SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS
In this section there are four passages followed by fourteen multiple choice questions. For each multiple choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO.
PASSAGE ONE
(1) If you drop your laptop computer, a chip built into it will sense the acceleration and protect the delicate moving parts of its hard disk before it hits the ground. A group of researchers led by Jesse Lawrence of Stanford University are putting the same accelerometer chip to an intriguing new use: detecting earthquakes. They plan to create a network of volunteer laptops that can map out future quakes in far greater detail than traditional seismometers manage.
(2) Seismometers are large, expensive beasts, costing $10,000 or more apiece. They are designed to be exquisitely sensitive to the sort of vibrations an earthquake produces, which means they can pick up tremors that began halfway around the world. By contrast, the accelerometer chips in laptops, which have evolved from those used to detect when a car is in a collision and thus trigger the release of the airbags, are rather crude devices. They are, however, ubiquitous. Almost all modem laptops have them and they are even finding their way into mobile phones. The iPhone, for example, uses such a chip to detect its orientation so that it can rotate its display and thus make it easily readable.
(3) On its own, an accelerometer chip in a laptop is not very useful for earthquake-detection, as it cannot distinguish between a quake and all sorts of other vibrations—the user tapping away at the keyboard, for example. But if lots of these chips are connected to a central server via the internet, their responses can be compared. And if a large number in a particular place register a vibration at almost the same time, it is more likely to be an earthquake than a bunch of users all hitting their space bars. To exploit this group effect, Dr Lawrence"s Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) employs the same software that is used by the SETI@home project, which aggregates computing power from hundreds of thousands of volunteer computers around the world to analyze radio-telescope signals for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.
(4) Dr Lawrence and his colleagues have already demonstrated that the QCN works. It detected a quake near Reno, Nevada, in April, and one near Los Angeles in July. Merely detecting a quake, however, is not the point. Seismometers can do that. To be useful, the QCN needs to be able to do things that seismometers cannot.
(5) One of those things is to measure the maximum amount of ground shaking. The sensitivity of seismometers means that strong signals would damage them if they were not designed to "clip" such signals when they exceed a certain threshold. The price paid is that information about strong, nearby earthquakes is lost. Laptop accelerometers are more robust. Though they cannot, if in America, tell you anything about an earthquake in China, they can sometimes do better than conventional kit when measuring local quakes.
(6) The network"s second benefit is of sheer numbers. This should allow the construction of far more detailed maps of the up-and-down and side-to-side motions induced by earthquakes. These vary a lot from quake to quake, and that means the damage done by a quake of any given strength is also variable. A better understanding of how movement and damage relate might help both building design and town planning in earthquake zones.
(7) Of course, for that to work, you have to know where each laptop was at the moment of the quake. Ideally, this information would come from a Global Positioning System device fitted within the laptop, but few computers have them at the moment. In their absence, information automatically supplied about the site of the nearest router (a network device that computers use to connect to the wider internet) gives a rough location. This is imperfect, but pooling the data from lots of laptops means that location errors can be detected statistically and erroneous data discarded.
(8) If that can be done quickly enough, the QCN could bring a third—and most valuable—benefit: warning. The speed of internet communication, coupled with a scheme for uploading data from each computer at brief intervals, means that Dr Lawrence"s network could issue an earthquake warning within seconds. That is faster than traditional seismometer networks, which update less regularly, and, above all, is much faster than seismic waves travel. Warnings could thus be broadcast to places the earthquake waves had not yet reached, giving people vital time to find a place of refuge.
(9) At the moment, the QCN has about 1,500 participating computers. But, as happened with SETI @ home, the researchers expect numbers to grow once knowledge of the project spreads: qcn.stanford.edu, for those who want to join in the fun.
PASSAGE TWO
(1) Damn you, tall people. They block your view at the movie theater. They"re a pain to shop for: Who really wants to drag themselves to the Big & Tall to buy Uncle Lurch a pair of extra-long pants They"re the ones with better chances of becoming pro basketball players, or supermodels.
(2) Squirts probably don"t need any more reasons to envy their longer-limbed neighbors. Unfortunately, a new study just added to the indignity of short people. According to a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, both men and women who are above average height—5 ft. 10 in. for males, 5 ft. 4 in. for females—report higher levels of happiness than smaller people.
(3) In the study, men who call their lives the "worst possible" are nearly an inch shorter than the average man. The women most down in the dumps are half an inch smaller, on average, than the average woman. Taller people say they are more content, and are less likely to report a range of negative emotions like sadness and physical pain. "Happiness is just one more thing that taller people have going for them," says Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist and co-author of the study, who stands a smug 6 ft. 4 in. (Full disclosure: I, too, am about 6 ft. 4 in., but I will refrain from mocking shrimps in this story.)
(4) Why are tall people happier According to Deaton"s analysis, the result is linked to education and income. The study found that taller people tend to have more education, and thus higher income levels, than shorter people. It follows that the smarter, richer tall people would be sunnier than their vertically challenged compatriots. "Money buys enjoyment and higher life evaluation," says Deaton. "It buys off stress, anger, worry and pain. Income is the thing!"
(5) To gain some real-world insight into these stats, I called the first smart short person I could think of, a friend named Milton Lee. Despite what these studies indicate, smart short people do exist. Milt, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, made a killing as a Wall Street trader in the 1990s, but quit finance to chase his dream of becoming a basketball coach. He has trained many NBA players, including this year"s top draft pick, Oklahoma"s Blake Griffin, and even landed an assistant coaching gig for the Los Angeles Clippers" summer-league team.
(6) Despite giving up an healthy Wall Street income, Lee, who claims he"s 5 ft. 9 in. but admits to being 5 ft. 8 in. when pressed, considers himself content. "I"m not totally buying it," he says of the study. "I"m below average height, and have above-average happiness." In his basketball work, Lee spends a lot of time around well-compensated human trees, and doesn"t always see smiling faces. "There are plenty of NBA players who are absolutely miserable," Lee says. "They want more playing time, they feel underappreciated. Only a dozen or so guys feel that they are truly loved."
(7) In his Wall Street days, Lee saw plenty of rich, happy short people and wealthy, depressed tall people. He does offer one reason why taller men might be happier. "Whenever I"m out with tall guys, they tend to get more attention from women," says Lee. "You never hear girls say, "Hey, I"m really into short guys.""
(8) Lee directed me to one of the players he coaches, Coleman Collins, for the smart, tall guy"s perspective. When I told him Lee questioned the findings, Collins, who is 6 ft. 9 in., wasn"t surprised. "Short people are always ready to disagree," says Collins, who graduated from Virginia Tech when he was 19, after just three years, and played for the school"s basketball team. He points out that he has many short friends. "Generally speaking, I"ve found that they are more likely to have a chip on their shoulder, more likely to have something to prove," Collins says.
(9) Collins, now 23, supports the study"s results. "I"m generally in a good mood," he says. "And based on the anecdotal evidence I"ve seen, tall people have a more pleasant disposition and are more easygoing. They don"t have to make an extra effort to command attention. When they walk into a room, it tends to come naturally to them." Such recognition surely helps your self-esteem. If only it wasn"t too late for you short people to have a growth spurt.
PASSAGE THREE
(1) MONDAY"S Supreme Court decision to block a class-action sex-discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart was a huge setback for as many as 1.6 million current and former female employees of the world"s largest retailer. But the decision has consequences that range far beyond sex discrimination or the viability of class-action suits.
(2) The underlying issue, which the Supreme Court has now ratified, is Wal-Mart"s authoritarian style, by which executives pressure store-level management to squeeze more and more from millions of clerks, stockers and lower-tier managers.
(3) Indeed, the sex discrimination at Wal-Mart that drove the recent suit is the product not merely of managerial bias and prejudice, but also of a corporate culture and business model that sustains it, rooted in the company"s very beginnings.
(4) In the 1950s and "60s, northwest Arkansas, where Wal-Mart got its start, was poor, white and rural, in the midst of a wave of agricultural mechanization that generated a huge surplus of unskilled workers. To these men and women, the burgeoning chain of discount stores founded by Sam Walton was a godsend. The men might find dignity managing a store instead of a hardscrabble farm, while their wives and daughters could earn pin money clerking for Mr. Sam, as he was known. "The enthusiasm of Wal-Mart associates toward their jobs is one of the company"s greatest assets," declared the firm"s 1973 annual report.
(5) A patriarchal ethos was written into the Wal-Mart DNA. "Welcome Assistant Managers and Wives" read a banner at a 1975 meeting for executive trainees. And that corporate culture—"the single most important element in the continued, remarkable success of Wal-Mart," asserted Don Soderquist, the company"s chief operating officer in the 1990s—was sustained not only by the hyper centralized managerial control that flowed from the Bentonville, Ark., home office but by the evangelical Protestantism that Mr. Soderquist and other executives encouraged.
(6) Wal-Mart attorneys have argued, and the Supreme Court agreed this week, that even if sex discrimination was once part of the company"s culture, it is now ancient history: if any store managers are guilty of bias when it comes to promoting women, they are at odds with corporate policy. Wal-Mart is no longer an Ozark company; it is a cosmopolitan, multinational operation.
(7) But that avoids the more essential point, namely that Wal-Mart views low labor costs and a high degree of workplace flexibility as a signal competitive advantage. It is a militantly anti-union company that has been forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to current and former employees for violations of state wage and hour laws.
(8) In other words, the patriarchy of old has been reconfigured into a more systematically authoritarian structure, one that deploys a communitarian ethos to sustain a high degree of corporate loyalty even as wages and working conditions are put under continual downward pressure—especially in recent years, as Wal-Mart"s same-store sales have declined. Workers of both sexes pay the price, but women, who constitute more than 70 percent of hourly employees, pay more.
(9) There are tens of thousands of experienced Wal-Mart women who would like to be promoted to the first managerial rung, salaried assistant store manager. But Wal-Mart makes it impossible for many of them to take that post, because its ruthless management style structures the job itself as one that most women, and especially those with young children or a relative to care for, would find difficult to accept.
(10) Why Because, for all the change that has swept over the company, at the store level there is still a fair amount of the old communal sociability. Recognizing that workers steeped in that culture make poor candidates for assistant managers, who are the front lines in enforcing labor discipline, Wal-Mart insists that almost all workers promoted to the managerial ranks move to a new store, often hundreds of miles away.
(11) For young men in a hurry, that"s an inconvenience; for middle-aged women caring for families, this corporate reassignment policy amounts to sex discrimination. True, Wal-Mart is hardly alone in demanding that rising managers sacrifice family life, but few companies make relocation such a fixed policy, and few have employment rolls even a third the size.
(12) The obstacles to women"s advancement do not stop there. The workweek for salaried managers is around 50 hours or more, which can surge to 80 or 90 hours a week during holiday seasons. Not unexpectedly, some managers think women with family responsibilities would balk at such demands, and it is hardly to the discredit of thousands of Wal-Mart women that they may be right.
(13) There used to be a remedy for this sort of managerial authoritarianism: it was called a union, which bargained over not only wages and pensions but also the kind of qualitative issues, including promotion and transfer policies, that have proved so vexing for non-unionized employees at Wal-Mart and other big retailers.
(14) For a time it seemed as if the class-action lawsuit might be a partial substitute. By drastically limiting how a class-action suit can be brought, the Supreme Court leaves millions of service-sector workers with few avenues to escape the grinding work life and limited opportunities that so many now face.
PASSAGE FOUR
(1) "HELL is a city much like London," opined Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1819. Modem academics agree. Last year Dutch researchers showed that city dwellers have a 21% higher risk of developing anxiety disorders than do their calmer rural countrymen, and a 39% higher risk of developing mood disorders. But exactly how the inner workings of the urban and rural minds cause this difference has remained obscure—until now. A study just published in Nature by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the University of Heidelberg and his colleagues has used a scanning technique called functional magnetic-resonance imaging (FMRI) to examine the brains of city dwellers and country bumpkins when they are under stress.
(2) In Dr Meyer-Lindenberg"s first experiment, participants lying with their heads in a scanner took maths tests that they were doomed to fail (the researchers had designed success rates to be just 25%-40%). To make the experience still more humiliating, the team provided negative feedback through headphones, all the while checking participants for indications of stress, such as high blood pressure.
(3) The urbanites" general mental health did not differ from that of their provincial counterparts. However, their brains dealt with the stress imposed by the experimenters in different ways. These differences were noticeable in two regions: the amygdalas and the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (PACC). The amygdalas are a pair of structures, one in each cerebral hemisphere, that are found deep inside the brain and are responsible for assessing threats and generating the emotion of fear. The PACC is part of the cerebral cortex (again, found in both hemispheres) that regulates the amygdalas.
(4) People living in the countryside had the lowest levels of activity in their amygdalas. Those living in towns had higher levels. City dwellers had the highest. Not that surprising, to those of a Shelleyesque disposition. In the case of the PACC, however, what mattered was not where someone was living now, but where he or she was brought up. The more urban a person"s childhood, the more active his PACC, regardless of where he was dwelling at the time of the experiment.
(5) The amygdalas thus seem to respond to the here-and-now whereas the PACC is programmed early on, and does not react in the same, flexible way as the amygdalas. Second-to-second changes in its activity might, though, be expected to be correlated with changes in the amygdalas, because of its role in regulating them. FMRI allows such correlations to be measured.
(6) In the cases of those brought up in the countryside, regardless of where they now live, the correlations were as expected. For those brought up in cities, however, these correlations broke down. The regulatory mechanism of the native urbanite, in other words, seems to be out of kilter. Further evidence, then, for Shelley"s point of view. Moreover, it is also known that the PACC-amygdala link is often out of kilter in schizophrenia, and that schizophrenia is more common among city dwellers than country folk. Dr Meyer-Lindenberg is careful not to claim that his results show the cause of this connection. But they might.
(7) Dr Meyer-Lindenberg and his team conducted several subsequent experiments to check their findings. They asked participants to complete more maths tests—and also tests in which they mentally rotated an object—while investigators chided them about their performance. The results matched those of the first test. They also studied another group of volunteers, who were given stress-free tasks to complete. These experiments showed no activity in either the amygdalas or the PACC, suggesting that the earlier results were indeed the result of social stress rather than mental exertion.
(8) As is usually the case in studies of this sort, the sample size was small (and therefore not as robust as might be desirable) and the result showed an association, rather than a definite, causal relationship. That association is, nevertheless, interesting. Living in cities brings many benefits, but Dr Meyer-Lindenberg"s work suggests that Shelley and his fellow Romantics had at least half a point.Why did the research team conduct another experiment with stress-free tasks (PASSAGE FOUR)