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For well over a century, schoolchildren have greeted the dawning of the summer break with joy. Many aspects of the Victorian school system—blackboards, easels and corporal punishment—have fallen by the wayside. But the long summer holiday, originally adopted in order to allow children to help with the harvest, has remained a fixture of the education system long after child labour was outlawed in the UK.It’s tempting to romanticise the extended break as a precious time out from the pressure of tests, a chance for children to enjoy spending time with their friends and to learn important life skills outside the classroom. But as the holidays draw to a close, a report from the children’s commissioner for England warns of important shifts in the way children spend their summer holidays.In this age of screens and social media, children are spending less time playing outside and more online, with many leading a “battery hen existence”. On average, children from five to 15 years old spend almost three hours a day online over the weekend, but just four hours a week playing outside—half the time that their parents did. There are inevitable consequences: research suggests children experience “dramatic and significant” reductions in their fitness over the summer break.Unsurprisingly, it is children from poorer backgrounds whose fitness suffers the most. Low-income parents face a greater struggle to make ends meet during the long school holiday than in termtime: half say they stay in more often during the school holidays than in term time because of the expense of taking children out for summer activities. As safety concerns mean parents are less likely than ever to let their children play outside unsupervised, it is the children of more affluent parents who are the most likely to stay active, thanks to expensive camps and sports courses.There are other pressures on the family budget: parents whose children normally get free school meals have to somehow meet the extra food costs, estimated to be £30-£40 a week for each child. Two in five low-income parents say they skip meals over the summer break to ensure they’re able to feed their children and, according to the Trussell Trust, the use of food bank spikes every summer.The children’s commissioner makes a number of sensible recommendations, including providing more funding for subsidised summer holiday clubs and meals for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. The government should also consider increasing benefits for low-income parents over the summer break.But another, complementary measure should also be on the table. There’s an established body of research from both the US and the UK that shows children forget some of what they have learned over the long summer break—the “summer slide”—and that this learning loss is, again, biggest for children from poorer backgrounds, In other words, the long summer break comes with an inequality double whammy: it increases the social gap not just in terms of physical health and fitness, but in educational attainment too.Shortening the summer break to four weeks could help reduce these effects. One method would be to restructure the existing school year into five eight-week terms—two before Christmas, and three after—each separated by a two-week holiday. This would give teachers and children a similar amount of holiday, just spaced more evenly over the year. And it would make life easier for all parents who struggle to find childcare for six weeks on the trot. Currently, school term dates are set at the discretion of councils. Some councils, such as the Isle of Wight and Nottinghamshire, will be experimenting with a shorter break next summer. Were the government to roll out a shorter break nationally, it would prompt sighs of relief from many working parents. The long summer break is a relic that disadvantages poorer children and makes life difficult for modern working families. Its time is long past.1. In the passage, the use of the phrase “battery hen existence” is meant to describe the way that .2. The most accurate title for this article would be .3. Which of the following disadvantages of holidays is NOT mentioned in the passage?4. The writer’s attitude towards school holidays is .5. Much of the motivation for making a change in the holiday system is .

Man is born naked but is everywhere in clothes (or their symbolic equivalents). We cannot tell how this came to be, but we can say something about why it should be so and what it means.Decorating, covering, uncovering or otherwise altering the human form in accordance with social notions of everyday propriety or sacred dress, beauty or solemnity, status or changes in status, or on occasion of the violation and inversion of such notions, seems to have been a concern of every human society of which we have knowledge. This objectively universal fact is associated with another of a more subjective nature—that the surface of the body seems not only to be the boundary of the individual as a biological and psychological entity but as the frontier of the social self as well. As these two entities are quite different, and as cultures differ widely in the ways they define both, the relation between them is highly problematic. The problems involved, however, are ones that all societies must solve in one way or as individuals, that is, of integrating them into the societies to which they belong not only as children but throughout their lives.The surface of the body, as the common frontier of society, the social self, and the psycho-biological individual becomes the symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialization is enacted and bodily adornment (in all its culturally multifarious forms, from body-painting to clothing and from feather head-dresses to cosmetics) become the language through which it is expressed. The adornment and public presentation of the body, however inconsequential or even frivolous a business it may appear to individuals, is for cultures a serious matter; that the feeling of being in harmony with fashion gives man a measure of security he rarely derives from his religion. The seriousness with which we take questions of dress and appearance is betrayed by the way we regard not taking them seriously as an index, either of a “serious” disposition or of serious psychological problems. As Lord Chesterfield remarked:Dress is a very foolish thing; and yet it is a very foolish thing for a man not to be well dressed, according to his rank and way of life; and it is so far from being a disparagement to any man’s understanding, that it is rather a proof of it, to be as well dressed as those whom he lives with: the difference in this case, between a man of sense and a fop, is, that the fop values himself upon his dress; and the man of sense laughs at it, at the same time that he knows that he must not neglect it.The most significant point of this passage is not the explicit assertion that a man of sense should regard dress with a mixture of contempt and attentiveness, but the implicit claim that by doing so, and thus maintaining his appearance in a way compatible with “those he lives with,” he defines himself as a man of sense. The uneasy ambivalence of the man of sense, whose “sense” consists in conforming to a practice he laughs at, is the consciousness of a truth that seems as scandalous today as it did in the eighteenth century. This culture, which we neither understand nor control, is not only the necessary medium through which we communicate our social status, attitudes, desires, beliefs and ideals (in short, our identities) to others, but also to a large extent constitutes these identities, in ways in which we are compelled to conform regardless of our self-consciousness or even our contempt. Dress and bodily adornment constitute one such cultural medium, perhaps the most specialized in the shaping and communication of personal and social identity.The Kayapo natives of Brazil possess a quite elaborate code of what could be called “dress”, a fact which might escape notice by a casual Western observer because it does not involve the use of clothing. There are, however, very few Western observers, including the anthropologist, who have ever taken the trouble to go beyond the superficial recording of such exotic paraphernalia to inquire into the system of meanings and values which it evokes for its wearers. A closer look at the Kayapo bodily adornment discloses that the apparently naked savage is as fully covered in a fabric of cultural meaning as the most elaborately draped Victorian lady or gentleman. A well turned out adult Kayapo male, with his large lower-lip plug, penis sheath, large holes pierced through the ear lobes from which hang small strings of beads, overall body paint in red and black patterns, plucked eyebrows, eyelashes and facial hair, and head shaved to a point at the crown with the hair left long at the sides and back, could on the other hand hardly leave the most insensitive traveler with the impression that bodily adornment is a neglected art among the Kayapo.1. According to the passage, which of the following statements is NOT true?2. The term fop is utilized by the author to establish .3.In the last paragraph, the case study about the Kayapo is meant to .4. According to the passage, if a woman wore the corset and hoop skirt of a Victorian woman in today’s society then she .5. What is the passage meant to do?

Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis translated social divisions and conflicts into urban form, drawing inspiration from metropolitan Manhattan. He also drew on visions of the future city from such architects and artists as Antonio Sant Elia, Le Corbusier, and Hugh Ferris. For modern architects, a functionalist division of urban space became a key tenet of design, and the utopian vision of modernist urban designs was predicated on a separation of spaces for living, working, and recreation. These divisions were typically horizontal, but some of the more fantastic plans applied these principles vertically as well. Lang, for instance, transformed this functional division vertically, and a strict vertical hierarchy structure in his Metropolis. Mid-air bridges and train lines spawn the yawning canyons between towering skyscrapers. The upper classes live in the upper reaches, in graciously partitioned spaces of play and repose. Underground, far from the light of day, are two levels of austerely delineated space. There are the worker’s tenements, where the bodies that labor for the wealthy reside. In addition, there are the machine rooms, where they work and occasionally die as they labor to keep the machinery of the city running. The New Tower of Babel, a skyscraper dominating the skyline, provides an axis for the vertical hierarchy. It is the control center for the entire city, with main thorough fares radiating from it, while its internal mechanisms plunge down into the lowest levels. The subterranean tenements and machine rooms form part of this rational axis. Insofar as the New Tower of Babel serves as the axis for this fundamentally vertical gesture, the entire city appears as one great tower.Now the biblical Tower of Babel that this structure evokes was in fact a ziggurat, a species of pyramid that one ascended along a path that spiraled up its perimeter to the apex. The Tower of Babel thus combines two diﬀerent, potentially contradictory architectural structurations of movement: the tower and the labyrinth. In Greek mythology, the labyrinth was the maze built by the first architect Daedalus at the behest of a sovereign, Minos, in order to hide his wife’s monstrous offspring. At the center of the labyrinth dwelled the Minotaur, half bull, half man. Each year Minos forced young men and women into the maze, where they invariably lost their way and fell prey to the Minotaur. The Labyrinth implies both disorientation and hybridization. It spatially poses the question of “where?” and “who?” but offers only cryptic replies. In contrast to the Labyrinth, the tower unequivocally marks a place and acts as a beacon, as if to answer the question posed by the Labyrinth: “Where?” “Here!” And, in response to the question of confused identity or tangled origins, the Tower poses a unitary and unifying entity. In effect, the Tower of Babel can be read as an architecture that superimposes the convoluted question mark of the Labyrinth upon the soaring exclamation mark of the Tower. It is a figure that rectifies and twists spatial orientations, actions, and identities.In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Tower of Babel came to represent man’s hubris, his attempt to ascend to the level of God. Hence it supplied an apt metaphor for modernity, when man really did lay claim to godlike powers, which pushed God aside and proclaimed Him dead, only to discover that human works did not prove a sufficient replacement for divinity. This is ostensibly how Metropolis conjures forth the Tower of Babel: as an icon for the inevitable failure of the modern project.While the giant city of Metropolis in Lang’s film is structured around the New Tower of Babel, it also offers a labyrinth: twisting passages and catacombs beneath the city, at once spaces of danger, secrecy, and safety. Yet even as these labyrinthine structures appear to unravel the vertical authority of the city, they are inseparable from it. The city generates them and imparts intensity to them. Ultimately even the rational axis of the New Tower partakes of the labyrinth. The austere worker housing and the machine rooms that form part of its modern machinery are also shadowy, smoky, and are connected to the twisting underground catacombs. In other words, if Lang’s Metropolis can be understood as a Tower of Babel, it is because it combines tower and labyrinth in specific ways. Another dominant building in the film, the Gothic Cathedral, also combines tower and labyrinth and provides some insights into the specificity of Lang’s Metropolis.Significantly, in medieval Europe, the soaring Gothic cathedrals were imagined as Towers of Babel, and on their floors, labyrinthine symbols of religious perambulation were etched. They thus combined a heavenward gesture with the convoluted motion of ritual. In circles of architecture and urban planning in 1920s Germany, however, the cathedral took on another meaning. It was taken as the model for a truly German version of the American skyscraper. Many believed that one massive central building in each city, in the manner of the cathedral, was preferable to the American model of unbridled commercial growth. In this sense, the cathedral promised a way to produce a German modernity free of foreign influence.1.What can be inferred from paragraph one?2. Which of the following statements are NOT true about the “tower” and “labyrinth” in paragraph 2?3. The tone in the last paragraph concerning German views on American skyscrapers can be described as ________.4. Which source material is NOT drawn upon as examples in this passage?5.What is the best title for the passage?

The untold story of the world economy—so far at least—is the potentially explosive interaction between the spreading trade war and the overhang of global debt, estimated at a _1_ $247 trillion. That’s “trillion” with a “t”. The numbers are so large as to be almost _2_.Households, businesses and governments borrow on the assumption that they will service their debts either by paying the _3_ and interest or by rolling over the debts into new loans. But this works only if incomes grow fast enough to make the debts bearable or to justify new loans. When those ingredients go _4_, delinquencies, defaults and (at worse) panics follow.Here’s where the trade war and debt may _5_ disastrously. Since 2003, global debt has soared. As a share of the world economy (gross domestic product), the increase went from 248 percent of GDP to 318 percent. In the first quarter of 2018 alone, global debt rose by a huge $8 trillion. The figures include all major countries and most types of debt: consumer, business and government.But to service these debts requires rising incomes, while an expanding trade war threatens to _6_ incomes. The resort to more tariffs and trade restrictions will make it harder for borrowers to pay their debts. At best, this could slow the global economy. At worst, it could _7_ another financial crisis.Note that the danger is worldwide. It’s not _8_ to the United States. In a new report, the Institute of International Finance (IIF), an industry research and advocacy group, says the debts of some “emerging market” countries (Turkey, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina) seem vulnerable to rollover risk: the inability to replace expiring loans. In 2018 and 2019, about $1 trillion of dollar-denominated emerging-market debt is _9_, the IIF says.Debt can either stimulate or retard economic growth, depending on the circumstances. Now we’re approaching a turning point, according to Hung Tran, the IIF’s executive managing director. If debt growth is not sustainable, as Tran believes, new _10_ will slow or stop. Borrowers will have to devote more of their cash flow to servicing existing debts.At a briefing, Tran described the change this way:“[We had] a Goldilocks economy, with decent economic growth. Inflation was nowhere to be seen, allowing central banks [the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank] to be more _11_ [i.e., keeping interest rates low]. You could always roll over your debt. However, the probability of this continuing is much less now… Trade tensions are on the rise, and this has already impacted [business confidence] and the willingness to _12_.”Inflation is also creeping _13_. To stall its rise, the Fed is raising interest rates. Trade protectionism _14_ the problem, because many non-U.S. companies borrow in dollars. (Dollars are widely used in trade even if neither the importer nor the exporter is American.) But these loans must be repaid in dollars. If tit-for-tat protectionism _15_ trade, getting those dollars will become harder. Loan delinquencies and defaults may rise.Tran isn’t predicting a full-scale panic resembling the 2008-2009 financial crisis, and there are some reasons for _16_. Banks are better capitalized now than before the crisis. (Bank capital—shareholders’ funds or loans—protects against losses.) People are also more _17_ to the dangers than a decade ago.Evidence of this comes from a recent “stress test” performed on 35 large bank holding companies by the Fed. A deep recession was _18_; the unemployment rate rose to 10 percent. Despite large losses, no bank failed. Since 2009, these banks have added $800 billion in common equity capital, the Fed says.What Tran is suggesting is a global shift away from debt-financed economic growth. The meaning of the $247 trillion debt overhang is that many countries (including China, India and other emerging-market countries) will be dealing with the consequences of high or unsustainable debts—whether _19_ by consumers, businesses or governments. There will be a collective drag _20_ the global economy.“If you are in a high-debt situation, you need to bring the debt down, either absolutely or as a share of GDP,” Tran said at the briefing. “[Either] will result in slower economic growth. You don’t have the borrowing needed to maintain strong investment and consumption spending.”This may represent a final chapter to the financial crisis. The low interest rates adopted by central banks were justified as necessary to avoid a worldwide depression. Critics worried that cheap credit would rationalize risky lending that couldn’t survive higher rates. We may soon discover who’s right.

Directions: Please summarize this article in English in about 200 words. (1/1)You are most basically a blend of your biological parents. Your genetic material is a combination of their genetic material. A human typically has 46 chromosomes that contain his or her DNA, commonly referred to as genes. 23 chromosomes are provided by the maternal egg and 23 chromosomes are provided by the paternal sperm. Whether fertilization—the combining of an egg and a sperm cell—happens naturally or in a laboratory setting, the egg and sperm must be added together. Only once the egg is fertilized, with a complete set of genetic material, will it begin to divide and grow into an unborn fetus.This combination of two incomplete sets of genetic materials accounts for trait variation and change (or evolution) across a sexually reproducing population. Charles Darwin, an English naturalist who lived and studied during the 19th century, was among the first scientists to observe and identify this phenomenon. For Darwin, his observations were ultimately clarified on a globe-spanning voyage aboard the HMS (Her Majesty’s Ship) Beagle.It was captain Robert Fitzroy who brought Darwin on board for what was, in fact, the second voyage of the Beagle (from December 27, 1831 to October 2, 1836). The Beagle’s mission was to survey the coastlines of South America, in order to render more accurate charts and maps. Darwin took advantage of these trips to explore the South American inland, and catalogue plant and animal life and various geological conditions. The Beagle’s visit to the Galapagos Islands proved to be the most important for Darwin’s studies.It was on the various Galapagos Islands that Darwin first noted what are now classically referred to as Darwin’s finches. He originally referred to these birds in scattered notes as either mockingbirds or wrens. It was only after his return to England and consultation with other scientists that Darwin came to understand these birds as different species of finches. This clarifying point led Darwin to reconsider his findings and ultimately arrive at his most compelling conclusions regarding variation and evolution.Darwin gave special attention to the different beaks among these different species of finches. He considered how a certain beak might be better suited for consuming a specific type of food. For example, a larger beak might be better suited for cracking seeds and nuts with harder shells that may fall to the ground. Smaller and more nimble beaks might be better suited for catching insects quickly in mid-air. He also noted that larger finches tended to be found foraging for food on the ground, while smaller finches stayed perched in trees. When Darwin turned his mind to questions of why each bird had been bestowed with these particular features and habits, he ultimately began to formulate his theory of natural selection.In that capacity for variation, Darwin saw potential for adaptation. If finch offspring were endowed with more advantageous traits, a larger beak perhaps, better at cracking seeds that have fallen to ground, then that particular bird would live a more successful life. With a greater inherent ability to consume food, that particular finch would stand a greater chance of living long enough to find a mate and produce offspring of its own. Thus, the advantageous variation would be passed on. As a population accumulates advantageous variations across generations, this piecemeal process builds into what is called speciation. The evolutionary process, called survival of the fittest, results in the formation of a new species.Evolutionary scientists have over the years come to appreciate just how serendipitous an event Darwin’s visit to the Galapagos Islands was. We might go as far as to consider the Galapagos Islands a natural laboratory, perfectly suited to observe the various results of evolutionary processes. If a population is very large or in close proximity to, and can interbreed with other populations of the same species, advantageous traits must trickle down over many generations before a critical number of individuals can be cast as a distinct species. However, if the population is small and isolated (only able to breed amongst itself, as in the case of Galapagos), then an advantageous variation might only be passed down through relatively few subsequent generations before a new species distinguishes itself.The Galapagos Islands provided the perfect environment for accelerated evolution and speciation in Darwin’s finches. The populations were small and perhaps most importantly, isolated from mainland South America. This allowed sexual reproduction and individual cases of mutation to introduce advantageous traits and disadvantageous traits that would not be diffused across a very large population.Darwin noted specifically that, while of distinctly different species, the finches of the Galapagos bore some resemblance to the finches of mainland South America. Perhaps a strong wind blew ancestral finches flying along South America’s coastline off course. The disoriented ancestors ultimately found a home on the more recently formed volcanic islands of the Galapagos. The newly settled population bred. The individuals among subsequent generations that were fitter or better adapted to certain conditions of the population’s new home, continued the breeding process, and thus, new species evolved. Those individuals that inherited disadvantageous traits, given environmental stressors, stood a greater chance of dying off before they could reproduce and pass the traits on to their offspring.

Agatti is one of the Lakshadweep Islands of the south-west coast of India. These islands are surrounded by lagoons and coral reefs which are in turn surrounded by the open ocean. Coral reefs, which are formed from the skeletons of minute sea creatures, give shelter to a variety of plants and animals, and therefore, have the potential to provide a stream of diverse benefits to the inhabitants of Agatti Island.In the first place, the reefs provide food and other products for consumption by the islanders themselves. Foods include different types of fish, octopus and molluscs, and in the case of poorer families, these constitute as much as 90% of the protein they consume. Reef resources are also used for medicinal purposes. For example, the money cowrie, a shell known locally as Vallakavadi, is commonly made into a paste and used as a home remedy to treat cysts in the eye.In addition, the reef contributes to income generation. According to a recent survey, 20% of the households on Agatti report lagoon fishing, or shingle, mollusc, octopus and cowrie collection as their main occupation. For poor households, the direct contribution of the reef to their financial resources is significant: 12% of poor households are completely dependent on the reef for their household income, while 59% of poor households rely on the reef for 70% of their household income, and the remaining 29% for 50% of their household income.Bartering of reef resources also commonly takes place, both between islanders and between islands. For example, Agatti Island is known for its abundance of octopus, and this is often used to obtain products from nearby Androth Island. Locally, reef products may be given by islanders in return for favors, such as help in constructing a house or net mending, or for other products such as rice, coconuts or fish.The investment required to exploit the reefs is minimal. It involves simple, locally available tools and equipment, some of which can be used without a boat, such as the fishing practice known as Kat moodsal. This is carried out in the shallow eastern lagoon of Agatti by children and adults, close to shore at low tide, throughout the year. A small cast net, a leaf bag, and plastic slippers are all that are required, and the activity can yield 10-12 small fish (approximately 1 kg) for household consumption. Cast nets are not expensive, and all the households in Agatti own at least one. Even the boats, which operate in the lagoon and near-shore reef, are constructed locally and have low running costs. They are either small, non-mechanized, traditional wooden rowing boats, known as Thonis, or rafts, known as Tharappanm. During more than 400 years of occupation and survival, the Agatti islanders have developed an intimate knowledge of the reefs. They have knowledge of numerous different types of fish and where they can be found according to the tide or lunar cycle. They have also developed a local naming system of folk taxonomy, naming fish according to their shape. Sometimes the same species is given different names depending on its size and age. For example, a full grown Emperor fish is called Metti and a juvenile is called Killokam. The abundance of each species at different fishing grounds is also well known. Along with this knowledge of reef resources, the islanders have developed a wide range of skills and techniques for exploiting them. A multitude of different fishing techniques are still used by the islanders, each targeting different areas of the reef and particular species.The reef plays an important role in the social lives of the islanders too, being an integral part of traditions and rituals. Most of the island’s folklore revolves around the reef and sea. There is hardly any tale or song which does not mention the traditional sailing crafts, known as Odams, the journeys of enterprising “heroes”, the adventures of sea fishing and encounters with sea creatures. Songs that women sing recollect women looking for returning Odams, and requesting the waves to be gentler and the breeze just right for the sails. There are stories of the benevolent sea ghost baluvam, whose coming to shore is considered a harbinger of prosperity for that year, bringing more coconuts, more fish and general well-being.The reef is regarded by the islanders as common property, and all the islanders are entitled to use the lagoon and reef resources. In the past, fishing groups would obtain permission from the Amin (island head person) and go fishing in the grounds allotted by him. On their return, the Amin would be given a share of the catch, normally one of the best or biggest fish. This practice no longer exists, but there is still a code of conduct or etiquette for exploiting the reef, and common respect for this is an effective way of avoiding conflict or disputes.Exploitation of such vast and diverse resources as the reefs and lagoon surrounding the island has encouraged collaborative efforts, mainly for purposes of safety, but also as a necessity in the operation of many fishing techniques. For example, an indigenous gear and operation known as Bala fadal involves 25-30 men. Reef gleaning for cowrie collection by groups of 6-10 women is also a common activity, and even today, although its economic significance is marginal, it continues as a recreational activity.

By the mid-1800s, telescopes had transformed Mars from a mythological figure into a world. As it came into focus, Mars became a planet with weather, shifting terrains, and ice caps like Earth’s. “The very first time we had a way to look at Mars through the eyepiece, we started discovering things that were changing,” says the SETI Institute’s Nathalie Cabrol, who has studied Mars for decades. With more advanced instruments, this dynamic place could be studied and mapped.During the Victorian era, astronomers sketched the Martian surface and presented their drawings as fact, although the whims and biases of the mapmakers influenced their final products. In 1877, one of those maps captured international attention. As drawn by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, Mars had harshly delineated topography, with islands that erupted from dozens of canals, which he colored blue. Schiaparelli stuffed his map with detail, and instead of conforming to contemporary naming conventions, he labeled the exotic features on his version of the planet after places in Mediterranean mythologies. “That was a really massively bold statement to make,” says Maria Lane, a historical geographer at the University of New Mexico, “It’s basically him saying, I saw so much stuff that was so different from what anyone else had seen, I can’t even use the same names.”As a result, Lane says, Schiaparelli’s map was instantly authoritative. Scientific and popular opinion pronounced it a powerful representation of truth. Three decades of unconstrained Mars mania followed, and by the end, any reasonable person would be forgiven for believing intelligent Martians had built a planet-spanning network of canals. Much of that fervor can be linked directly to Percival Lowell, a quirky aristocrat with a serious Mars obsession. A wealthy Bostonian and Harvard University alum, Lowell had more than a passing interest in astronomy, and he was an avid reader of scientific and popular texts. Inspired in part by Schiaparelli’s maps, and believing that alien technology had crafted the Martian canals, Lowell raced to build a hilltop observatory before the autumn of 1894, when Mars would make a close approach to Earth and its fully sunlit face would be prime for observing those supposed canals.With the help of some friends and his family fortune, the Lowell Observatory emerged that year near Flagstaff, Arizona, on a steep bluff that the locals named Mars Hill. From there, among the conifers, he dutifully studied the red planet, waiting night after night for the shimmering world to come into focus. Based on his observations and sketches, Lowell not only thought he could confirm Schiaparelli’s maps, he believed he spotted an additional 116 canals. “The more you look through the eyepiece, the more you’re going to start seeing straight lines,” Cabrol says. “Because this is what the human brain does.”In Lowell’s estimation, the Martian canal builders were supremely intelligent beings capable of planetary-scale engineering, an alien race intent on surviving a devastating change in climate that forced them to build mammoth irrigation canals stretching from the poles to the equator. Lowell published his observations prodigiously, and his conviction was infectious. Even Nikola Tesla, the electric pioneer who famously sparred with rival inventor Thomas Edison, got caught up in the moment and reported detecting radio signals coming from Mars in the early 1900s.But Lowell’s story began to fall apart in 1907, in part because of a project he funded. That year, astronomers took thousands of photos of Mars through a telescope and shared them with the world. Planetary photography eventually replaced cartography as “truth,” Lane says. Once people could see for themselves how the photos and maps of Mars didn’t match, they no longer bought into the authority of Lowell’s maps. Still, by the turn of the 20th century, Mars had become a familiar neighbor with changing landscapes and the lingering promise of inhabitants. The next wave of observations revealed that seasonally, the Martian polar caps shrank and expanded, unleashing a swath of darkness that crawled toward the equator. Some scientists in the 1950s thought those shadowy areas had to be vegetation that flourished and died back, theories that made it into top-tier journals. All this scientific fervor fueled a trove of speculative fiction, from H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom serials to Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles.

During the American Civil War, military hospitals considered opioids to be essential medicine. Doctors and nurses used opium and morphine to treat soldiers’ pain, stop internal bleeding and mitigate vomiting and diarrhea caused by infectious diseases. However, this led some soldiers to develop opioid addictions, either during the war or afterward when they sought medical treatment for wartime injuries or illnesses.For many Civil War veterans, opioid addictions were life-ruining. Veterans’ dependency made them fatigued and emaciated, and could lead to a fatal overdose. In some cases, opioid addiction could threaten a veteran’s ability to receive a pension. In 1895, a Union veteran named Charles L. Williams stated in an application to a soldiers’ home that he was “totally unable to earn a living” since he had “contracted [the] opium habit during war.”By the time Williams applied to the soldiers’ home, the scope of the problem had grown beyond veterans: America was in the midst of its first major opioid crisis, fueled by the rise of injectable morphine that some doctors had begun administering during the Civil War. The specific plight of veterans helped draw attention to the issue, raising awareness among doctors and the general public about the dangers of opioid addiction.Opioid use has a long history in the United States. Before the Civil War, doctors commonly prescribed opium pills and laudanum, which was a mixture of opium and alcohol. These opiates, or natural opioids, were available in many drugstores without a prescription. When the war began, both the Union and the Confederacy considered it important to stock their hospitals with the drugs. A Confederate medical handbook advised that “Opium is the one indispensable drug on the battlefield important to the surgeon, as gunpowder to the ordnance.”In addition to opium and laudanum, some Union doctors also started using the hypodermic syringe, a relatively new invention, to inject another opioid-morphine-straight into soldiers’veins. These doctors “realized that this invention that hadn’t really been used very widely in the U.S. could now be a godsend in hospitals, because it delivers morphine immediately,” says Jonathan S. Jones, a history professor at Virginia Military Institute. Injectable morphine provided quicker relief than opium pills and laudanum, but was also more likely to lead to addiction.In addition to soldiers, Civil War doctors took opioids themselves to treat infectious diseases and deal with the stress of working in army hospitals, leading them to develop addictions before and after the war. A Union surgeon named J.M. Richards would later recall how he had developed chronic diarrhea during the war and “at last resorted to frequent doses of morphine as the only certain means of controlling the difficulty.”Notably, Black veterans mostly did not develop opioid addiction, owing to disparities in medical care provided to Black and white men. “Overall, Black soldiers were systematically denied the same quality of medical care that white soldiers were given,” Jones says. Doctors didn’t provide Black soldiers with the same level of opioids as white soldiers, who began to refer to their addiction—seemingly without irony—as “opium slavery.”When veterans returned home after the war, they continued taking opium and injectable morphine, which became much more accessible in the 1870s. “By the end of the 1870s, virtually every American physician had a hypodermic syringe,” says David T. Courtwright, a professor emeritus of history at the University of North Florida. “And by all accounts, that was the primary driver of the big increase in opiate addiction in the 1870s, 1880s and early 1890s.”Jones argues that the Civil War helped “mainstream” the use of the hypodermic syringe. Doctors who used it during the war taught their colleagues about injectable morphine, which led more doctors to prescribe it for veterans and other patients after the war. Companies took notice, and began selling injectable morphine straight to consumers.“You can get syringes and morphine easily; you could even buy them through the mail at Sears and Roebuck. the department store,” Jones says. The availability of injectable morphine led to a full-fledged opioid addiction crisis by the 1880s, and one of the groups that helped highlight this crisis were Civil War veterans, who had now been addicted for decades. Stories like these helped inform medical thinking about opioid addiction as a public health issue—one that the U.S. continues to struggle with today.

Directions: Please summarize this article in English in about 200 words, explaining why peatlands are useful and how they are being damaged. (1/1)At the southernmost tip of South America, in a region known as Tierra del Fuego (Land of Fire), the Andes mountain range and pristine blue lakes create one of the most sought-after destinations for adventure-seeking tourists. But it’s the unassuming, waterlogged peat fields at the base of these majestic mountains that are now garnering attention as an environmental powerhouse.Peat is the surface organic layer of a soil that consists of partially decomposed organic matter, derived mostly from plant material, which has accumulated under conditions of waterlogging, oxygen deficiency, high acidity and nutrient deficiency, and Tierra del Fuego’s peatland ecosystems are actually very busy: They provide habitat for wildlife and hold huge water reservoirs, as well as large stores of carbon. Peatlands, like those found in South America’s remote mountain wilderness, have the potential to fight climate change—or accelerate it if they’re disturbed. Compared to all other ecosystems combined, peatlands comprise the largest stores of terrestrial carbon. Despite occupying just 3 percent of the world’s land, they store more than 30 percent of global carbon, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Already, an estimated 5 percent of annual global emissions comes from drained peatland.While many of the peatlands in Tierra del Fuego remain pristine, they face a number of threats: proposed roads traversing the heavily touristed region; invasive animals such as beavers that dig holes through peat; and few legal protections to guarantee that they remain untouched by humans in the future. The largest of South America’s peat reserves-84 percent of the peatlands in Argentina-are found on a Tierra del Fuego peninsula called Peninsula Mitre. This year, Tierra del Fuego’s legislature will vote on a proposal to protect 926 square miles (2,400 square kilometers) of pristine peatland on the peninsula. Like many of the world’s wetlands, their unassuming nature can mean they struggle to garner attention as ecosystems worth saving. Fifty-one years ago today, a global treaty called the Convention on Wetlands was officially adopted to help fight for swamps, bogs, marshes, and other ecosystems that comprise wetlands. But from 1971 to 2021, an additional third of the world’s wetlands were lost. This year, World Wetlands Day, which commemorates the convention, is focused on action-committing financial, political, and human capital toward saving wetlands. “People generally think peatlands are bleak and horrible places to be. It’s windy. It quite often rains, but if you actually look at the vegetation, I would argue they are really beautiful as well,” says Renée Kerkvliet-Hermans, an expert on peatlands at the IUCN Peatland Program in the United Kingdom. Peatlands accumulate their peat very slowly, growing gradually over thousands of years. A study on one peatland in Borneo found it dated back 47,800 years. Bogs are famous for their ability to preserve ecological records of pollen, seeds, ancient pottery, and human bodies.Peat bog plants sequester and store large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere because they don’t entirely decompose in their wetland conditions. In the waterlogged conditions of a bog, oxygen and nutrients are low, and acidity is high. The undecomposed plant material sinks to the bottom, accumulating year-after-year. As more plant material accumulates, that gradual compression increases peat thickness and increases the carbon stored within it. Over thousands of years, it becomes a field of peatland, and over tens of millions of years, subjected to the right conditions, it may fossilize and become coal. “Coal originally started off as peat. Over a very long time of fossilization and pressure, it fossilized and became stone, but its origin is peat. That’s why it has so much carbon,” says Jack Rieley, a peatland ecologist and a vice president of the International Peatland Society.Like a tree storing carbon in its trunk over decades, peatlands contain densely packed stores of peat carbon submerged in wetlands. When peatlands degrade, either as a result of prolonged natural drought, or being drained to make way for agriculture, those tightly packed stores of carbon are suddenly released as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. “They can be really good for our climate but not when we degrade them,” says Kerkvliet-Hermans. “They emit more carbon than all our forests are sequestering in the U.K. That’s why we need to restore them urgently.”Increasingly, peatlands are being recognized as a powerful type of “nature-based” tool for fighting climate change. Along with managing forests and keeping soils healthy, keeping peatlands intact and restoring it where possible is one way environmental advocates say the world could mitigate climate change. Unlike towering forests or scenic meadows, peatlands’ perceived lack of charm means conserving and restoring them requires a public relations campaign. “They used to be seen as wastelands,” says Kervliet-Hermans. “In the 1980s people still had the view that we needed to drain them and plant them with trees to make use out of them.”Like many wetlands around the world, peatlands frequently have been drained of their water to make space for activities with more economic value, such as livestock grazing or oil palm plantations. In the past, many of the peatlands in North America and Europe were drained or burned for fuel. In southeast Asia, large swaths of tropical peatlands have been deforested, drained, and converted to plantations of lucrative oil palms. This large scale destruction has led to an increase in wildfires on degraded wetlands, a once rare disaster that now plagues Indonesia and neighboring countries yearly. The country, which holds over a third of the world’s tropical peat, is now undertaking a $3 to $7 billion restoration project to restore 2.5 million hectares of peatland forest. A study published last December in the journal Nature Communications found that if Indonesia’s restoration efforts had been completed six years ago, the country’s deadly 2015 fires would have produced 18 percent fewer carbon dioxide emissions. Vast stores of peatland in places like the Congo and the Amazon have recently been discovered and are vulnerable to exploitation. To develop them would be a dangerous mistake, says Rieley. “I always maintain, as a conservationist, you should try to keep what you have. It is always costly to bring it back. It’s a waste of time; it’s a waste of money,” he says. Bogs can take hundreds of years to form and bringing them back to life is a complicated and expensive task, not least because they’re often remotely located. One project to restore a peatland ecosystem in the U.K. cost $2.7 million to restore just over 4,000 acres. In Argentina, the peatlands in Tierra del Fuego are legally classified as minerals and so subject to potential mining, says Adriana Urciuolo, director of the Tierra del Fuego water resources office. “The main challenge,” says Urciuolo, “is the lack of knowledge and conscience of the community and governments about the value of peatlands. Because of this situation, private interests on peatlands as minerals for extractive use, usually prevails over conservation efforts.”

It’s unthinkable that more than 50 million people worldwide died from the 1918-1919 flu pandemic commonly known as the “Spanish Flu.” It was the deadliest global pandemic since the Black Death, and rare among flu viruses for striking down the young and healthy, often within days of exhibiting the first symptoms. In the United States, the 1918 flu pandemic lowered the average life expectancy by 12 years. What’s even more remarkable about the 1918 flu, say infectious disease experts, is that it never really went away. After infecting an estimated 500 million people worldwide (a third of the global population), the H1N1 strain that caused the Spanish flu receded into the background and stuck around as the regular seasonal flu. The virus was combated with the advent of the first seasonal flu vaccines after World War II, but every so often, direct descendants of the 1918 flu would combine with bird flu or swine flu to create powerful new pandemic strains, which is exactly what happened in 1957, 1968 and 2009. Those later flu outbreaks, all created in part by the 1918 virus, claimed millions of additional lives, earning the 1918 flu the odious title of “the mother of all pandemics.” Jeffrey Taubenberger was part of the pioneering scientific team that first isolated and sequenced the genome of the 1918 flu virus in the late 1990s. The painstaking process involved extracting viral RNA from autopsied lung samples taken from American soldiers who died from the 1918 flu, plus one diseased lung preserved in the Alaskan permafrost for nearly 100 years. Now chief of the Viral Pathogenesis and Evolution Section at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Taubenberger explains that genetic analyses of the 1918 flu indicate that it started as an avian flu and represented a completely new viral strain when it made the leap to humans shortly before 1918. Lab tests of the reconstructed 1918 virus show that in its original form, the virus’s novel encoded proteins made it 100 times more lethal in mice than today’s seasonal flu.The 1918 pandemic struck in three distinct waves over a 12-month period. It first appeared in the spring of 1918 in North America and Europe largely in the trenches of World War I, then reemerged in its deadliest form in the fall of 1918, killing tens of millions of people worldwide from September through November. The final wave swept across Australia, the United States and Europe in the late winter and spring of 1919. Since the whole world had been exposed to the virus, and had therefore developed natural immunity against it, the 1918 strain began to mutate and evolve in a process called “antigenic drift.” Slightly altered versions of the 1918 flu reemerged in the winters of 1919-1920 and 1920-1921, but they were far less deadly and nearly indistinguishable from the seasonal flu.But what’s truly incredible, according to genetic analyses, is that the same novel strain of flu first introduced in 1918 appears to be the direct ancestor of every seasonal and pandemic flu we’ve had over the past century. “You can still find the genetic traces of the 1918 virus in the seasonal flus that circulate today,” says Taubenberger. “Every single human infection with influenza A in the past 102 years is derived from that one introduction of the 1918 flu.” In a normal flu season, vaccine scientists can track the most active viral strains and produce a vaccine that protects against changes in the human flu virus from year to year. But every so often, viral genes from the animal kingdom enter the mix. “If one animal is infected with two different influenza viruses at the same time,” says Taubenberger, “maybe one virus from a bird and another from a human, those genes can mix and match to create a brand new virus that never existed before.” That’s what happened in 1957 when the 1918 flu, which is an H1N1 virus, swapped genes with another bird flu giving us the H2N2 pandemic, which claimed a million lives worldwide. It happened again in 1968 with the creation of the H3N2 virus that killed another million people.The so-called “Swine Flu” pandemic of 2009 has an even deeper backstory. When humans became infected with the 1918 pandemic flu, which was originally a bird flu, we also passed it on to pigs. One branch of the 1918 flu permanently adapted to pigs and became swine influenza that was seen in pigs in the US every year after 1918 and spread around the world. In 2009, a strain of swine flu swapped genes with both human influenza and avian influenza to create a new variety of H1N1 flu that was more like 1918 than had been seen in a long time. Around 300,000 people died from the 2009 flu pandemic.All told, if 50 to 100 million people died in the 1918 and 1919 pandemic, and tens of millions more have died in the ensuing century of seasonal flus and pandemic outbreaks, then all of those deaths can be attributed to the single and accidental emergence in humans of the very successful and stubborn 1918 virus.

More than 3,200 years ago, the Mediterranean and Near East were home to a flourishing and interconnected Bronze Age civilization fueled by lucrative trade in valuable metals and finished goods. The great kingdoms and empires of the day—including the Egyptians, Babylonians, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Hittites and more-had the technological know-how to build monumental palaces and employed scribes to keep records of their finances and military exploits.In a matter of decades, though, that thriving culture underwent a rapid and near-total collapse. After 1177 B.C., the survivors of this Bronze Age collapse were plunged into a centuries-long “Dark Ages” that saw the disappearance of some written languages and brought once-mighty kingdoms to their knees.But what kind of catastrophic event could have triggered such a sudden and sweeping downfall? It’s likely that the simultaneous demise of so many ancient civilizations wasn’t caused by a single event or disaster, but by a “perfect storm” of multiple stressors that toppled these interdependent kingdoms like dominos.Not unlike today, a truly “globalized” economy once existed in the Late Bronze Age in which multiple ancient civilizations depended on each other for raw materials especially copper and tin to produce bronze—and also trade goods made from ceramic, ivory and gold.One way to grasp the extent of this interconnectedness is through archeological finds like the 1320 B.C. Uluburun shipwreck of the coast of modern-day Turkey. Its contents include a dazzling array of luxury goods: carved ivory trinkets, gold and agate jewelry, and expensive raw materials from distant ports. Also on board were bulk shipments of copper and tin ingots in the typical ratio of 10 to 1, the recipe for making bronze, the strongest and most brilliant metal of its day. These materials were from Cyprus, Afghanistan, Greece, Egypt, and Lebanon, making the ship a good example of the international trade that was going on in the Late Bronze Age, both in raw materials and finished products. The traditional explanation for the sudden collapse of these powerful and interdependent civilizations was the arrival, at the turn of the 12th century B.C., of marauding invaders known collectively as the “Sea Peoples,” a term first coined by the 19th- century Egyptologist Emmanuel de Rougé. At Ugarit, a major port city in Canaan, the king wrote of unknown enemies who burned his cities and “did evil things in my country.” In Egypt, the pharaoh’s armies fought off two separate attacks from these mysterious foreigners, once in 1207 B.C. and again in 1177 B.C. A stunning relief on the walls of Ramses III’s temple at Medinet Habu depicts the second massive se battle, in which Egypt was finally victorious against the swarm of Sea Peoples. The true origins of the Sea Peoples are one of history’s great unsolved mysteries. One leading theory is that they emerged from the western Mediterranean—the Aegean Sea or as far as the Iberian Peninsula of modern Spain-and were driven East by drought and other climate disasters. Their ships invaded Mediterranean strongholds with women and children in tow, evidence that the Sea Peoples were both raiders and refugees.In 2014, researchers from Israel and Germany analyzed core samples taken from the Sea of Galilee and determined, using radiocarbon dating, that the period from 1250 to 1100 B.C. was the driest of the entire Bronze Age, what some scholars call a “mega-drought.”The Egyptians and Babylonians were spared the worst of the drought because of their proximity to mighty rivers like the Nile and the Tigris and Euphrates. But other civilizations weren’t so lucky. Where there’s drought, there’s famine. And Cline doesn’t believe it’s a coincidence that the worst famine years correspond with the invasion of the Sea Peoples, when desperate climate refugees would have been on the hunt for resources. The mega-drought wasn’t the only natural disaster that destabilized Late Bronze Age civilizations. Cline conducted research with the geophysicist Amos Nur which revealed that during the 50-year period from 1225 to 1175 B.C. the Mediterranean region was hit with a rapid-fire series of major earthquakes known as an “earthquake storm.”Ironically, the interconnectedness that had strengthened these Bronze Age kingdoms may have hastened their downfall. Once trade routes for tin and copper were disrupted and cities began to fall, it had a domino effect that resulted in a widespread system collapse. Among the casualties of the Late Bronze Age collapse was large-scale monument building and an entire system of writing called Linear B, an archaic form of Greek used by Mycenaean scribes to record economic transactions. Since only the top one percent were literate, they lost that ability after the collapse. Consequently, it took centuries for writing to return to Greece, only after the Phoenicians brought their alphabet. Not all civilizations were impacted equally. Some, like the Mycenaeans and Minoans, suffered a complete collapse. Same with the Hittites, who simply ceased to exist as a civilization. The Assyrians and the Egyptians were largely unaffected, while others showed resilience and either transformed or redefined themselves.

You do not need to believe in ghosts to enjoy a ghost story. The tales that have grown over generations around reputedly haunted places can take on a fantastic life of their own in folklore, and the stories that surround a place can influence our experiences of them. All it takes is a creepy place, a touch of imagination and a glimpse of something unexpected, only half seen. A prime example of this is the Waverly Sanatorium in Louisville, Kentucky. This grim, bat-winged building is the archetype of the haunted hospital or insane asylum. The first hospital on this windswept hill on the edge of Louisville was built in 1910 to treat victims of the “white plague” of tuberculosis that was ravaging the country. At the time, there was no known cure and the disease was often fatal. In some cases, doctors tried experimental methods to help ease the symptoms, and stories emerged of illicit medical experiments in which the cure often proved as fatal as the disease. Certainly the sanatorium was the scene of many deaths over the years, although claims that more than 60,000 patients died there are exaggerated, according to surviving records from the hospital. Historians say the real number was likely closer to 8,000, with a total of 152 deaths in 1945, the worst year of the epidemic.Waverly Hills served as a geriatric hospital from the 1960s until the 1980s, and several stories about the spooky old hospital are based on rumors from this time that patients were mistreated, including claims that radical treatments such as electroshock therapy were used. In the years since Waverly Hills was closed for good, wanderers, thrill-seekers and ghost hunters who found their way inside the building have told of slamming doors and strange noises in the deserted building.Others reported hearing footsteps and the screams of patients have from empty rooms. Ghostly, shadowy forms have been said to gather in the building’s dark recesses and are said to follow visitors through the narrow corridors. Phantom footsteps and voices reportedly echo along the “death tunnel,” or “body chute”—an underground tunnel that leads from the hospital to railway tracks at the bottom of the hill, to transport the dead away from the hospital where the living patients would not see them.Several stories center on the fifth floor of the hospital, where tuberculosis patients with mental disturbances were reportedly treated. In particular, Room 502, where two nurses are said to have killed themselves one by hanging, the other by jumping to her death—is said to be haunted. Some visitors claimed to have seen mysterious shapes moving in the windows, or to have heard voices telling them to “get out.”Geographical boundaries may extend far beyond a plot of land; in the case of Savannah, Georgia, the entire city seems rife with pockets of the paranormal. Home to dozens of celebrated haunted houses and hundreds of ghost sightings, Savannah is often called “the most haunted city in the United States”—especially by its many ghost tour operators, who often begin with a visit to the city’s historic Bonaventure Cemetery, a tangle of stone tombs, eerie statues and spooky trees laced with Spanish moss. Among the cemetery’s resident ghosts is that of Gracie Watson, a 6-year-old who died of pneumonia in1889. Her ghost is said to haunt the life-size statue that stands over her grave, which like several other funereal statues in the cemetery are sometimes said to move as if they were alive, while the sounds of children playing or crying is sometimes heard nearby.Just as celebrated, Savannah’s Hampton Lillybridge House was built in 1797 and was relocated to its current location several years later—despite the discovery of a mysterious crypt beneath the new property, which has never been opened. Since then, no fewer than 26 families who have lived in the house have complained of various ghostly goings—on that forced them to move out. These strange encounters included furniture moving around and doors locking themselves. However, the most famous haunted house in Savannah may be the Sorrel-Weed House, which appeared in the opening shots of the 1994 film “Forrest Gump,” directed by Robert Zemeckis. The Sorrel-Weed house is said to be haunted by at least two vengeful ghosts: the wife and the rival lover of shipping merchant Francis Sorrel, who built the house in the 1840s. Francis’ wife, Matilda Sorrel, allegedly jumped to her death when she discovered her husband’s infidelity—but historical researchers point out that by the time of her reported suicide in a “moment of lunacy,” the Sorrel family had moved out to another property next door.Lest you think a building is a requirement of a haunting, the field of Gettysburg may prove otherwise. The largest and deadliest battle of the American Civil War took place at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1863. More than 8,000 combatants were killed at Gettysburg, and in the years since the bloody battle, an uncommon number of ghost stories have been linked to events and personalities on the battlefield. Several visitors to what is now the Gettysburg National Military Park have reported hearing sounds of battle, including phantom cannon fire and the disembodied shouts or screams of ghostly soldiers.At a high, rocky outcrop on the battlefield called The Devil’s Den, where heavy fighting took place on the second day of the battle (July 2, 1836), several visitors over the years claim to have heard the sound of drum rolls and gunfire. Several ghost sightings have also been reported at the hill called Little Round Top, where Confederate troops were forced back from an assault on the Union forces. It has been claimed that some Civil War enactors who worked on the 1993 film “Gettysburg,” a dramatization of the battle, met and spoke with a man in a shabby Union Army uniform who gave them some musket rounds, which they assumed were movie props—but which they later learned were Civil War rounds in pristine condition.

A Cyborg Manifesto is an essay written by Donna Haraway in which the concept of the cyborg is a rejection of rigid boundaries, notably those separating “human” from “animal” and “human” from “machine”. She writes: “The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.” The Manifesto criticizes traditional notions of feminism, particularly feminist focuses on identity politics, and encouraging instead coalition through affinity. She uses the metaphor of a cyborg to urge feminists to move beyond the limitations of traditional gender, feminism, and politics. Marisa Olson summarized Haraway’s thoughts as a belief that there is no distinction between natural life and artificial man-made machines. Haraway begins the Manifesto by explaining three boundary breakdowns since the 20th century that have allowed for her hybrid, cyborg myth: the breakdown of boundaries between human and animal, animal-human and machine, and physical and non-physical. Evolution has blurred the lines between human and animal; 20th century machines have made ambiguous the lines between natural and artificial; and microelectronics and the political invisibility of cyborgs have confused the lines of physicality. Haraway highlights the problematic use and justification of Western traditions like patriarchy, colonialism, essentialism, and naturalism (among others). These traditions in turn allow for the problematic formations of taxonomies and what Haraway explains as antagonistic dualisms that order Western discourse. These dualisms, Haraway states, have all been systematic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature, workers, animals... all those constituted as others. However, high-tech culture provides a challenge to these antagonistic dualisms. Haraway’s cyborg theory rejects the notions of essentialism, proposing instead a chimeric, monstrous world of fusions between animal and machine. Cyborg theory relies on writing as “the technology of cyborgs”, as “cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism”. Instead, Haraway’s cyborg calls for a non-essentialized, material-semiotic metaphor capable of uniting diffuse political coalitions along the lines of affinity rather than identity. Following Lacanian feminists such as Luce Irigaray, Haraway’s work addresses the chasm between feminist discourses and the dominant language of Western patriarchy. As Haraway explains, “grammar is politics by other means,” and effective politics require speaking in the language of domination. As she details in a chart of the paradigmatic shifts from modern to postmodern epistemology within the Manifesto, the unified human subject of identity has shifted to the hybridized posthuman of technoscience, from “representation” to “simulation”, “bourgeois novel” to “science fiction”, “reproduction” to “replication”, and “white capitalist patriarchy” to “informatics of domination”. While Haraway’s “ironic dream of a common language” is inspired by Irigaray’s argument for a discourse other than patriarchy, she rejects Irigaray’s essentializing construction of woman-as-not-male to argue for a linguistic community of situated, partial knowledges in which no one is innocent. Although Haraway’s metaphor of the cyborg has been labelled as a post-gender statement, Haraway has clarified her stance on post-genderism in some interviews. She acknowledges that her argument in the Manifesto seeks to challenge the necessity for categorization of gender, but does not correlate this argument to post-genderism. She clarifies this distinction because post-genderism is often associated with the discourse of the utopian concept of being beyond masculinity and femininity. Haraway notes that gender constructs are still prevalent and meaningful, but are troublesome and should therefore be eliminated as categories for identity.1. According to the text, a cybernetic organism or cyborg must be understood as .2. Haraway poses that gender constructs should be eliminated as categories for identity because .3. According to Haraway manicheisms are in competition with one another, creating paradoxical relations of domination, particularly .4. The cyborg is a .5. A sonographic fetus would in many ways be the ultimate cyborg because .

It is a well-known hypothesis that newborns can immediately identify the smell of their mother’s amniotic fluid; other than this one potential exception, taste in fragrance can be thought of as nurtured in totality by experience and influence. There is, of course, an argument that nature intervenes to temper a subject’s agency by inducing unfavourable reactions to harmful and poisonous materials that causes a negative olfactory association, for example, the smell of rotten food becoming linked to the experience of food poisoning. However, in most cases the process of deciding bad from good smells is controlled by societal (parental) censorship and its converse—public appreciation. This logic is akin to the French philosopher Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation in relation to subjectivity and identity-making. For Althusser, human subjectivity (arguably comparable to consciousness itself) is a type of ideology. In Althusser’s view it is impossible to avoid the ideology of subjectivity and for this reason subjects are “always already interpellated”, even before they are born. Althusser’s philosophy essentially argues that one cannot see oneself outside of ideology and one’s identity is formed by mirroring oneself in the ideology already present. In relation to (olfactory) taste-making, this is significant as taste can be thought of as a subset of subjectivity and therefore choosing a fragrance is an interpellating activity that paradoxically both affirms and displaces a subject’s sense of free agency. The hail comes from marketing and emotive retail experiences; the ideology that of personal enhancement; the moment of interpellation taking place at the point of sale. There are, in my opinion, pertinent links to be made between interpellation and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s work on the mirror stage in infants. This is described by Lacan as the moment when a child sees themselves for the first time in a (conceptual) mirror, recognises themselves as the image in the mirror, and dissociates the belief in a fragmented body with a visual wholeness threatened by literal and metaphorical fragmentation (of their own body/of the replication of their body in the mirror), resulting in a tension between the physical body and the imaged body. It is also the moment when the child is able to apperceive—the concept of seeing oneself outside of oneself as an object. In an attempt to alleviate this tension, Lacan argues that the child then fully identifies itself with the image, and as a result the Ego is formed through visual means, resulting in a temporary cognitive jubilation in the baby’s apparent mastery over its own image. As Althusser, Lacan sees the ideology of subjectivity as a prerequisite of a developed consciousness. Once this has happened, further understanding of self-presentation and self-fashioning can begin that govern one’s own identity-formation for the rest of life. Although babies are aware of the fragrance stimuli around them at a young age, including the peculiarities of smells produced by them, I would argue that the moment of what I term mature olfactory apperception happens much later than other forms of practical self-awareness and tends to occur around puberty when issues of olfactory urgency arise around bodily changes. I am arguing that the recognition of one’s own scent in a conceptual olfactory mirror at that moment in life gives rise to a strong sense of olfactory hierarchy and cements involuntary links between ideology and perfume. It is no coincidence then that so many fragrance-lovers comment that their interest developed around their teens. To explicate the term further, it can be reasoned that recognition of the difference between personal and external smells in babies in relation to subjectivity is fairly limited, just as is the understanding of the imaged self before the mirror stage. However, given that Lacan argues that the Ego is initially formed through cognitive contradictions in image, the sense of sight is given immediate priority over the other senses, as the baby comprehends the significance of its own bodily image through its presence in social situations. However, the significance of its own smells is not a subject treated with as much codified authority and therefore little olfactory context is given to the subject. As one approaches puberty and begins to apperceive the idea of a personal whole scent as opposed to a fragmented olfactory reality scent is suddenly put into an important, codified, and relevant context—a context of “them, me, dirty, clean, sexual”. This is the moment of mature olfactory apperception.1. With the possible exception of an infant’s ability to identify the smell of the amniotic fluid, taste in fragrance is .2. Mature olfactory apperception is achieved at the moment of .3. Personal style and choice of a fragrance can be seen as .4. Apperception can be defined as the induction of the self as .5. According to the author, a teenager’s choice of perfume .

Chicago’s segregation of minorities is as old as the city itself. The African-American neighborhoods of today’s South and West sides are located in exactly the same parts of the city as the African-American neighborhoods of 1910. And from 1930 to today, these African America neighborhoods have been represented in Congress and in the state house by African-American politicians, who have done very little (other than pass Federal benefit programs) to lift African-Americans out of poverty. In the 2000 Census, for example, of the ten poorest census tracts in the entire United States, nine were located in the South and West Side African-American areas ruled by African-American congressmen Bobby Rush and Jesse Jackson Jr. The concept of Western Imperial Colonialism is very popular in the literature of racial exploitation. The continent of Africa was divided up into “colonies” by the major European Imperial powers in a very short period of time: just seven years, from 1885 to 1892. Previously, Britain had seized vast territories belonging to other cultures for hundreds of years. But in 20th century America a new type of colony was invented: American urban colonies in the large metropolitan areas from the Midwest and Northeast to Los Angeles. These were made possible by the Great Migration of African-Americans from the South to the North, which began during WWI. As they moved north, African-Americans were immediately confined to ghettoes defined by racial boundaries. No one doubts that this segregation was done intentionally. But it’s important to realize that this segregation was not created by the racist attitudes of the residents of Chicago (Chicago never had slaves) but by the ruling political elite. As soon as the African-American population of Chicago began to expand, the Great Depression hit and put many persons out of work. FDR’s response to this was to create the New Deal programs of welfare, food assistance, and subsidized housing. While this greatly helped unemployed persons of all races, for African-Americans it began the ghettoization of their people into what can only be called urban colonies in the large cities of the north. The pattern seen in the 20 largest cities of the United States from 1920 to 2010 is remarkably consistent. In 1920 19 of the twenty largest cities were all located in the North. All of these nineteen cities were from 92.5% to 99% white. The one exception was Baltimore, MD and that was 85% white. It had a slightly larger black population only because it was a port of entry for the slave trade. Similarly, all of these cities saw great increases in their black populations starting in 1920. By 1990 these cities were from 26 to 76% black. These cities did not lose whites because African-Americans moved in. Rather, it is more accurate to say that Americans are a highly migratory group, and the big cities were ports of entry for European immigrants. So as whites left, politicians wanted to maintain their population numbers. By the 2010 Census the cities with the highest black populations were Detroit, MI, which was 83% black, and Newark, NJ which was 52%. (Sources: Census paper No. 76 and Census 2010 Quickfacts). And since in all the major industrial cities of the North, the destinations of job-seeking African-American migrants were controlled by Democrats, it is overwhelmingly clear that these great pockets of urban poverty were created and maintained by that one political party. Tragically all of these cities have very high rates of segregation, poor education for African-Americans; high unemployment, single motherhood, and crime. In Chicago, “negro wards” as they were then called, were quickly drawn up: their boundaries reflected (and promoted) the racial segregation of the time. Their political representatives were African-American, and they were expected to deliver votes to the Democratic Party. Most Americans don’t know that Chicago is the center for black politics. Furthermore, since Lincoln freed the slaves, African-Americans in Chicago voted for Republicans, until a Democratic Mayor, Anton Cermak, took over; fired all the thousands of African-Americans who Republicans had given city government jobs, and took over the black vote. Since that time Chicago’s African-Americans have been represented exclusively by black politicians, and always lived in poverty. What made the black submachine of Chicago possible was that Chicago already had in place a Democratic Machine. Exploitation is promulgated by urban Democrats as a way to manipulate residents and keep themselves in power. What makes the American Urban Colonialism plan so revolutionary and ingenious is that it does not rely on agreements with foreign governments; the market price of iron ore, or cotton for profits; but on Federal benefit programs. These program dollars are infinitely more reliable and politically stable.1. According to the essay, American cities lost white residents due to .2. The essays convincingly demonstrates that .3. The Democratic Machine in Chicago provides incentives in the form of .4. Obama moved to Chicago because .5. According to the author, American urban colonialism is the result of .

In the 1960s and ’70s of the last unlamented century, there was a New York television producer named David Susskind. He was commercially successful; he was also, surprisingly, a man of strong political views which he knew how to present so tactfully that networks were often unaware of just what he was getting away with on their—our—air. Politically, he liked to get strong-minded guests to sit with him at a round table in a ratty building at the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street. Sooner or later, just about everyone of interest appeared on his program. Needless to say, he also had time for Vivien Leigh to discuss her recent divorce from Laurence Olivier, which summoned forth the mysterious cry from the former Scarlett O’Hara, “I am deeply sorry for any woman who was not married to Larry Olivier.” Since this took in several billion ladies (not to mention those gentlemen who might have offered to fill, as it were, the breach), Leigh caused a proper stir, as did the ballerina Alicia Markova, who gently assured us that “a Markova comes only once every hundred years or so.”I suspect it was the dim lighting on the set that invited such naked truths. David watched his pennies. I don’t recall how, or when, we began our “States of the Union” programs. But we did them year after year. I would follow whoever happened to be president, and I’d correct his “real” State of the Union with one of my own, improvising from questions that David would prepare. I was a political pundit because in a 1960 race for the House of Representatives (upstate New York), I got more votes than the head of the ticket, JFK; in 1962, I turned down the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate on the sensible ground that it was not winnable; I also had a pretty good memory in those days, now a-jangle with warning bells as I try to recall the national debt or, more poignantly, where I last saw my glasses.I’ve just come across my “State of the Union” as of 1972. In 1972, I begin: “According to the polls, our second principal concern today is the breakdown of law and order.” (What, I wonder, was the first? Let’s hope it was the pointless, seven-year—at that point—war in Southeast Asia.) I noted that to those die-hard conservatives, “law and order” is usually a code phrase meaning “get the blacks”. While, to what anorexic, vacant-eyed blonde women on TV now describe as the “liberal elite,” we were pushing the careful—that is, slow—elimination of poverty. But then, I say very mildly, we have only one political party in the United States, the Property Party, with two right wings, Republican and Democrat. Since I tended to speak to conservative audiences in such civilized places as Medford, Oregon; Parkersburg, West Virginia; and Longview, Washington, there are, predictably, a few gasps at this rejection of so much received opinion. There are also quite a few nods from interested citizens who find it difficult at election time to tell the parties apart. Was it in pristine Medford that I actually saw the nodding Ralph Nader whom I was, to his horror, to run for President that year in Esquire? Inspired by the nods, I start to geld the lily, as the late Sam Goldwyn used to say. The Republicans are often more doctrinaire than the Democrats, who are willing to make small—very small—adjustments where the poor and black are concerned while giving aid and comfort to the anti-imperialists.1. We may understand Alicia Markova to be .2. In the passage, the author reminds the reader that the broadcast bands are .3. The author now finds it difficult to .4. The author observes that anti-crime initiatives by America’s political right often either result in or are based upon .5. The author was invited to participate in Susskind’s television programs because .

Perhaps no branch of legal scholarship has enjoyed greater influence during the last half century than the economic analysis of the law. Although its conceptual kernel can be traced at least to the English jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the field of law and economics did not hit full stride until the 1960s. This timing is no coincidence, arriving on the heels of the legal realism movement, which had made a serious case that law was not an independent discipline, but rather an institutional intersection of disparate and competing social forces, ideas, and agendas. This realist criticism set the stage for constructive and interpretative theories of law emanating from external disciplines (including economics). What is coincidental, however, is that economics was simultaneously undergoing its own transformation, form a largely philosophical discourse to an elegant mathematical approach for analyzing social and private ordering. Energized by this intellectual transformation, economic-minded scholars (particularly at the University of Chicago) soon began to seek out institutional applications for this methodology. Law proved an inviting target.Most law and economics analysis falls into one of two subspecies: (a) positive theory, which uses economic analysis to explain observed social behavior, or to predict (for example) how behavior will respond to a change in legal regime; and (b) normative theory, which evaluates the social desirability of observed behavior or predicted changes thereto. Positive theories are the simplest, yet still depend on some core assumptions about individual behavior. Most central: they posit that individuals respond to economic incentives in systematic and predictable ways. This assumption—known generally as “rationality”—maintains that individuals behave as if they were attempting to maximize their happiness, or “utility”. As long as one’s underlying preferences are sufficiently well behaved, the argument goes, a mathematical “utility function” exists that faithfully embodies those preferences. When a collection of rational individuals interact with one another, the predicted outcome that results is called “equilibrium”.Normative theories go a step further, explicitly evaluating which equilibrium outcome (or collection thereof) is socially most desirable. To make this assessment, the theorist must provide a method for aggregating and comparing individuals’ welfare. A number of methods are possible here, ranging from the relatively weak notion of Pareto efficiency (ranking as efficient all outcomes that cannot be altered to increase someone’s utility without reducing someone else’s) to the stronger notion of Kaldor-Hicks efficiency (identifying efficient outcome as those for which there exists no alternative that, when compared, confers greater monetized benefits on winners that it does on losers). Although most tractable notions of efficiency require one to compare individual utilities, Kenneth Arrow’s “impossibility theorem” has demonstrated that it is frequently (though no always) impossible to make such comparison coherently without also being dictatorial, Consequently, normative theorists frequently must wield their conclusion with measured caution.1. The significance of the Theory of Law and Economics strives in .2. The passage discusses that social and private ordering .3. Methodology is important in Law and Economics because .4. Positive theory can be described as .5. Normative theories predicates .

Puerto Rico is usually thought of as a tourism destination or is usually invisible in the U.S. media. In recent times, its fiscal and economic crisis has led to show up in the business pages of the mainstream media with inaccurate comparisions with Detroit or Greece whose fiscal crisis had attracted much media attention. As usual, the mainstream press looks at the illness without looking at the root causes. And the comparisons are usually risky because they tend to ignore history and the nuances of each case. Unfortunately for Puerto Rico, its fuzzy political relationship with the United States is always described with euphemisms by the supporters of the governing Popular Democratic Praty (“Commonwealth”) in order to avoid the undeniable truth. The basic problem of the Puerto Rico model is the failure of its economic system to provide the revenue to pay for services. While in the early stages of what was called “Operation Bootstrap” there was a closing of the gap in wages between Puerto Rico and the United States. But after the 1970s the gap began to expand. Part of the reason was the decline in unionization rates, and the decline in the economic development efforts which led to less revenues going to the government coffers. Since the 1970s, they began to rely on debt to pay for basic public services and to pay for previous debt. This is a chaotic situation given that the public debt of Puerto Rico is $71 billion dollars or 102 per cent of the island’s GNP the highest of any state in the U.S. The debt income ratio is 83 per cent almost 14 times the same measure as New York, California or Illinois. In order to obtain some revenue from these newly incorporated “controlled foreign corporations” the colonial government instituted Law 154 to tax these corporations at a rat eof 4 per cent, in an industry that has become addicted to low taxes this measure has not been received well. In 2012 the government received $1.8 billion dollars from this measure. A local economist Argeo Quiñones has argued that instead of this tax the government should legislate to increase the backward linkages of these enterprises. In other words to provide incentives so that they buy a higher percentage of their industrial inputs to infuse more money into the economy and further increase employment. Because of the reliance on local tax exemptions, “controlled foreign corporations” are not subject to federal taxes and at times they sell their intellectual rights (like Microsoft USA) to their local foreign owned subsidiary (since Puerto Rico is foreign for tax purposes) and are able to save billions of dollar in the sales in the U.S. market. The Congress Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (October12, 2012), chaired by Senator Max Baucus found that: “In 2011, this corporate sleight of hand enabled Microsoft USA to shift 47 cent of every dollar in U.S. sales totaling $6 billion, to its Puerto Rican subsidiary, dodging payments of U.S. taxes on nearly half of its U.S. sales income.” In the meantime, foreign corporations in Puerto Rico, predominantly from the U.S. repatriated $33 billion in profits in 2012. It is also good for drug traffickers, Puerto Rico is a trans-shipment point for drugs into the United States that brought in $5 billion in drug trafficking activity in Puerto Rico in 2011. Rcccntly, in 2012 the regular election included a referendum on Puerto Rico’s status. The referendum had two parts, one in which people had to choose whether they were satisfied with the present “territorial status” status, given the long term efforts to improve it the results of this vote were not a surprise. 54 per cent of the voters chose that they were not satisfied with the present colonial status. In the second part of the referendum people were given three choices, but the present status of “commonwealth” was not included. The purpose was to disperse the pro-commonwealth vote and highlight the pro-statehood vote. However, in protest for the language of the ballot the PPD asked its supporters to leave the ballots blank. In this round, while statehood received the highest percentage of the votes 44.4 per cent it is the lowest pro-statehood vote since 1998 and 1993. When the blank votes are added to the rest 54.7 per cent of voter rejected statehood. But in sum, these results have confused the issue for congress and while the Obama administration approved funding for another plebiscite and another bill is in Congress to ask voter “Yes or No” on statehood no reasonable observer expects any clear result from these efforts. Especially when the General Accounting Office (GAO) in March released a study where the consequences of statehood for Puerto Rico will be dismal, what remains of the manufacturing sector will leave and what will be left is a population dependent on federal subsidies. Puerto Ricans need a clear path toward the resolution of their political status. This will have dire consequences for all, Puerto Rico and the United States.1. The essay about Puerto Rico is mainly about .2. The main mode of analysis used by the author is .3. The blank votes in the ballot came mainly from .4. The body of “controlled foreign corporations” is composed of .5. The fuzzy descriptions of the relationship between Puerto Rico and the U.S.A. are a euphemism for its status as a .

The UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), to be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 4-6 June 2012, offers an extraordinary and unique opportunity to reset the world on a sustainable development path. Despite substantial improvements over the past 20 years in many key areas of sustainable development, the world is not on track to achieve the goals as aspired to in Agenda 21, adopted in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and reiterated in subsequent world conferences, such as the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg in 2002. While there have been some achievements in implementing Agenda 21, including the implementation of the chapters on “Science for Sustainable Development” and on “Promoting Education, Public Awareness & Training”, for which UNESCO was designated as the lead agency, much still remains to be done. Increasing disparities, inequalities and social inequity, growing deterioration of the environment and resources, as well as concurrent energy, food and financial crises, reflect the inadequacy of the world’s current development paradigm. No development model which leaves a billion people in hunger, poverty and socially excluded will be sustainable. Rio+20 must underpin a broader, longer-term process of redressing imbalances, a rethinking of priorities, and the necessary institutional reforms to bring about coherence in economic, environmental and social policies, which benefits all members of society.Charting the way forward in a sustainable manner must start by recognizing that the world has changed in fundamental ways, with shifts in demographic growth, resource consumption, production patterns, climate change, and increasing natural and human-induced disasters. There has been much technological progress, from renewable energy to new vehicles for social dialogue, such as social media. Achievements have been made in attaining a number of the Millenum Development Goals (MDGs) and Education for All (EFA) goals. All of this has profound implications for UNESCO and its activities.Green societies are educated societies in all of its dimensions. Investing in education is crucial for achieving sustainable development, poverty eradication, equity and inclusiveness. Education holds the key to productivity and sustainable growth, improves health and nutrition, income, and livelihoods, creating a condition for achieving all of the MDGs and the EFA goals. No country has ever climbed the human development ladder without steady investment in education.A second critical factor is the quality of education. Years of schooling alone do not guarantee that students will receive an education relevant for their lives and careers. Quality—that is the content of the education provided, the excellence of teachers, actual attainments and achievements—matters as much as quantity. There is a positive feedback loop between education and innovation as a prime mover of sustainable growth in green economies, where innovation, green skills and the capacity to cope with change will be significant drivers of each economic sector. Education is a sound investment; quality education is a smart investment for building inclusive, green societies.Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is a particularly important dimension of quality education. It provides people at all levels of education, but in particular youth, with the skills, competencies and knowledge needed to impart values indispensable for behavior and practices conducive to sustainable development, and for multicultural and multi-ethnic societies aspiring to democratic citizenship. It is fundamental for preparing young people for green jobs, for adapting to a changing physical environment, and for changing unsustainable consumption and production patterns. ESD must be strengthened and promoted at all levels and in all educational settings throughout life. This calls for mainstreaming education for sustainable development comprehensively into relevant national education policies and practices. It equally calls for developing effective mechanisms to link green growth labor market objectives to educational programs, particularly through technical and vocational education and training. It entails reforming formal, informal and nonformal education systems so as to prepare young men and women for a green labor market and to retrain the existing workforce.1. The UN Conference on Sustainable Development offers an extraordinary and unique opportunity to .2. The writer argues that Rio+20 must .3. When the writer argues that “charting the way forward in a sustainable manner must start by recognizing that the world has changed in fundamental ways, with shifts in demographic growth” the writer means that .4. According to the writer, education .5. According to the writer, education is important because .

Multiple levels of synergy exist between bicycling, health, and social equality. Transportation infrastructure and policy in most countries elevates the social status of motorists over bicyclists and pedestrians. Through such policy, the status syndrome (inequality as a direct risk factor for ill health) is related to the world obesity epidemic and to low self-esteem and social stigmatization of those who walk, ride mass transit, and use the bicycle for transportation. Programs which promote bicycling have the ability to help reverse these negative health and social trends. Such programs are more successful in boosting cycling, health, and social equality when one of the program goals is the elevation of the cyclist to equal status and privilege as the motorist. Because the effects of inequality on health have profound consequences for all humanity, transportation planners, policy makers and infrastructure developers must adopt as a priority, the goal of promoting status equality in every policy and project.A 1999 World Health Organization study of mobility concluded “Exercise levels, social contact, and access to services in children, the elderly, the ill, and the poor is inversely related to the societal level of motor vehicle usage in all countries.” In 2006, Transportation Alternatives (TA) in New York published a study showing that people who live on streets with heavy traffic go outdoors less often and have fewer friends than those living on quieter streets. The study, “Traffic’s Human Toll” reveals that high volume vehicular traffic has profoundly negative impacts on the lives and perceptions of residents who live near it. The study concluded that, “Compared to their neighborhood counterparts living on streets with low traffic volumes, residents living on higher volume streets: harbor more negative perceptions of their block; possess fewer relationships with their neighbors; are more frequently interrupted during sleep, meals, and conversations; spend less time walking, shopping and playing with their children.”A 1995 study of social contact in San Francisco third graders showed that, on average, those living on streets with light traffic had three times as many friends and twice as many acquaintances as those living on streets with heavy traffic.The recently identified Nature Deficit Disorder is a failure to develop a sense of connectedness with nature resulting from lack of meaningful experience of natural areas. This disorder develops in children who are constantly indoors or in motor vehicles. Children who are deprived of contact with nature begin to show deficits in motor and social skills as early as age five. The disorder was starkly demonstrated in a study by Marco Huttenmoser of Zurich in which 6 and 7 year-old children were asked to draw pictures of their daily trips to school. Those who walk or bicycle to school drew pictures rich with color and included a variety of plants, animals and people encountered in their journeys. Their classmates who are driven to school tended to draw images with little color and devoid of details about anything but the vehicle, the road, and the buildings of origin and destination.Through the status syndrome, motorists adversely affect the health of other modal users. This effect constitutes an externalization to society of the cost of motoring which has not been fully recognized or subjected to economic analysis. The costs of motoring not fully paid by motorists themselves have, therefore, been underestimated by economists. This externalization of cost must be accounted for in future economic analyses of transportation impacts the perception of transportation mode status by individuals has largely become internalized and automatic. Transportation programs which elevate the status of pedestrians, bicyclists and transit users to equality or superiority with respect to motorists will help change this perception and should result in more rapid adoption of alternative transportation modes than programs which ignore status effects or which seek to change status perception by education or marketing approaches not accompanied by real and demonstrative changes in the system hierarchy. By lowering motor vehicle usage, these programs will serve to decrease the health impacts of both the status syndrome and the other adverse effects of transportation inequality mentioned above. Transportation equality is clearly a vital matter of health and social justice.1. What does the writer mean by “synergy” between “bicycling, health, and social equality”?2. “Social Stigmazation” of people who walk, ride mass transit, and use the bicycle for transportation refers to .3. The main thesis of the article is that planners must .4. Studies have found that people who own motor vehicles .5. By “externalization to society of the cost of motoring” the writer argues that .

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