $15,000 a year. Life isn’t very sweet outside the elite. Low-ranked wrestlers must tend to their superiors, preparing their meals and cleaning their quarters and even soaping up their hardest-to-reach body parts. So ranking is everything.A wrestler’s ranking is based on his performance in the elite tournaments that are held six times a year. Each wrestler has fifteen bouts per tournament, one per day over fifteen consecutive days. If he finishes the tournament with a winning record (eight victories or better), his ranking will rise. If he has a losing record, his ranking falls. If it falls far enough, he is booted from the elite rank entirely. The eighth victory in any tournament is therefore critical, the difference between promotion and demotion; it is roughly four times as valuable in the rankings as the typical victory.Based on the excerpt, which statement provides the best example of incentive for a sumo wrestler to cheat?
Which of the following pieces of evidence from Fast Food Nation best supports the author’s claim that teenagers are the ideal candidates for working in the fast food industry?
Read this claim from an argumentative essay about high-sugar foods. High-sugar foods should have the same sales restrictions as other harmful substances, such as alcohol and tobacco.Which statement best represents a counterclaim to this claim?
Read the following excerpt from Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics.A key fact of white-collar crime is that we hear about only the very slim fraction of people who are caught cheating. Most embezzlers lead quiet and theoretically happy lives; employees who steal company property are rarely detected.With street crime, meanwhile, that is not the case. A mugging or a burglary or a murder is usually tallied whether or not the criminal is caught. A street crime has a victim, who typically reports the crime to the police, who generate data, which in turn generate thousands of academic papers by criminologists, sociologists, and economists. But white-collar crime presents no obvious victim.In this excerpt, the authors present
Read this claim from an argumentative essay about zoos. Zoos help to protect endangered animals, and they are necessary for animal conservation.Which statement best represents a counterclaim to this claim?
Evidence to support a claim in an argumentative essay should be part of the
Which statement best explains how Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Death by Black Hole” and Billy Collins’s “Man Listening to Disc” present differing views about the universe?
Read the opening lines from Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Death by Black Hole.”Without a doubt, the most spectacular way to die in space is to fall into a black hole. Where else in the universe can you lose your life by being ripped apart atom by atom?Read the beginning stanza from Billy Collins’s “Man Listening to Disc.”This is not bad—ambling along 44th Streetwith Sonny Rollins for company,his music flowing through the soft calipersof these earphones,The beginnings of these two pieces are similar because they both
Read the excerpt from Death by Black Hole.Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, published in 1916, provides the insight to understand the bizarre structure of space and time in a high-gravity environment. Later research by the American physicist John A. Wheeler, and others, helped to formulate a vocabulary as well as the mathematical tools to describe and predict what a black hole will do to its surroundings.Read the excerpt from “Man Listening to Disc.”And I bow deeply to Thelonious Monkfor figuring out a wayto motorize—or whatever—his huge pianoso he could be with us today.The central idea that both texts share is
In Fast Food Nation, the best reason that the author offers for the fast-food industry’s strict regimen for productivity is that
Which of the following parts of an argumentative essay belongs in the introduction?
Read the sentence from an argumentative essay about the economy.The unstable economy caused lots of people to lose their jobs.Which revision exhibits the best word choice for the underlined portion of the sentence?
Which excerpt from “Man Listening to Disc” best supports the idea that when the speaker listens to music he is the center of his own world?
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