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The main reason that the author of the passage discounts using a purely acoustic analysis to understand the way in which humans are able to recognize sounds is that
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Linguist:?Each language has a word that captures a concept or emotional state in a way that no other language does. To capture such a breadth of expression, an artificial language should be created that contains words corresponding to all the different concepts and emotional states captured by the world`s languages. That is not to say that such a language would contain as many words as there are in all the world`s languages. Rather, only for those words that have no corresponding word in another language. While such a plan is hugely ambitious, the resulting language would be more thorough than any existing language.
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The conclusion drawn above depends on which of the following assumptions?
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The US Constitution established both gold and silver as the basis of US currency: that is to say, it established a bimetallic standard for currency. This remained in place for about a century, until the Coinage Act of 1873, which embraced a "gold only" standard, a monometallic standard, effectively dropping silver as the basis of currency. Over the next several decades, advocates of bimetallism and advocates of the "gold only" standard fiercely debated.
The "gold only" advocates, such as William McKinley, argued that shifts in the relative value of the two precious metals could lead to wild fluctuations in the values of currency in a bimetallic system. Early in the United States history, Alexander Hamilton had tried to fix the gold-silver exchange rate by fiat, but of course, such restraints only inhibit the natural development of a free market.
Unemployment was high in the depression caused by the Panic of 1893, and many argued that these economic challenges had been triggered by abandoning bimetallism. One of the more prominent advocates of bimetallism was William Jennings Bryant: indeed, bimetallism was the very center of his presidential campaigns in 1896 and 1900, both of which he lost to McKinley. Bryant articulated the popular view that a "gold only" standard limited the money supply, and thus favored those who were already quite wealthy, against the interests of working people of all professions. He famously expressed this argument in his "Cross of Gold" speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention, in which he argued that continuing the "gold only" standard would "crucify" the honest laboring classes on a "cross of gold."
Despite the eloquence of Bryant's arguments, history strongly favored the "gold-only" standard. The argument that increasing the money supply would lead to greater prosperity strikes us now as na?ve: of course, we now understand that increasing the monetary supply can lead to runaway inflation, which hurts everyone. Furthermore, gold did not remain as limited as the advocates of bimetallism imagined. In the 1890s, scientists discovered a cyanide process that allowed workers to extract pure gold from much lower grade ore, thus significantly increasing domestic gold production. Additionally, the discovery of two immense gold deposits in South Africa substantially increased world gold supply. Thus, the "gold only" standard allowed for ample currency, and even robust prosperity in the 1920s, so bimetallism died a quiet death.
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The author of the passage believes that William Jennings Bryant`s argument that a gold standard favors the rich to be
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Originally, scientists predicted small asteroids to be hard and rocky, as any loose surface material (called regolith) generated by impacts was expected to escape their weak gravity. Aggregate small bodies were not thought to exist, because the slightest sustained relative motion would cause them to separate. But observations and computer modeling are proving otherwise. Most asteroids larger than a kilometer are now believed to be composites of smaller pieces. Those imaged at high-resolution show evidence for copious regolith despite the weak gravity. Most of them have one or more extraordinarily large craters, some of which are wider than the mean radius of the whole body. Such colossal impacts would not just gouge out a crater-they would break any monolithic body into pieces. In short, asteroids larger than a kilometer across may look like nuggets of hard rock but are more likely to be aggregate assemblages-or even piles of loose rubble so pervasively fragmented that no solid bedrock is left.
The rubble hypothesis, proposed decades ago by scientists, lacked evidence, until the planetologist Shoemaker realized that the huge craters on the asteroid Mathilde and its very low density could only make sense together: a porous body such as a rubble pile can withstand a battering much better than an integral object. It will absorb and dissipate a large fraction of the energy of an impact; the far side might hardly feel a thing. At first, the rubble hypothesis may appear conceptually troublesome. The material strength of an asteroid is nearly zero, and the gravity is so low one is tempted to neglect that too. The truth is neither strength nor gravity can be ignored. Paltry though it may be, gravity binds a rubble pile together. And anybody who builds sandcastles knows that even loose debris can cohere. Oft-ignored details of motion begin to matter: sliding friction, chemical bonding, damping of kinetic energy, etc. We are just beginning to fathom the subtle interplay of these minuscule forces.
The size of an asteroid should determine which force dominates. One indication is the observed pattern of asteroidal rotation rates. Some collisions cause an asteroid to spin faster; others slow it down. If asteroids are monolithic rocks undergoing random collisions, a graph of their rotation rates should show a bell-shaped distribution with a statistical "tail" of very fast rotators. If nearly all asteroids are rubble piles, however, this tail would be missing, because any rubble pile spinning faster than once every two or three hours would fly apart. Recently, several astronomers discovered that all but five observed asteroids obey a strict rotation limit. The exceptions are all smaller than about 150 meters in diameter, with an abrupt cutoff for asteroids larger than 200 meters. The evident conclusion-that asteroids larger than 200 meters across are rubble piles-agrees with recent computer modeling of collisions. A collision can blast a large asteroid to bits, but those bits will usually be moving slower than their mutual escape velocity (the lowest velocity that a body must have in order to escape the orbit of a planet). Over several hours, gravity will reassemble all but the fastest pieces into a rubble pile.
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The reason that graphs of asteroid rotation rates lack the expected statistical tail associated with high rotational rates is that
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Compared to regulations in other countries, those of the United States tends to be narrower in scope, with an emphasis on manufacturing processes and specific categories of pollution, and little or no attention to the many other factors that affect environmental quality. An example is the focus on controlling pollution rather than influencing decisions about processes, raw materials, or products that determine environmental impacts. Regulation in the United States tends to isolate specific aspects of production processes and attempts to control them stringently, which means that some aspects of business are regulated tightly, although sometimes not cost-effectively, while others are ignored. Other countries and several American states have recently made more progress in preventing pollution at its source and considering such issues as product life cycles, packaging waste, and industrial energy efficiency.
Environmental regulation in the United States is also more prescriptive than elsewhere, in the sense of requiring specific actions, with little discretion left to the regulated firm. There also is a great reliance on action-forcing laws and technology standards.
These contrasts are illustrated nicely in a 1974 book that used a hare and tortoise analogy to compare air quality regulation in the United States and Sweden. While the United States (the hare) codified ambitious goals in statutes that drove industry to adopt new technologies under the threat of sanctions, Sweden (the tortoise) used a more collaborative process that stressed results but worked with industry in deciding how to achieve them. In the end air quality results were about the same. Similar results have been found in other comparative analyses of environmental regulation. For example, one study of a multinational firm with operations in the United States and Japan found that pollution levels in both countries were similar, despite generally higher pollution abatement expenditures in the United States. The higher costs observed in the United States thus were due in large part, not to more stringent standards, but to the higher regulatory transaction costs. Because agencies in different countries share information about technologies, best practices, and other issues, the pollution levels found acceptable in different countries tends to be quite similar.
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It can be inferred that, compared to the United States, Japan spent less on
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In the mid-1970`s, Walter Alvarez, a geologist, was studying Earth`s polarity. It had recently been learned that the orientation of the planet`s magnetic field reverses, so that every so often, in effect, south becomes north and vice versa. Alvarez and some colleagues had found that a certain formation of pinkish limestone in Italy, known as the scaglia rossa, recorded these occasional reversals. The limestone also contained the fossilized remains of millions of tiny sea creatures called foraminifera. Alvarez became interested in a thin layer of clay in the limestone that seemed to have been laid down around the end of the Cretaceous Period. Below the layer, certain species of foraminifera-or forams, for short-were preserved. In the clay layer, there were no forams. Above the layer, the earlier species disappeared and new forams appeared. Having been taught the uniformitarian view, which held that any apparent extinctions throughout geological time resulted from `the incompleteness of the fossil record` rather than an actual extinction, Alvarez was not sure what to make of the lacuna in geological time corresponding to the missing foraminifera, because the change looked very abrupt.
Had Walter Alvarez not asked his father, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez, how long the clay had taken to deposit, the younger Alvarez may not have thought to use iridium, an element rarely found on earth but more plentiful in meteorites, to answer this question. Iridium, in the form of microscopic grains of cosmic dust, is constantly raining down on the planet. The Alvarezes reasoned that if the clay layer had taken a significant amount of time to deposit, it would contain detectable levels of iridium. The results were startling: far too much iridium had shown up. The Alvarez hypothesis, as it became known, was that everything-not just the clay layer-could be explained by a single event: a six-mile-wide asteroid had slammed into Earth, killing off not only the forams but also the dinosaurs and all the other organisms that went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period.
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It can be inferred from the passage that had the scaglia rossa not exhibited a certain geological property then which of the following would most likely have been true?
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Freudianism sits alongside Marxism and Darwinism in the pantheon of modern theories held to be so revelatory that they not only gained the adherence of Western intelligentsia but shaped the broader culture. During the first half of the twentieth century, an air of intrigue and mystery hovered around Freud`s newly anointed practitioners: psychotherapists. They occupied a strange universe, speaking in a language so incomprehensible but seemingly authoritative that it alternately awed and scared the average man on the street. Psychotherapy is no longer an intellectual movement today as it once was. But in the form of modern professional"caring,"it has assumed a new role, which is to provide a peculiar sort of substitute friendship - what we might call "artificial friendship" - for lonely people in a lonely age.
To understand why this occurred and what it means for American culture, one must study the fractious history of the mental health field over the last six decades. It is a complicated story, with a staggering variety of terms, schools, leaders, and techniques, so any overview must necessarily leave out many important details. But from even just a synopsis of the conflicts that gave rise to today`s culture of psychotherapy - battles over who would hold the truest title to physician of the mind, tensions between scientists and clinicians, academics and professionals, elites and the public - we can see more clearly how psychotherapy has profoundly shaped the American conception of what happiness is and how we can achieve it.
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According to the passage"the American conception of what happiness is"at least partially results from
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More capacious than ponderous, the most recent incarnation in a line of Melville biographies, Philbrick`s"Moby Dick"(a barefaced titular homage to Melville`s iconic novel on a white whale) has the wild and unpredictable energy of the great white whale itself, more than enough to heave its significance out of what Melville called "the universal cannibalism of the sea" and into the light.
According to Philbrick, Melville, in his rightly lionized novel,"Moby Dick", challenged the form of the novel decades before James Joyce, and a century before Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace. Calling for tools befitting the ambition of his task -"Give me a condor`s quill! Give me Vesuvius`s crater for an ink stand!"- Melville substituted dialogue and stage direction for a chapter`s worth of prose. He halted the action to include a parody of the scientific classification of whales, a treatise on the whale as represented in art, a meditation on the complexity of rope, whatever snagged his attention.
Reporting the exact day and time of his writing in a parenthetical aside, he "pulled back the fictive curtain and inserted a seemingly irrelevant glimpse of himself in the act of composition,"the moment Philbrick identifies as his favorite in the novel. Melville may not have called this playfulness metafiction, but he defied strictures that shaped the work of his contemporaries.
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The function of the lines beginning with "Melville substituted dialogue..."is to illustrate the way in which Melville
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In his magnificent biography of Keats, Nicholas Roe chronicles a forward-looking spirit, whose poetry offered a strikingly modern amalgam of the arts and sciences. Medical allusions to nerves, arteries, bone and blood developed in tandem with deepening thoughts on human pain and suffering, says Roe. Keats`s vaunted "negative capability" allowed him to engage imaginatively with life`s transience and his own consumptive state (he suffered from tuberculosis and was not expected to live for long). The rueful melancholy of"To Autumn"and"Ode to a Nightingale"speaks of a courageous reckoning with mortality.
Lord Byron, with customary disdain, regarded Keats as a mere dilettante of sensation and "his imagination". Roe will have little of this. The imagination at work in a poem such as"Isabella, or, the Pot of Basil" derived from Keats`s professional exposure to dissecting-room corpses. As the son of a Moorfields livery stables manager, Keats knew how the poor could serve as fodder for scalpels. Hospitals were complicit in the body-snatching trade, as the science of anatomy was in its infancy and trainee surgeons were required to practice their skills.
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According to the passage, Lord Byron`s attitude toward Keats is suspect primarily because
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Even though physiological and behavioral processes are maximized within relatively narrow ranges of temperatures in amphibians and reptiles, individuals may not maintain activity at the optimum temperatures for performance because of the costs associated with doing so. Alternatively, activity can occur at suboptimal temperatures even when the costs are great. Theoretically, costs of activity at suboptimal temperatures must be balanced by gains of being active. For instance, the leatherback sea turtle will hunt during the time of day in which krill are abundant, even though the water is cooler and thus the turtle`s body temperature requires greater metabolic activity. In general, however, the cost of keeping a suboptimal body temperature, for reptiles and amphibians, is varied and not well understood; they include risk of predation, reduced performance, and reduced foraging success.
One reptile that scientists understand better is the desert lizard, which is active during the morning at relatively low body temperatures (usually 33.0 C), inactive during midday when external temperatures are extreme, and active in the evening at body temperatures of 37.0 C. Although the lizards engage in similar behavior (e.g., in morning and afternoon, social displays, movements, and feeding), metabolic rates and water loss are great and sprint speed is lower in the evening when body temperatures are high. Thus, the highest metabolic and performance costs of activity occur in the evening when lizards have high body temperatures. However, males that are active late in the day apparently have a higher mating success resulting from their prolonged social encounters. The costs of activity at temperatures beyond those optimal for performance are offset by the advantages gained by maximizing social interactions that ultimately impact individual fitness.
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It can be inferred from the passage that the metabolic costs of an activity during the middle of the day are
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In 1883, the Indonesian island Krakatoa, home to a massive volcano, seemingly disappeared overnight as an eruption rent the entire island apart, catapulting rock and debris into the atmosphere. For the next years, as ash circled the entire globe, the average world temperature dropped by several degrees Fahrenheit. Therefore, an eruption of similar power in terms of the amount of debris ejected into the atmosphere will likely cause the average temperature around the world to drop by several degrees.
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