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Sandeep Gupta
Serial GMAT Topper
Director
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Part 1
Passage 1
During
the
nineteenth
century,
occupational
information about women that was provided by the
United States censusa population count conducted
each decadebecame more detailed and precise in
response to social changes. Through 1840, simple
enumeration by household mirrored a home-based
agricultural economy and hierarchical social order: the
head of the household (presumed male or absent) was
specified by name, whereas other household members
were only indicated by the total number of persons
counted in various categories, including occupational
categories. Like farms, most enterprises were familyrun, so that the census measured economic activity as
an attribute of the entire household, rather than of
individuals.
The 1850 census, partly responding to antislavery and
women's rights movements, initiated the collection of
specific information about each individual in a
household.
Not until 1870 was occupational
information analyzed by gender:
the census
superintendent reported 1.8 million women employed
outside the home in "gainful and reputable
occupations." In addition, he arbitrarily attributed to
each family one woman "keeping house." Overlap
between the two groups was not calculated until 1890,
when the rapid entry of women into the paid labor
force and social issues arising from industrialization
were causing women's advocates and women
statisticians to press for more thorough and accurate
accounting of women's occupations and wages.
Passage 2
The general density dependence model can be applied
to explain the founding of specialist firms (those
attempting to serve a narrow target market).
According to this model, specialist foundings hinge on
the interplay between legitimation and competitive
forces, both of which are functions of the density (total
number) of firms in a particular specialist population.
Legitimation occurs as a new type of firm moves from
being viewed as unfamiliar to being viewed as a
natural way to organize. At low density levels, each
founding increases legitimation, reducing barriers to
entry and easing subsequent foundings. Competition
occurs because the resources that firms seek
customers, suppliers, and employeesare limited, but
as long as density is low relative to plentiful resources,
the addition of another firm has a negligible impact on
the intensity of competition. At high density levels,
however, competitive effects outweigh legitimation
effects, discouraging foundings. The more numerous
the competitors, the fiercer the competition will be and
the smaller will be the incentive for new firms to enter
the field.
While several studies have found a significant
correspondence between the density dependence
model and actual patterns of foundings, other studies
have found patterns not consistent with the model. A
possible explanation for this inconsistency is that
legitimation and competitive forces transcend national
boundaries, while studies typically restrict their
analysis to the national level. Thus a national-level
analysis can understate the true legitimation and
competitive forces as well as the number of foundings
in an industry that is internationally integrated. Many
industries are or are becoming international, and since
media and information easily cross national borders,
so should legitimation and its effects on overseas
foundings. For example, if a type of firm becomes
established in the United States, that information
transcends borders, reduces uncertainties, and helps
foundings of that type of firm in other countries. Even
within national contexts, studies have found more
support for the density dependence model when they
employ broader geographic units of analysisfor
example, finding that the model's operation is seen
more clearly at the state and national levels than at
city levels.
Passage 3
In its 1903 decision in the case of Lone Wolf v.
Hitchcock, the United States Supreme Court rejected
the efforts of three Native American tribes to prevent
the opening of tribal lands to non-Indian settlement
without tribal consent. In his study of the Lone Wolf
case, Blue Clark properly emphasizes the Court's
assertion of a virtually unlimited unilateral power of
Congress (the House of Representatives and the
Senate) over Native American affairs. But he fails to
note the decision's more far-reaching impact: shortly
after Lone Wolf, the federal government totally
abandoned negotiation and execution of formal written
agreements with Indian tribes as a prerequisite for the
implementation of federal Indian policy.
Many
commentators believe that this change had already
occurred in 1871 whenfollowing a dispute between
the House and the Senate over which chamber should
enjoy primacy in Indian affairsCongress abolished
the making of treaties with Native American tribes.
But in reality the federal government continued to
negotiate formal tribal agreements past the turn of the
century, treating these documents not as treaties with
sovereign nations requiring ratification by the Senate
but simply as legislation to be passed by both houses
of Congress. The Lone Wolf decision ended this era of
formal negotiation and finally did away with what had
increasingly become the empty formality of obtaining
tribal consent.
Passage 4
Some historians contend that conditions in the
United States during the Second World War gave rise
to a dynamic wartime alliance between trade unions
and the African American community, an alliance that
advanced the cause of civil rights. They conclude that
the postwar demise of this vital alliance constituted a
lost opportunity for the civil rights movement that
followed the war. Other scholars, however, have
portrayed organized labor as defending all along the
relatively privileged position of White workers relative
to African American workers.
Clearly, these two
perspectives are not easily reconcilable, but the
historical reality is not reducible to one or the other.
Unions faced a choice between either maintaining the
prewar status quo or promoting a more inclusive
approach that sought for all members the right to
participate in the internal affairs of unions, access to
skilled and high-paying positions within the
occupational hierarchy, and protection against
management's arbitrary authority in the workplace.
While union representatives often voiced this inclusive
ideal, in practice unions far more often favored
entrenched interests. The accelerating development
of the civil rights movement following the Second
World War exacerbated the unions' dilemma, forcing
trade unionists to confront contradictions in their own
practices.
Passage 5
Historians have identified two dominant currents in the
Russian women's movement of the late tsarist period.
"Bourgeois" feminism, so called by its more radical
opponents, emphasized "individualist" feminist goals
such as access to education, career opportunities, and
legal equality.
"Socialist" feminists, by contrast,
emphasized class, rather than gender, as the principal
source of women's inequality and oppression, and
socialist revolution, not legal reform, as the only road
to emancipation and equality.
However, despite antagonism between bourgeois
feminists and socialist feminists, the two movements
shared certain underlying beliefs. Both regarded paid
labor as the principal means by which women might
attain emancipation: participation in the workplace
and economic self-sufficiency, they believed, would
make women socially useful and therefore deserving
of equality with men. Both groups also recognized the
enormous difficulties women faced when they
combined paid labor with motherhood. In fact, at the
First All-Russian Women's Congress in 1908, most
participants advocated maternity insurance and paid
maternity leave, although the intense hostility between
some socialists and bourgeois feminists at the
Congress made it difficult for them to recognize these
areas of agreement. Finally, socialist feminists and
most bourgeois feminists concurred in subordinating
women's emancipation to what they considered the
more important goal of liberating the entire Russian
population from political oppression, economic
backwardness, and social injustice.
Passage 6
Colonial historian David Allen's intensive study of five
communities in seventeenth-century Massachusetts is
a model of meticulous scholarship on the detailed
microcosmic level, and is convincing up to a point.
Allen suggests that much more coherence and direct
continuity existed between English and colonial
agricultural practices and administrative organization
than other historians have suggested. However, he
overstates his case with the declaration that he has
proved "the remarkable extent to which diversity in
New England local institutions was directly imitative of
regional differences in the mother country."
Such an assertion ignores critical differences between
seventeenth-century England and New England. First,
England was overcrowded and land-hungry; New
England was sparsely populated and labor-hungry.
Second, England suffered the normal European rate of
mortality; New England, especially in the first
generation of English colonists, was virtually free from
infectious diseases.
Third, England had an allembracing state church; in New England membership
in a church was restricted to the elect. Fourth, a high
proportion of English villagers lived under paternalistic
resident squires; no such class existed in New
England. By narrowing his focus to village institutions
and ignoring these critical differences, which studies
by Greven, Demos, and Lockridge have shown to be
so important, Allen has created a somewhat distorted
picture of reality.
Allen's work is a rather extreme example of the
"country community" school of seventeenth-century
English history whose intemperate excesses in
removing all national issues from the history of that
period have been exposed by Professor Clive Holmes.
What conclusion can be drawn, for example, from
Allen's discovery that Puritan clergy who had come to
the colonies from East Anglia were one-third to onehalf as likely to return to England by 1660 as were
Puritan ministers from western and northern England?
We are not told in what way, if at all, this discovery
illuminates historical understanding. Studies of local
history have enormously expanded our horizons, but it
is a mistake for their authors to conclude that village
institutions are all that mattered, simply because their
functions are all that the records of village institutions
reveal.
Passage 7
The United States government has a long-standing
policy of using federal funds to keep small business
viable. The Small Business Act of 1953 authorized the
Small Business Administration (SBA) to enter into
contracts
with
government
agencies
having
procurement powers and to arrange for fulfillment of
these contracts by awarding subcontracts to small
businesses. In the mid-1960's, during the war on
poverty years, Congress hoped to encourage minority
entrepreneurs by directing such funding to minority
businesses. At first this funding was directed toward
minority entrepreneurs with very low incomes. A 1967
amendment to the Economic Opportunity Act directed
the SBA to pay special attention to minority-owned
businesses located in urban or rural areas
characterized by high proportions of unemployed or
low-income individuals. Since then, the answer given
to the fundamental question of who the recipients
should bethe most economically disadvantaged or
those with the best prospects for business success
has changed, and the social goals of the programs
have shifted, resulting in policy changes.
The first shift occurred during the early 1970's. While
the goal of assisting the economically disadvantaged
entrepreneur remained, a new goal emerged: to
remedy the effects of past discrimination. In fact, in
1970 the SBA explicitly stated that their main goal was
to increase the number of minority-owned businesses.
At the time, minorities constituted seventeen percent
of the nation's population, but only four percent of the
nation's self-employed. This ownership gap was
held to be the result of past discrimination. Increasing
the number of minority-owned firms was seen as a
way to remedy this problem.
In that context,
providing funding to minority entrepreneurs in middleand high-income brackets seemed justified.
In the late 1970's, the goals of minority-business
funding programs shifted again.
At the Minority
Business Development Agency, for example, the goal
of increasing numbers of minority-owned firms was
supplanted by the goal of creating and assisting more
minority-owned substantive firms with future growth
potential.
Assisting manufacturers or wholesalers
became far more important than assisting small
service businesses.
Minority-business funding
programs were now justified as instruments for
economic development, particularly for creating jobs in
minority communities of high unemployment.
Passage 8
In terrestrial environments, gravity places special
demands on the cardiovascular systems of animals.
Gravitational pressure can cause blood to pool in the
lower regions of the body, making it difficult to
circulate blood to critical organs such as the brain.
Terrestrial snakes, in particular, exhibit adaptations
that aid in circulating blood against the force of
gravity.
The problem confronting terrestrial snakes is best
illustrated by what happens to sea snakes when
removed from their supportive medium. Because the
vertical pressure gradients within the blood vessels are
counteracted by similar pressure gradients in the
surrounding water, the distribution of blood
throughout the body of sea snakes remains about the
same regardless of their orientation in space, provided
they remain in the ocean. When removed from the
water and tilted at various angles with the head up,
however, blood pressure at their midpoint drops
significantly, and at brain level falls to zero. That
many terrestrial snakes in similar spatial orientations
do not experience this kind of circulatory failure
suggests that certain adaptations enable them to
regulate blood pressure more effectively in those
orientations.
One such adaptation is the closer proximity of the
terrestrial snake's heart to its head, which helps to
ensure circulation to the brain, regardless of the
snake's orientation in space. The heart of sea snakes
can be located near the middle of the body, a position
that minimizes the work entailed in circulating blood to
both extremities. In arboreal snakes, however, which
dwell in trees and often assume a vertical posture, the
average distance from the heart to the head can be as
little as 15 percent of overall body length. Such a
location requires that blood circulated to the tail of the
snake travel a greater distance back to the heart, a
problem solved by another adaptation.
When
climbing, arboreal snakes often pause momentarily to
wiggle their bodies, causing waves of muscle
contraction that advance from the lower torso to head.
By compressing the veins and forcing blood forward,
these contractions apparently improve the flow of
venous blood returning to the heart.
25. The passage supports the assertions that:
(A) The disadvantages of an adaptation to a particular
feature of an environment often outweigh the
advantages of such an adaptation.
(B) An organism's reaction to being placed in an
environment to which it is not well adapted can
sometimes illustrate the problems that have been
solved by the adaptations of organisms indigenous
to that environment.
(C) The effectiveness of an organism's adaptation to a
particular feature of its environment can only be
evaluated by examining the effectiveness with
which organisms of other species have adapted to
a similar feature of a different environment.
Passage 9
In a new book about the antiparty feeling of the early
political leaders of the United States, Ralph Ketcham
argues that the first six Presidents differed decisively
from later Presidents because the first six held values
inherited from the classical humanist tradition of
eighteenth-century England. In this view, government
was designed not to satisfy the private desires of the
people but to make them better citizens; this tradition
stressed the disinterested devotion of political leaders
to the public good. Justice, wisdom, and courage
were more important qualities in a leader than the
ability to organize voters and win elections. Indeed,
leaders were supposed to be called to office rather
than to run for office. And if they took up the burdens
of public office with a sense of duty, leaders also
believed that such offices were naturally their due
because of their social preeminence or their
contributions to the country. Given this classical
conception of leadership, it is not surprising that the
first six Presidents condemned political parties. Parties
were partial by definition, self-interested, and
therefore serving something other than the
transcendent public good.
Even during the first presidency (Washington's),
however, the classical conception of virtuous
leadership was being undermined by commercial
forces that had been gathering since at least the
beginning of the eighteenth century. Commerceits
profit-making,
its
self-interestedness,
its
individualismbecame the enemy of these classical
ideals.
Although Ketcham does not picture the
struggle in quite this way, he does rightly see
Jackson's tenure (the seventh presidency) as the
culmination of the acceptance of party, commerce,
and
individualism.
For
the
Jacksonians,
nonpartisanship lost its relevance, and under the
direction of Van Buren, party gained a new legitimacy.
The classical ideals of the first six Presidents became
identified with a privileged aristocracy, an aristocracy
that had to be overcome in order to allow competition
between opposing political interests. Ketcham is so
strongly committed to justifying the classical ideals,
however, that he underestimates the advantages of
their decline. For example, the classical conception of
leadership was incompatible with our modern notion of
the freedoms of speech and press, freedoms intimately
associated with the legitimacy of opposing political
parties.
Passage 10
Conventional wisdom has it that large deficits in the
United States budget cause interest rates to rise. Two
main arguments are given for this claim. According to
the first, as the deficit increases, the government will
borrow more to make up for the ensuing shortage of
funds. Consequently, it is argued, if both the total
supply of credit (money available for borrowing) and
the amount of credit sought by nongovernment
borrowers remain relatively stable, as is often
supposed, then the price of credit (the interest rate)
will increase. That this is so is suggested by the basic
economic principle that if supplies of a commodity
(here, credit) remain fixed and demand for that
commodity increases, its price will also increase. The
second argument supposes that the government will
tend to finance its deficits by increasing the money
supply with insufficient regard for whether there is
enough room for economic growth to enable such an
increase to occur without causing inflation. It is then
argued that financiers will expect the deficit to cause
inflation and will raise interest rates, anticipating that
because of inflation the money they lend will be worth
less when paid back.
Unfortunately for the first argument, it is unreasonable
to assume that nongovernment borrowing and the
supply of credit will remain relatively stable.
Nongovernment borrowing sometimes decreases.
When it does, increased government borrowing will
not necessarily push up the total demand for credit.
Alternatively, when credit availability increases, for
example through greater foreign lending to the United
States, then interest rates need not rise, even if both
private and government borrowing increase.
Passage 11
Current feminist theory, in validating women's own
stories of their experience, has encouraged scholars of
women's history to view the use of women's oral
narratives as the methodology, next to the use of
women's written autobiography, that brings historians
closest to the "reality" of women's lives.
Such
narratives, unlike most standard histories, represent
experience from the perspective of women, affirm the
importance of women's contributions, and furnish
present-day women with historical continuity that is
essential to their identity, individually and collectively.
Scholars of women's history should, however, be as
cautious about accepting oral narratives at face value
as they already are about written memories. Oral
narratives are no more likely than are written
narratives to provide a disinterested commentary on
events or people. Moreover, the stories people tell to
explain themselves are shaped by narrative devices
and storytelling conventions, as well as by other
cultural and historical factors, in ways that the
storytellers may be unaware of. The political rhetoric
of a particular era, for example, may influence
women's interpretations of the significance of their
experience. Thus a woman who views the Second
World War as pivotal in increasing the social
acceptance of women's paid work outside the home
may reach that conclusion partly and unwittingly
because of wartime rhetoric encouraging a positive
view of women's participation in such work.
Passage 12
The professionalization of the study of history in the
second half of the nineteenth century, including
history's transformation from a literary genre to a
scientific discipline, had important consequences not
only for historians' perceptions of women but also for
women as historians. The disappearance of women as
objects of historical studies during this period has
elements of irony to it. On the one hand, in writing
about women, earlier historians had relied not on
firsthand sources but rather on secondary sources; the
shift to more rigorous research methods required that
secondary sources be disregarded. On the other
hand, the development of archival research and the
critical editing of collections of documents began to
reveal significant new historical evidence concerning
women, yet this evidence was perceived as
substantially irrelevant: historians saw political history
as the general framework for historical writing.
Because women were seen as belonging to the private
rather than to the public sphere, the discovery of
documents about them, or by them, did not, by itself,
produce history acknowledging the contributions of
women. In addition, genres such as biography and
memoir, those forms of "particular history" that
women had traditionally authored, fell into disrepute.
The dividing line between "particular history" and
general history was redefined in stronger terms,
widening the gulf between amateur and professional
practices of historical research.
Passage 13
Comparable worth, as a standard applied to eliminate
inequities in pay, insists that the values of certain
tasks performed in dissimilar jobs can be compared.
In the last decade, this approach has become a critical
social policy issue, as large numbers of private-sector
firms and industries as well as federal, state, and local
governmental entities have adopted comparable worth
policies or begun to consider doing so.
This widespread institutional awareness of comparable
worth indicates increased public awareness that pay
inequitiesthat is, situations in which pay is not "fair"
because it does not reflect the true value of a job
exist in the labor market. However, the question still
remains: have the gains already made in pay equity
under comparable worth principles been of a
precedent-setting nature or are they mostly transitory,
a function of concessions made by employers to
mislead female employees into believing that they
have made long-term pay equity gains?
Comparable worth pay adjustments are indeed
precedent-setting. Because of the principles driving
them, other mandates that can be applied to reduce
or eliminate unjustified pay gaps between male and
female workers have not remedied perceived pay
inequities satisfactorily for the litigants in cases in
which men and women hold different jobs. But
whenever comparable worth principles are applied to
pay schedules, perceived unjustified pay differences
are eliminated. In this sense, then, comparable worth
is more comprehensive than other mandates, such as
the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964.
Neither compares tasks in
dissimilar jobs (that is, jobs across occupational
categories) in an effort to determine whether or not
what is necessary to perform these tasksknow-how,
problem-solving, and accountabilitycan be quantified
in terms of its dollar value to the employer.
Comparable worth, on the other hand, takes as its
premise that certain tasks in dissimilar jobs may
require a similar amount of training, effort, and skill;
may carry similar responsibility; may be carried on in
an environment having a similar impact upon the
worker; and may have a similar dollar value to the
employer.
Passage 14
Many United States companies believe that the rising
cost of employees' health care benefits has hurt the
country's competitive position in the global market by
raising production costs and thus increasing the prices
of exported and domestically sold goods. As a result,
these companies have shifted health care costs to
employees in the form of wage deductions or high
deductibles.
This strategy, however, has actually
hindered companies' competitiveness. For example,
cost shifting threatens employees' health because
many do not seek preventive screening. Also, labor
relations have been damaged: the percentage of
strikes in which health benefits were a major issue
rose from 18 percent in 1986 to 78 percent in 1989.
Health care costs can be managed more effectively if
companies intervene in the supply side of health care
delivery just as they do with other key suppliers:
strategies used to procure components necessary for
production would work in procuring health care. For
example, the make/buy decisionthe decision
whether to produce or purchase parts used in making
a productcan be applied to health care. At one
company, for example, employees receive health care
at an on-site clinic maintained by the company. The
clinic fosters morale, resulting in a low rate of
employees leaving the company. Additionally, the
company has constrained the growth of health care
costs while expanding medical services.
47.
(A)
(B)
(C)
(D)
(E)
Passage 15
Dendrochronology, the study of tree-ring records to
glean information about the past, is possible because
each year a tree adds a new layer of wood between
the existing wood and the bark. In temperate and
subpolar climates, cells added at the growing season's
start are large and thin-walled, but later the new cells
that develop are smaller and thick-walled; the growing
season is followed by a period of dormancy. When a
tree trunk is viewed in cross section, a boundary line is
normally visible between the small-celled wood added
at the end of the growing season in the previous year
and the large-celled spring wood of the following
year's growing season. The annual growth pattern
appears as a series of larger and larger rings. In wet
years rings are broad; during drought years they are
narrow, since the trees grow less. Often, ring patterns
of dead trees of different, but overlapping, ages can
be correlated to provide an extended index of past
climate conditions.
However, trees that grew in areas with a steady
supply of groundwater show little variation in ring
width from year to year; these "complacent" rings tell
nothing about changes in climate. And trees in
extremely dry regions may go a year or two without
adding any rings, thereby introducing uncertainties
into the count. Certain species sometimes add more
than one ring in a single year, when growth halts
temporarily and then starts again.
Passage 16
What kinds of property rights apply to Algonquian
family hunting territories, and how did they come to
be? The dominant view in recent decades has been
that family hunting territories, like other forms of
private landownership, were not found among
Algonquians (a group of North American Indian tribes)
before contact with Europeans but are the result of
changes in Algonquian society brought about by the
European-Algonquian fur trade, in combination with
other factors such as ecological changes and
consequent shifts in wildlife harvesting patterns.
Another view claims that Algonquian family hunting
territories predate contact with Europeans and are
forms of private landownership by individuals and
families. More recent fieldwork, however, has shown
that individual and family rights to hunting territories
form part of a larger land-use system of multifamilial
hunting groups, that rights to hunting territories at this
larger community level take precedence over those at
the individual or family level, and that this system
reflects a concept of spiritual and social reciprocity that
conflicts with European concepts of private property.
In short, there are now strong reasons to think that it
was erroneous to claim that Algonquian family hunting
territories ever were, or were becoming, a kind of
private property system.
Passage 17
Many people believe that because wages are lower in
developing countries than in developed countries,
competition from developing countries in goods traded
internationally will soon eliminate large numbers of
jobs in developed countries. Currently, developed
countries' advanced technology results in higher
productivity, which accounts for their higher wages.
Advanced technology is being transferred ever more
speedily across borders, but even with the latest
technology, productivity and wages in developing
countries will remain lower than in developed countries
for many years because developed countries have
better infrastructure and better-educated workers.
When productivity in a developing country does catch
up, experience suggests that wages there will rise.
Some individual firms in developing countries have
raised their productivity but kept their wages (which
are influenced by average productivity in the country's
economy) low. However, in a developing country's
economy as a whole, productivity improvements in
goods traded internationally are likely to cause an
increase in wages. Furthermore, if wages are not
allowed to rise, the value of the country's currency will
appreciate, which (from the developed countries' point
of view) is the equivalent of increased wages in the
developing country. And although in the past a few
countries have deliberately kept their currencies
undervalued, that is now much harder to do in a world
where capital moves more freely.
Passage 18
A recent study has provided clues to predator-prey
dynamics in the late Pleistocene era. Researchers
compared the number of tooth fractures in presentday carnivores with tooth fractures in carnivores that
lived 36,000 to 10,000 years ago and that were
preserved in the Rancho La Brea tar pits in Los
Angeles. The breakage frequencies in the extinct
species were strikingly higher than those in the
present-day species.
In considering possible explanations for this finding,
the researchers dismissed demographic bias because
older individuals were not overrepresented in the fossil
samples. They rejected preservational bias because a
total absence of breakage in two extinct species
demonstrated that the fractures were not the result of
abrasion within the pits. They ruled out local bias
because breakage data obtained from other
Pleistocene sites were similar to the La Brea data. The
explanation they consider most plausible is behavioral
differences between extinct and
present-day
carnivoresin particular, more contact between the
teeth of predators and the bones of prey due to more
thorough consumption of carcasses by the extinct
species. Such thorough carcass consumption implies
to the researchers either that prey availability was low,
at least seasonally, or that there was intense
competition over kills and a high rate of carcass theft
due to relatively high predator densities.
59.
(A)
(B)
(C)
(D)
(E)
Part 2
Passage 19
The modern multinational corporation is described as
having originated when the owner-managers of
nineteenth-century British firms carrying on international
trade were replaced by teams of salaried managers
organized into hierarchies. Increases in the volume of
transactions in such firms are commonly believed to have
necessitated this structural change. Nineteenth-century
inventions like the steamship and the telegraph, by
facilitating coordination of managerial activities, are
described as key factors. Sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury chartered trading companies, despite the
international scope of their activities, are usually
considered irrelevant to this discussion: the volume of
their transactions is assumed to have been too low and
the communications and transport of their day too
primitive
to
make
comparisons
with
modern
multinationals interesting.
In reality, however, early trading companies successfully
purchased and outfitted ships, built and operated offices
and warehouses, manufactured trade goods for use
abroad, maintained trading posts and production facilities
overseas, procured goods for import, and sold those
goods both at home and in other countries. The large
volume of transactions associated with these activities
seems to have necessitated hierarchical management
structures well before the advent of modern
communications and transportation. For example, in the
Hudson's Bay Company, each far-flung trading outpost
was managed by a salaried agent, who carried out the
trade with the Native Americans, managed day-to-day
operations, and oversaw the post's workers and servants.
One chief agent, answerable to the Court of Directors in
London through the correspondence committee, was
appointed with control over all of the agents on the bay.
The early trading companies did differ strikingly from
modern multinationals in many respects. They depended
heavily on the national governments of their home
countries and thus characteristically acted abroad to
promote national interests. Their top managers were
typically owners with a substantial minority share,
whereas senior managers' holdings in modern
multinationals are usually insignificant. They operated in
a preindustrial world, grafting a system of capitalist
international trade onto a premodern system of artisan
and peasant production.
Despite these differences,
however, early trading companies organized effectively in
remarkably modern ways and merit further study as
analogues of more modern structures.
Passage 20
More selective than most chemical pesticides in that
they ordinarily destroy only unwanted species,
biocontrol agents (such as insects, fungi, and viruses)
eat, infect, or parasitize targeted plant or animal pests.
However, biocontrol agents can negatively affect
nontarget species by, for example, competing with
them for resources: a biocontrol agent might reduce
the benefits conferred by a desirable animal species by
consuming a plant on which the animal prefers to lay
its eggs. Another example of indirect negative
consequences occurred in England when a virus
introduced to control rabbits reduced the amount of
open ground (because large rabbit populations reduce
the ground cover), in turn reducing underground ant
nests and triggering the extinction of a blue butterfly
that had depended on the nests to shelter its
offspring.
The paucity of known extinctions or
disruptions resulting from indirect interactions may
reflect not the infrequency of such mishaps but rather
the failure to look for or to detect them: most
organisms likely to be adversely affected by indirect
interactions are of little or no known commercial value
and the events linking a biocontrol agent with an
adverse effect are often unclear.
Moreover,
determining the potential risks of biocontrol agents
before they are used is difficult, especially when a
nonnative agent is introduced, because, unlike a
chemical pesticide, a biocontrol agent may adapt in
unpredictable ways so that it can feed on or otherwise
harm new hosts.
Passage 21
Ethnohistoric documents from sixteenth-century
Mexico suggesting that weaving and cooking were the
most common productive activities for Aztec women
may lead modern historians to underestimate the
value of women's contributions to Aztec society. Since
weaving and cooking occurred mostly (but not
entirely) in a domestic setting, modern historians are
likely to apply to the Aztec culture the modern
Western distinction between "private" and "public"
production. Thus, the ethnohistoric record conspires
with Western culture to foster the view that women's
production was not central to the demographic,
economic, and political structures in sixteenth-century
Mexico.
A closer examination of Aztec culture indicates that
treating Aztec women's production in Mexico in such a
manner would be a mistake. Even if the products of
women's labor did not circulate beyond the household,
such products were essential to population growth.
Researchers document a tenfold increase in the
population of the valley of Mexico during the previous
four centuries, an increase that was crucial to the
developing Aztec political economy.
Population
growthwhich could not have occurred in the absence
of successful household economy, in which women's
work was essentialmade possible the large-scale
development of labor-intensive chinampa (ridged-field)
agriculture in the southern valley of Mexico which, in
turn, supported urbanization and political centralization
in the Aztec capital.
But the products of women's labor did in fact circulate
beyond the household. Aztec women wove cloth, and
cloth circulated through the market system, the tribute
system, and the redistributive economy of the palaces.
Cotton mantles served as a unit of currency in the
regional market system. Quantities of woven mantles,
loincloths, blouses, and skirts were paid as tribute to
local lords and to imperial tax stewards and were
distributed to ritual and administrative personnel, craft
specialists, warriors, and other faithful servants of the
state. In addition, woven articles of clothing served as
markers of social status and clothing fulfilled a
symbolic function in political negotiation. The cloth
that was the product of women's work thus was crucial
as a primary means of organizing the flow of goods
and services that sustained the Aztec state.
Passage 22
Solar ponds are bodies of water in which circulation is
incomplete and there is a very high salt concentration
that increases with depth. This vertical change in
salinity serves to trap heat because concentrated brine
in the lowest water level acts as a collector and
storage area for solar heat, while the less saline,
lighter water at the upper levels provides insulation.
Heat is thus retained in the depths.
An artificial pond of this type has been constructed on
the western shore of the Dead Sea in Israel in order to
test its suitability as a source of low-grade heat for
conversion into electricity. An immediate threat to the
success of the venture was the growth of algae.
Water in solar ponds must be kept maximally
transparent to allow penetration of light to the deep
storage area. Therefore, any particles of matter in the
water, such as algae cells, that scatter or absorb light
will interfere with the collection of heat.
One proposed method of controlling the algae was the
application of an algicide. However, the Dead Sea is a
closed body of water without any outlet and as such is
very easily contaminated. Extensive use of chemicals
in numerous future full-scale solar ponds would lead to
such contamination of the Dead Sea, which now
enjoys a lucrative tourist trade.
A recent experiment has supplied a more promising
method for controlling the algae. To repress the algae
cells' capacity for accommodating themselves to
environmental changes, the water in the solar pond
was first made more saline through evaporation and
then diluted by a rapid inflow of fresh water. This
shock reduced the cells' ability to regulate the
movement of water through their membranes. They
rapidly absorbed water, resulting in distortions of
shape, increase in volume, and impairment to motility.
Their buoyancy adversely affected, the cells sank to
the bottom of the pond, where they encountered the
hot waters of the storage layer and were destroyed.
This method allows for effective control of nuisance
algae while leaving solar ponds as one of the cleanest
technologies providing energy for human use.
Passage 23
Traditional social science models of class groups in the
United States are based on economic status and
assume that women's economic status derives from
association with men, typically fathers or husbands,
and that women therefore have more compelling
common interest with men of their own economic
class than with women outside it. Some feminist
social scientists, by contrast, have argued that the
basic division in American society is instead based on
gender, and that the total female population,
regardless of economic status, constitutes a distinct
class. Social historian Mary Ryan, for example, has
argued that in early-nineteenth-century America the
identical legal status of working-class and middle-class
free women outweighed the differences between
women of these two classes:
married women,
regardless of their family's wealth, did essentially the
same unpaid domestic work, and none could own
property or vote. Recently, though, other feminist
analysts have questioned this model, examining ways
in which the condition of working-class women differs
from that of middle-class women as well as from that
of working-class men. Ann Oakley notes, for example,
that the gap between women of different economic
classes widened in the late nineteenth century: most
working-class women, who performed wage labor
outside the home, were excluded from the emerging
middle-class ideal of femininity centered around
domesticity and volunteerism.
Passage 24
According to P. F. Drucker, the management
philosophy known as Total Quality Management
(TQM), which is designed to be adopted consistently
throughout an organization and to improve customer
service by using sampling theory to reduce the
variability of a product's quality, can work successfully
in conjunction with two older management systems.
As Drucker notes, TQM's scientific approach is
consistent with the statistical sampling techniques of
the "rationalist" school of scientific management, and
the organizational structure associated with TQM is
consistent with the social and psychological emphases
of the "human relations" school of management.
However, TQM cannot simply be grafted onto these
systems or onto certain other non-TQM management
systems. Although, as Drucker contends, TQM shares
with such systems the ultimate objective of increasing
profitability, TQM requires fundamentally different
strategies. While the other management systems
referred to use upper management decision-making
and employee specialization to maximize shareholder
profits over the short term, TQM envisions the
interests of employees, shareholders, and customers
as convergent. For example, lower prices not only
benefit consumers but also enhance an organization's
competitive edge and ensure its continuance, thus
benefiting employees and owners. TQM's emphasis on
shared interests is reflected in the decentralized
decision-making, integrated production activity, and
lateral structure of organizations that achieve the
benefits of TQM.
Passage 25
The United States hospital industry is an unusual
market in that nonprofit and for-profit producers exist
simultaneously. Theoretical literature offers conflicting
views on whether nonprofit hospitals are less
financially efficient. Theory suggests that nonprofit
hospitals are so much more interested in offering highquality service than in making money that they
frequently input more resources to provide the same
output of service as for-profit hospitals. This priority
might also often lead them to be less vigilant in
streamlining their serviceseliminating duplication
between departments, for instance. Conversely, while
profit motive is thought to encourage for-profit
hospitals to attain efficient production, most theorists
admit that obstacles to that efficiency remain. Forprofit hospital managers, for example, generally work
independently of hospital owners and thus may not
always make maximum financial efficiency their
highest priority. The literature also suggests that
widespread adoption of third-party payment systems
may eventually eliminate any such potential
differences between the two kinds of hospitals.
The same literature offers similarly conflicting views of
the efficiency of nonprofit hospitals from a social
welfare perspective. Newhouse (1970) contends that
nonprofit hospital managers unnecessarily expand the
quality and quantity of hospital care beyond the actual
needs of the community, while Weisbrod (1975)
argues that nonprofit firmshospitals included
contribute efficiently to community welfare by
providing public services that might be inadequately
provided by government alone.
Passage 26
Although the industrial union organizations that
emerged under the banner of the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s and 1940s
embraced the principles of nondiscrimination and
inclusion, the role of women within unions reflected
the prevailing gender ideology of the period.
Elizabeth Faue's study of the labor movement in
Minneapolis argues that women were marginalized by
union bureaucratization and by the separation of
unions from the community politics from which
industrial unionism had emerged. Faue stresses the
importance of women's contribution to the
development of unions at the community level,
contributions that made women's ultimate fate within
the city's labor movement all the more poignant: as
unions reached the peak of their strength in the
1940s, the community base that had made their
success possible and to which women's contributions
were so vital became increasingly irrelevant to unions'
institutional life.
In her study of CIO industrial unions from the 1930s to
the 1970s, Nancy F. Gabin also acknowledges the
pervasive male domination in the unions, but
maintains that women workers were able to create a
political space within some unions to advance their
interests as women. Gabin shows that, despite the
unions' tendency to marginalize women's issues,
working women's demands were a constant
undercurrent within the union, and she stresses the
links between the unions' women activists and the
wave of feminism that emerged in the 1960s.
Passage 27
The view has prevailed for the better part of the
twentieth century that small firms do not perform an
important role in Western economies. Official policies
in many countries have favored large units of
production because there were strong reasons to
believe that large firms were superior to small firms in
virtually every aspect of economic performance
productivity, technological progress, and job security
and compensation. However, in the 1970s, evidence
began to suggest that small firms in some countries
were outperforming their larger counterparts. Perhaps
the best example of this trend was in the steel
industry, where new firms entered the market in the
form of "mini-mills," and small-firm employment
expanded, while many large companies shut down
plants and reduced employment.
Although no
systematic evidence exists to determine unequivocally
whether smaller units of production are as efficient as
large firms or are, in fact, more efficient, some
researchers have concluded that the accumulated
evidence to date indicates that small firms are at least
not burdened with an inherent size disadvantage.
Thus, an alternative view has emerged in the
economics literature, arguing that small firms make
several important contributions to industrial markets.
First, small firms are often the source of the kind of
innovative activity that leads to technological change.
Small firms generate market turbulence that creates
additional dimensions of competition, and they also
promote international competition through newly
created niches. Finally, small firms in recent years
have generated the preponderant share of new jobs.
However, empirical knowledge about the relative roles
of large and small firms is generally based upon
anecdotal evidence and case studies, and such
evidence has proved inadequate to answer major
questions concerning the role of small firms across
various industries and nations. An additional difficulty
is that it is not obvious what criteria one should use to
distinguish small firms from large ones. While a "small
firm" is often defined as an enterprise with fewer than
500 employees, research studies of small firms use a
wide variety of definitions.
Passage 28
The Black Death, a severe epidemic that ravaged
fourteenth-century Europe, has intrigued scholars ever
since Francis Gasquet's 1893 study contending that
this epidemic greatly intensified the political and
religious upheaval that ended the Middle Ages. Thirtysix years later, historian George Coulton agreed but,
paradoxically, attributed a silver lining to the Black
Death:
prosperity engendered by diminished
competition for food, shelter, and work led survivors of
the epidemic into the Renaissance and subsequent rise
of modern Europe.
In the 1930s, however, Evgeny Kosminsky and other
Marxist historians claimed the epidemic was merely an
ancillary factor contributing to a general agrarian crisis
stemming primarily from the inevitable decay of
European feudalism. In arguing that this decline of
feudalism was economically determined, the Marxist
asserted that the Black Death was a relatively
insignificant factor. This became the prevailing view
until after the Second World War, when studies of
specific regions and towns revealed astonishing
mortality rates ascribed to the epidemic, thus restoring
the central role of the Black Death in history.
This central role of the Black Death (traditionally
attributed to bubonic plague brought from Asia) has
been recently challenged from another direction.
Building
on
bacteriologist
John
Shrewsbury's
speculations about mislabeled epidemics, zoologist
Graham Twigg employs urban case studies suggesting
that the rat population in Europe was both too sparse
and insufficiently migratory to have spread plague.
Moreover, Twigg disputes the traditional trade-ship
explanation for plague transmissions by extrapolating
from data on the number of dead rats aboard Nile
sailing vessels in 1912. The Black Death, which he
conjectures was anthrax instead of bubonic plague,
therefore caused far less havoc and fewer deaths than
historians typically claim.
Although correctly citing the exacting conditions
needed to start or spread bubonic plague, Twigg
ignores virtually a century of scholarship contradictory
to his findings and employs faulty logic in his singleminded approach to the Black Death. His speculative
generalizations about the numbers of rats in medieval
Europe are based on isolated studies unrepresentative
of medieval conditions, while his unconvincing tradeship argument overlooks land-based caravans, the
overland migration of infected rodents, and the many
other animals that carry plague.
Passage 29
Most farmers attempting to control slugs and snails
turn to baited slug poison, or molluscicide, which
usually consists of a bran pellet containing either
methiocarb or metaldehyde.
Both chemicals are
neurotoxins that disrupt that part of the brain charged
with making the mouth move in a coordinated
fashionthe "central pattern generator"as the slug
feeds.
Thus, both neurotoxins, while somewhat
effective, interfere with the slugs' feeding behavior
and limit their ingestion of the poison, increasing the
probability that some will stop feeding before receiving
a lethal dose. Moreover, slugs are not the only
consumers of these poisons: methiocarb may be toxic
to a variety of species, including varieties of worms,
carabid beetles, and fish.
Researchers are experimenting with an alternative
compound based on aluminum, which may solve these
problems, but this may well have a limited future as
we learn more about the hazards of aluminum in the
environment. For example, some researchers suggest
that acid rain kills trees by mobilizing aluminum in the
soil, while others have noted that the human disease
Alzheimer's is more prevalent in areas where levels of
aluminum in the soil are high. With farmers losing as
much as 20 percent of their crops to slugs and snails
even after treatment with currently available
molluscicides, there is considerable incentive for
researchers to come up with better and
environmentally safer solutions.
Passage 30
The storms most studied by climatologists have been
those that are most easily understood by taking
atmospheric measurements.
Hurricanes and
tornadoes, for example, are spatially confined, the
forces that drive them are highly concentrated, and
they have distinctive forms and readily quantifiable
characteristics. Consequently, data about them are
abundant, and their behavior is relatively well
understood, although still difficult to predict.
Hurricanes and tornadoes are also studied because
they are highly destructive storms, and knowledge
about their behavior can help minimize injury to
people and property. But other equally destructive
storms have not been so thoroughly researched,
perhaps because they are more difficult to study. A
primary example is the northeaster, a type of coastal
storm that causes significant damage along the
eastern coast of North America. Northeasters, whose
diffuse nature makes them difficult to categorize, are
relatively weak low-pressure systems with winds that
rarely acquire the strength of even the smallest
hurricane. Although northeasters are perceived to be
less destructive than other storms, the high waves
associated with strong northeasters can cause damage
comparable to that of a hurricane, because they can
affect stretches of coast more than 1,500 kilometers
long, whereas hurricanes typically threaten a relatively
small ribbon of coastlineroughly 100 to 150
kilometers.
Passage 31
The identification of femininity with morality and a
belief in the innate moral superiority of women were
fundamental to the cult of female domesticity in the
nineteenth-century United States.
Ironically, this
ideology of female benevolence empowered women in
the realm of social activism, enabling them to escape
the confines of their traditional domestic spheres and
to enter prisons, hospitals, battlefields, and slums. By
following this path, some women came to wield
considerable authority in the distribution of resources
and services in their communities.
The sentimentalized concept of female benevolence
bore little resemblance to women's actual work, which
was decidedly unsentimental and businesslike, in that
it involved chartering societies, raising money, and
paying salaries.
Moreover, in the face of legal
limitations on their right to control money and
property, women had to find ingenious legal ways to
run and finance organized philanthropy. In contrast to
the day-to-day reality of this work, the idealized image
of female benevolence lent a sentimental and gracious
aura of altruism to the very real authority and privilege
that some women commandedwhich explains why
some women activists clung tenaciously to this
ideology. But clinging to this ideology also prevented
these women from even attempting to gain true
political power because it implied a moral purity that
precluded participation in the messy world of partisan
politics.
Passage 32
Maps made by non-Native Americans to depict Native
American land tenure, resources, and population
distributions appeared almost as early as Europeans'
first encounters with Native Americans and took many
forms:
missionaries' field sketches, explorers'
drawings, and surveyors' maps, as well as maps
rendered in connection with treaties involving land
transfers. Most existing maps of Native American lands
are reconstructions that are based largely on
archaeology, oral reports, and evidence gathered from
observers' accounts in letters, diaries, and official
reports; accordingly, the accuracy of these maps is
especially dependent on the mapmakers' own
interpretive abilities.
Many existing maps also reflect the 150-year role of
the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in administering
tribal lands. Though these maps incorporate some
information gleaned directly from Native Americans,
rarely has Native American cartography contributed to
this official record, which has been compiled,
surveyed, and authenticated by non-Native Americans.
Thus our current cartographic record relating to Native
American tribes and their migrations and cultural
features, as well as territoriality and contemporary
trust lands, reflects the origins of the data, the mixed
purposes for which the maps have been prepared, and
changes both in United States government policy and
in non-Native Americans' attitudes toward an
understanding of Native Americans.
Passage 33
After the Second World War, unionism in the Japanese
auto industry was company-based, with separate
unions in each auto company. Most company unions
played no independent role in bargaining shop-floor
issues or pressing autoworkers' grievances. In a 1981
survey, for example, fewer than 1 percent of workers
said they sought union assistance for work-related
problems, while 43 percent said they turned to
management instead. There was little to distinguish
the two in any case: most union officers were foremen
or middle-level managers, and the union's role was
primarily one of passive support for company goals.
Conflict occasionally disrupted this cooperative
relationshipone company union's opposition to the
productivity campaigns of the early 1980s has been
cited as such a case. In 1986, however, a caucus led
by the Foreman's Association forced the union's
leadership out of office and returned the union's policy
to one of passive cooperation. In the United States,
the potential for such company unionism grew after
1979, but it had difficulty taking hold in the auto
industry, where a single union represented workers
from all companies, particularly since federal law
prohibited foremen from joining or leading industrial
unions.
The Japanese model was often invoked as one in
which authority decentralized to the shop floor
empowered production workers to make key decisions.
What these claims failed to recognize was that the
actual delegation of authority was to the foreman, not
the workers. The foreman exercised discretion over
job assignments, training, transfers, and promotions;
worker initiative was limited to suggestions that finetuned a management-controlled production process.
Rather than being proactive, Japanese workers were
forced to be reactive, the range of their responsibilities
being far wider than their span of control. For
example, the founder of one production system, Taichi
Ohno, routinely gave department managers only 90
percent of the resources needed for production. As
soon as workers could meet production goals without
working overtime, 10 percent of remaining resources
would be removed. Because the "OH! NO!" system
continually pushed the production process to the verge
of breakdown in an effort to find the minimum
resource requirement, critics described it as
"management by stress."
Passage 34
Planter-legislators of the post-Civil War southern
United States enacted crop lien laws stipulating that
those who advanced cash or supplies necessary to
plant a crop would receive, as security, a claim, or lien,
on the crop produced. In doing so, planters, most of
whom were former slaveholders, sought access to
credit from merchants and control over nominally free
laborersformer slaves freed by the victory of the
northern Union over the southern Confederacy in the
United States Civil War. They hoped to reassure
merchants that despite the emancipation of the slaves,
planters would produce crops and pay debts. Planters
planned to use their supply credit to control their
workers, former slaves who were without money to
rent land or buy supplies. Planters imagined
continuation of the pre-Civil War economic hierarchy:
merchants supplying landlords, landlords supplying
laborers, and laborers producing crops from which
their scant wages and planters' profits would come,
allowing planters to repay advances.
Lien laws
frequently had unintended consequences, however,
thwarting the planter fantasy of mastery without
slavery. The newly freed workers, seeking to become
self-employed tenant farmers rather than wage
laborers, made direct arrangements with merchants
for supplies. Lien laws, the centerpiece of a system
designed to create a dependent labor force, became
the means for workers, with alternative means of
supply advances, to escape that dependence.
Passage 35
In the 1980's, astronomer Bohdan Paczynski proposed
a way of determining whether the enormous dark halo
constituting the outermost part of the Milky Way
galaxy is composed of MACHO's (massive compact
halo objects), which are astronomical objects too dim
to be visible. Paczynski reasoned that if MACHO's
make up this halo, a MACHO would occasionally drift in
front of a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a bright
galaxy near the Milky Way. The gravity of a MACHO
that had so drifted, astronomers agree, would cause
the star's light rays, which would otherwise diverge, to
bend together so that, as observed from Earth, the
star would temporarily appear to brighten, a process
known as microlensing. Because many individual stars
are of intrinsically variable brightness, some
astronomers have contended that the brightening of
intrinsically variable stars can be mistaken for
microlensing. However, whereas the different colors
of light emitted by an intrinsically variable star are
affected differently when the star brightens, all of a
star's colors are equally affected by microlensing.
Thus, if a MACHO magnifies a star's red light tenfold, it
will do the same to the star's blue light and yellow
light. Moreover, it is highly unlikely that a star in the
Large Magellanic Cloud will undergo microlensing more
than once, because the chance that a second MACHO
would pass in front of exactly the same star is
minuscule.
Passage 36
Passage 37
The system of patent-granting, which confers
temporary monopolies for the exploitation of new
technologies, was originally established as an incentive
to the pursuit of risky new ideas. Yet studies of the
most
patent-conscious
business
of
allthe
semiconductor industrysuggest that firms do not
necessarily become more innovative as they increase
their patenting activity. Ziedonis and Hall, for example,
found that investment in research and development (a
reasonable proxy for innovation) did not substantially
increase between 1982 and 1992, the industrys most
feverish period of patenting. Instead, semiconductor
firms simply squeezed more patents out of existing
research and development expenditures. Moreover,
Ziedonis and Hall found that as patenting activity at
semiconductor firms increased in the 1980s, the
consensus among industry employees was that the
average quality of their firms patents declined.
Though patent quality is a difficult notion to measure,
the number of times a patent is cited in the technical
literature is a reasonable yardstick, and citations per
semiconductor patent did decline during the 1980s.
This decline in quality may be related to changes in
the way semiconductor firms managed their patenting
process: rather than patenting to win exclusive rights
to a valuable new technology, patents were filed more
for strategic purposes, to be used as bargaining chips
to ward off infringement suits or as a means to block
competitors products.
61. The passage is primarily concerned with discussing
(A) a study suggesting that the semiconductor
industrys approach to patenting during the period
from 1982 to 1992 yielded unanticipated results
(B) a study of the semiconductor industry during the
period from 1982 to 1992 that advocates certain
changes in the industrys management of the
patenting process
(C) the connection between patenting and innovation
in the semiconductor industry during the period
from 1982 to 1992
(D) reasons that investment in research and
development in the semiconductor industry did not
increase significantly during the period from 1982
to 1992
(E) certain factors that made the period from 1982 to
1992 a time of intense patenting activity in the
semiconductor industry
62. The passage suggests that the use of patents as
bargaining chips to ward off infringement suits
(A) was rarely successful during the 1980s
(B) became increasingly infrequent in the 1980s
(C) does not fulfill the intended purpose of the patentgranting system
(D) is a consequence of the decline in patent quality
(E) is discussed increasingly in the semiconductor
industry's technical literature
Part 3
Total about 75 passages
The idea that equipping homes with electrical
appliances and other modern household technologies
would eliminate drudgery, save labor time, and
increase leisure for women who were full-time home
workers remained largely unchallenged until the
womens movement of the 1970s spawned the
groundbreaking and influential works of sociologist
Joann Vanek and historian Ruth Cowan. Vanek
analyzed 40 years of time-use surveys conducted by
home economists to argue that electrical appliances
and other modern household technologies reduced the
effort required to perform specific tasks, but
ownership of these appliances did not correlate with
less time spent on housework by full-time home
workers. In fact, time spent by these workers
remained remarkably constantat about 52 to 54
hours per weekfrom the 1920s to the 1960s, a
period of significant change in household technology.
In surveying two centuries of household technology in
the United States, Cowan argued that the
industrialization of the home often resulted in more
work for full-time home workers because the use of
such devices as coal stoves, water pumps, and
vacuum cleaners tended to reduce the workload of
married-womens helpers (husbands, sons, daughters,
and servants) while promoting a more rigorous
standard of housework. The full-time home workers
duties also shifted to include more household
management, child care, and the post-Second World
War phenomenon of being Moms taxi.
is
a
a
a
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
A.
B.
C.
The primary purpose of the passage is to
A. argue against a conventional explanation for
the extinction of certain salmon populations
and suggest an alternative
B. correct a common misunderstanding about the
behavior of salmon in response to
environmental degradation caused by human
activity
C. compare the effects of human activity on
salmon populations with the effects of natural
disturbances on salmon populations
D. differentiate the particular effects of various
human activities on salmon habitats
D.
E.
Recently biologists have been interested in a tideassociated periodic behavior displayed by the diatom
Hantzschia virgata, a microscopic golden-brown alga
that inhabits that portion of a shoreline washed by
tides (the intertidal zone). Diatoms of this species,
sometimes called commuter diatoms, remain
burrowed in the sand during high tide, and emerge on
the sand surface during the daytime low tide. Just
before the sand is inundated by the rising tide, the
diatoms burrow again. Some scientists hypothesize
that commuter diatoms know that it is low tide
because they sense an environmental change, such as
an alteration in temperature or a change in pressure
caused by tidal movement. However, when diatoms
are observed under constant conditions in a
laboratory, they still display periodic behavior,
continuing to burrow on schedule for several weeks.
This indicates that commuter diatoms, rather than
relying on environmental cues to keep time, possess
an internal pacemaker or biological clock that enables
them to anticipate periodic changes in the
environment. A commuter diatom has an unusually
accurate biological clock, a consequence of the
unrelenting environmental pressures to which it is
subjected; any diatoms that do not burrow before the
tide arrives are washed away.
This is not to suggest that the period of this biological
clock is immutably fixed. Biologists have concluded
that even though a diatom does not rely on the
environment to keep time, environmental factors
including changes in the tides hydrostatic pressure,
salinity, mechanical agitation, and temperaturecan
alter the period of its biological clock according to
changes in the tidal cycle. In short, the relation
between an organisms biological clock and its
environment is similar to that between a wristwatch
and its owner: the owner cannot make the watch run
faster or slower, but can reset the hands. However,
this relation is complicated in intertidal dwellers such
as commuter diatoms by the fact that these organisms
are exposed to the solar-day cycle as well as to the
tidal cycle, and sometimes display both solar-day and
tidal periods in a single behavior. Commuter diatoms,
for example, emerge only during those low tides that
occur during the day.
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
Recently biologists have been interested in a tideassociated periodic behavior displayed by the diatom
Hantzschia virgata, a microscopic golden-brown alga
that inhabits that portion of a shoreline washed by
tides (the intertidal zone). Diatoms of this species,
sometimes called commuter diatoms, remain
burrowed in the sand during high tide, and emerge on
the sand surface during the daytime low tide. Just
before the sand is inundated by the rising tide, the
diatoms burrow again. Some scientists hypothesize
that commuter diatoms know that it is low tide
because they sense an environmental change, such as
an alteration in temperature or a change in pressure
caused by tidal movement. However, when diatoms
are observed under constant conditions in a
laboratory, they still display periodic behavior,
continuing to burrow on schedule for several weeks.
This indicates that commuter diatoms, rather than
relying on environmental cues to keep time, possess
an internal pacemaker or biological clock that enables
them to anticipate periodic changes in the
environment. A commuter diatom has an unusually
accurate biological clock, a consequence of the
unrelenting environmental pressures to which it is
subjected; any diatoms that do not burrow before the
tide arrives are washed away.
This is not to suggest that the period of this biological
clock is immutably fixed. Biologists have concluded
that even though a diatom does not rely on the
environment to keep time, environmental factors
including changes in the tides hydrostatic pressure,
salinity, mechanical agitation, and temperaturecan
alter the period of its biological clock according to
changes in the tidal cycle. In short, the relation
between an organisms biological clock and its
environment is similar to that between a wristwatch
and its owner: the owner cannot make the watch run
faster or slower, but can reset the hands. However,
this relation is complicated in intertidal dwellers such
as commuter diatoms by the fact that these organisms
are exposed to the solar-day cycle as well as to the
tidal cycle, and sometimes display both solar-day and
tidal periods in a single behavior. Commuter diatoms,
for example, emerge only during those low tides that
occur during the day.
1.
2.
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
3.
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
4.
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
6.
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
I.
II.
III.
7.
8.
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
9.
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
Grassland songbirds often nest in the same grasslandwetland complexes as waterfowl, particularly in a
certain part of those complexes, namely, upland
habitats surrounding wetlands. Although some wildlife
management procedures directed at waterfowl, such
as habitat enhancement or restoration, may also
benefit songbirds, the impact of others, especially the
control of waterfowl predators, remains difficult to
predict. For example, most predators of waterfowl
nests prey opportunistically on songbird nests, and
removing these predators could directly increase
songbird nesting success. Alternatively, small
mammals such as mice and ground squirrels are
important in the diet of many waterfowl-nest predators
and can themselves be important predators of
songbird nests. Thus removing waterfowl-nest
predators could affect songbird nesting success
through subsequent increases in small-mammal
populations.
In 1995 and 1996, researchers trapped and removed
certain waterfowl nest predators, primary raccoons
and striped skunks, then observed subsequent survival
rates for songbird nests. Surprisingly, they observed
no significant effect on songbird nesting success. This
may be due to several factors. Neither raccoons nor
striped skunks consume ground squirrels, which are
important predators of songbird nests. Thus, their
removal may not have led to significant increases in
populations of smaller predators. Additionally, both
raccoons and striped skunks prefer wetlands and
spend little time in upland habitats; removing these
species may not have increased the nesting success of
songbirds in the uplands enough to allow detection.
Grassland songbirds often nest in the same grasslandwetland complexes as waterfowl, particularly in a
certain part of those complexes, namely, upland
habitats surrounding wetlands. Although some wildlife
management procedures directed at waterfowl, such
as habitat enhancement or restoration, may also
benefit songbirds, the impact of others, especially the
control of waterfowl predators, remains difficult to
predict. For example, most predators of waterfowl
nests prey opportunistically on songbird nests, and
removing these predators could directly increase
songbird nesting success. Alternatively, small
mammals such as mice and ground squirrels are
important in the diet of many waterfowl-nest predators
and can themselves be important predators of
songbird nests. Thus removing waterfowl-nest
predators could affect songbird nesting success
through subsequent increases in small-mammal
populations.
In 1995 and 1996, researchers trapped and removed
certain waterfowl nest predators, primary raccoons
and striped skunks, then observed subsequent survival
rates for songbird nests. Surprisingly, they observed
no significant effect on songbird nesting success. This
may be due to several factors. Neither raccoons nor
striped skunks consume ground squirrels, which are
important predators of songbird nests. Thus, their
removal may not have led to significant increases in
populations of smaller predators. Additionally, both
raccoons and striped skunks prefer wetlands and
spend little time in upland habitats; removing these
species may not have increased the nesting success of
songbirds in the uplands enough to allow detection.