This passage is from John Okada, No-No Boy, published by the University of Washington Press, copyright © 2001.
The lieutenant who operated the radar-detection equipment was a blond giant from Nebraska. The lieutenant from Nebraska said: “Where you from?” The Japanese-American who was an American soldier answered: “No place in particular.” “You got folks?” “Yeah, I got folks.” “Where at?” “Wyoming, out in the desert.” “Farmers, huh?” “Not quite.” “What’s that mean?” “Well, it’s this way… . .” And then the Japanese- American whose folks were still Japanese-Japanese, or else they would not be in a camp with barbed wire and watchtowers with soldiers holding rifles, told the blond giant from Nebraska about the removal of the Japanese from the Coast, which was called the evacuation, and about the concentration camps, which were called relocation centers.
According to the text, at the time of this account the narrator’s parents are
This passage is from Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe, copyright © 1979 by Freeman J.
Dyson. There are some striking examples in the laws of nuclear physics of numerical accidents that seem to conspire to make the universe habitable. The strength of the attractive nuclear force is just sufficient to overcome the electrical repulsion between the positive charges in thenuclei of ordinary atoms such as oxygen or iron. But the nuclear forces are not quite strong enough to bind together two protons (hydrogen nuclei) into a bound system which would be called a diproton if it existed. If the nuclear forces had been slightly stronger than they are, the diproton would exist and almost all the hydrogen in the universe would have been combined into diprotons and heavier nuclei. Hydrogen would be a rare element,and stars like the sun, which live for a long time by the slow burning of hydrogen in their cores, could not exist. On the other hand, if the nuclear forces had been substantially weaker than they are, hydrogen could not burn at all and there would be no heavy elements.
According to the text, if the nuclear forces in atoms had been slightly stronger than they are,
This passage is from Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail, copyright © 1974.
It is customary to place the date for the beginnings of modern medicine somewhere in the mid-1930s, with the entry of sulfonamides and penicillin into the pharmacopoeia, and it is usual to ascribe to these events the force of a revolution in medical practice. This is what things seemed like at the time. Medicine was upheaved, revolutionized indeed. Therapy had been discovered for great numbers of patients whose illnesses had previously been untreatable. Cures were now available. It seemed a totally new world. Doctors could now cure disease, and this was astonishing, most of all to the doctors themselves.
Why, according to the text, were doctors astonished around the mid-1930s?
This passage is from Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative, copyright © 1983 by Irving Kristol.
Throughout history, artists and writers have been candidly contemptuous of commercial activity between consenting adults, regarding it as an activity that tends to coarsen and trivialize the human spirit. And since bourgeois society was above all else a commercial society—the first in all of recorded history in which the commercial ethos was sovereign over all others—their exasperation was bound to be all the more acute. Later on, the term “philistinism” would emerge to encapsulate this sentiment.
According to the text, the term “philistinism” arose because
This passage is from Milton Friend, “Why Bother About Wildlife Disease?” from U.S. Geological Survey Circular 1401, 2014.
The general importance of zoonoses for humanity has waxed and waned over time in concert with changing conditions including changes in the number of human cases and (or) exposures associated with enzootic areas, such as chronic disease presence and activity levels, for specific zoonoses. The occurrence of major epizootics or epidemics involving the expansion of established geographic range for specific diseases and (or) the appearance of “new” zoonoses within a geographic area is also of great concern.
According to the text,
Rabies is a well-established zoonosis and, except for anthrax, perhaps the next earliest zoonosis to confront humans. The first recorded escription of canine rabies dates back to about 500 B.C. Rabies is an important zoonosis in much of the world, because death is the outcome once clinical signs appear. Human deaths from rabies are rare in the United States, but the disease is diagnosed annually in wildlife and other animals where it continues to cause periodic epizootics.
According to the text, rabies
The following passage is from Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated from French into English by Henry Reeve and originally published in 1835. Alexis de Tocqueville was a French writer and visitor to the United States.
A majority taken collectively is only an individual, whose opinions, and frequently whose interests, are opposed to those of another individual, who is styled a minority. If it be admitted that a man possessing absolute power may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should not a majority be liable to the same reproach?
I am therefore of the opinion that social power superior to all others must always be placed somewhere; but I think that liberty is endangered when this power finds no obstacle which can retard its course and give it time to moderate its own vehemence.
This passage is from Peter Matthiessen, Indian Country, copyright © 1984 by Peter Matthiessen.
By eliminating an Indian nation termination quiets Indian claims to tribal lands that were never ceded to the U.S. government by treaty, which happens to describe almost all the “federal” land in the Far West; instead, the people must accept whatever monetary settlement has been bestowed upon them by the Court of Claims, which was set up not to administer justice but to expedite adjudication of land titles and head off any future claims that Indians might make on lands already coveted by the white economy.
According to the text, the Court of Claims
This passage is from Henry Van Dyke, The Americanism of Washington. It was originally published in 1906.
I see Benjamin Franklin, in the Congress of 1776, already past his seventieth year, prosperous, famous, by far the most celebrated man in America, accepting without demur the difficult and dangerous mission to France, and whispering to his friend, Dr. Rush, “I am old and good for nothing, but as the store-keepers say of their remnants of cloth, ‘I am but a fag-end, and you may have me for what you please.’”
According to the text, which of the following is not true about Benjamin Franklin?
He made no extravagant claims for his own motives, and some of his ways were not distinctly ideal. He was full of prudential proverbs and claimed to be a follower of the theory of enlightened self-interest. But there was not a faculty of his wise old head which he did not put at the service of his country, nor was there a pulse of his slow and steady heart which did not beat loyal to the cause of freedom.
According to the text, Benjamin Franklin said that he was
This passage is from Suparna Choudhury, “Culturing the Adolescent Brain: What Can Neuroscience Learn from Anthropology?” in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2010.
All of these factors were thought to make Samoan adolescence relatively tranquil and enjoyable and led to Mead’s assertion of the primacy of nurture over nature.
According to the text, from her observation that adolescence in Samoa is different from adolescence in America, Margaret Mead argued that
Schlegel and Barry’s cross-cultural study of adolescents in tribal and traditional societies using data collected from over 175 societies around the world demonstrated that adolescence as a distinctive, socially marked stage of life is ubiquitous. These researchers put forward a biosocial theory, arguing that the social stage of adolescence is a response to the development of the reproductive capacity.
According to the text, Schlegel and Barry’s cross-cultural study of adolescents in tribal and traditional societies showed that
This passage is from Gilbert Highet, The Art of Teaching, copyright © 1950 by Gilbert Highet.
In that, perhaps, they are the ancestors of the modern journalists who have the knack of turning out a bright and interesting article on any new subject, without using special or expert information. The sophists dazzled everyone without convincing anyone of anything positive. They argued unsystematically and unfairly, but painted over the gaps in their reasoning with glossy rhetoric. They had few constructive ideas, and won most applause by taking traditional notions and showing they were based on convention rather than logic. They demonstrated that almost anything could be proved by a fast talker—sometimes they made a powerful speech on one side of a question in the morning and an equally powerful speech on the opposite side in the afternoon.
According to the text, what is not true about the sophists?
However, in some instances the culling of urban waterfowl collections infected by duck plague has been vigorously opposed by various segments of society. That opposition highlights one of the difficulties associated with wildlife disease management within urban environments; companion animal status conferred upon these waterfowl by segments of the public may interfere with needed disease control actions and facilitate diseaseestablishment and spread when eradication was possible.
According to the text, a difficulty faced by authorities in charge of wildlife management in urban areas is that