Chapter 1. prod_chap_3_feb05

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Howie Chackowicz

Radio Story

In this audio piece, recorded for Chicago Public Media’s popular radio program This American Life, Howie Chackowicz recalls the irrational and amusing methods he unsuccessfully employed as a child to win girls’ hearts. Listen to Chackowicz’s story, and then respond to the questions that follow.

View transcript.

“The Game Ain’t Over ’til the Fatso Man Sings,” by Howard Chackowicz from WBEZ Chicago’s This American Life, episode #188: Kid Logic.

Source: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/188/kid-logic?act52#play

Meaning

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Multiple Editors

Photo Essay

On its maiden voyage from Southampton, United Kingdom, to New York, United States, in April 1912, the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg off Newfoundland and sank within three hours, killing more than 1,500 people. Approximately 700 passengers and crewmembers were rescued. Seventy-three years later, in 1985, the wreck was discovered lying two and a half miles beneath the Atlantic’s surface, by a U.S.-French team led by Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Many explorers and scientists have visited the Titanic since, including filmmaker James Cameron. Click through the photos to observe scenes of the luxurious ocean liner, then and now, and then answer the questions below.

Meaning

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Tiana Chavez

Video

Tiana Chavez interviews athletes from Arizona State University about their pregame superstitions. Watch the video below, and then answer the questions that follow.

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The State Press, Arizona State University

Source: http://www.statepress.com/2012/03/15/asu-athletes-discuss-superstitions/

Meaning

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National Geographic

Photo Essay

National Geographic compiled a series of images showing how New Orleans has recovered since the immediate impact of Hurricane Katrina, which hit the area in 2005. Click through the slideshow to view all of the pictures and read the accompanying text, and then answer the questions that follow.

Meaning

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Total DUI

Infographic

Drawing on information from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and other sources, this infographic uses science to explain how overconsumption of alcohol impairs driving abilities. View the infographic, and then respond to the questions that follow.

Meaning

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UNICEF

Video

In 2009, UNICEF’s Tap Project bottled the water that millions of people drink worldwide and “sold” it from a Dirty Water vending machine. This campaign garnered media attention and raised money to help people access clean, safe water. Watch the video that documents the project, and then respond to the questions that follow.

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Casanova-Pendrill

Source: http://thepositivechangeproject.org/unicefs-amazing-dirty-water-campaign/

Meaning

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Casey Neistat

Video

Videographer Casey Neistat explores the dangers of texting while walking before proposing a solution. Click on the image below to watch this comical video, and then respond to the questions that follow.

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Casey Neistat

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/video/2012/01/08/opinion/100000001269189/texting-while-walking.html

Meaning

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Consumer Reports Editors

Video

Consumer Reports is a nonprofit organization dedicated to reviewing products ranging from cars to pancakes. Click the image below to watch this review, and then respond to the questions that follow.

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“Best Buttermilk Pancakes” Copyright 2012 Consumers Union of U.S., Inc. Yonkers, NY 10703-1057, a nonprofit organization.
Reprinted with permission from ConsumerReports.org for educational purposes only.
www.ConsumerReports.org.

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlLUbO19nTI

Meaning

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Cary Tennis

Advice Column

Cary Tennis writes an advice column on Salon.com called “Since You Asked.” In this selection, Tennis advises a woman who feels that her obsession with celebrity culture is making her unproductive. Read the column, and then respond to the critical reading questions that follow.

Dear Cary,

1

Every day I find myself logging on to a variety of Web sites—People.com, eonline.com, Salon.com's the Fix—to gobble up all forms of celebrity gossip. I spend hours on imdb.com figuring out which celebrities were born closest to my birthday (Billy Crudup, Robert Rodriguez) or discovering that both Debra Messing and Cate Blanchett named their sons Roman. After awards shows, I go to site after site to relive the dresses, the hairstyles, the snippets of gossip from the red carpet and the after parties.

2

It struck me that this was a problem again last night, when I read that Laura Dern and Ben Harper got married, then proceeded to Google them to death to find photos of them doing mundane things like walking with their baby down the street. They seem like cool people, but could I possibly care about the minutiae of their lives? And what about the hours I handed over to that endeavor?

3

I’ve always been fascinated with celebrities, but the fascination was for years limited to magazine browsing in line at the grocery store. Even then, I knew it was odd that I could tell you the names of Demi Moore’s daughters (Rumer, Scout, and Tallulah) without a pause. But lately, fueled by the whole-house wireless my news junkie partner installed, it seems I can’t get enough.

4

I might not worry about this if I weren’t worried about other elements of my life. My stunted creativity, for example. I’m a writer, but for years I haven’t finished things that weren’t on a specific work-related deadline. My own writing, though I sit down to it regularly, is shrinking. I’ve published a book of poems, been nominated for a Pushcart, taught creativity to both kids and adults. All this is past tense. I feel I’m getting less and less creative. It’s harder to tap into the free-form spill that leads me into a poem, harder to wiggle into the voice that makes a story rise above the rote. I’m in one of those jobs that is too good to leave, too bad to stay. I drive to work fantasizing about quitting. I walk into my cubicle and I slump. On my days off and in the early morning, I work on my own pieces up to a point, and then I file them away. I read about why Renée Zellweger always wears Carolina Herrera.

5

Is this as simple as mere avoidance, distraction? Other things in my life are good. I’m in a happy partnership, have a relatively nourishing home life. I have good friends. The sun shines a lot where I live. My garden has fresh herbs.

6

I turn to you because you are so gifted at seeing beyond the obvious, at teasing out the nuanced reasons for the choices we make. I know that I can unplug the Internet, talk with my therapist, go cold turkey. I’m more interested in what lies beneath. Unlocking this seems the key to changing it. What is the metaphor here? What questions should I be asking? What might I be hungering for? I just read a story about a couple who searched for a year and a half for an apartment in Brooklyn with the right fireplace, and the moment they saw it, bought a studio with a mantel tiled with undulating dogwood carvings. They fell for a fireplace. There’s something noble in that hunger. An update on Kirsten Dunst’s hair extensions? Not so noble. Can you help me see my way out of this, Cary?

Signed,

Too Many Stars in My Eyes

Dear Too Many Stars,

7

I see celebrities as gods and goddesses. A strong interest in their betrothals and betrayals, their binges and fasts, their tragedies, to me indicates an interest in the world of magical characters. It is at root a spiritual quest, closely allied with our thirst for literature. The reason we are so obsessed by celebrities today, I figure, is that there is nowhere else in our culture with such rich and readily accessible tales of such magical and entrancing variety.

8

For instance, the lead item in the Fix today, as I’m writing, is this: “Gwyneth Paltrow has enlisted a rabbi from the Kabbalah Center to exorcise the ghosts from the five-bedroom London townhouse she shares with Coldplay frontman Chris Martin and their 19-month-old daughter, Apple. ‘Gwyneth believes that the dark energy that has dogged her lately is due to something dark and unexplained in her home,’ a source told Daily Mail. ‘Her pregnancy is not as peaceful as her last one and she has also been upset by a stalker.’ “

9

Isn’t that wild? (Note that she, as a vessel, holds our crazy beliefs so we don’t have to.)

10

I would argue that gods and goddesses are only useful to us in our lives if they are not regarded consciously as gods and goddesses—only if they are regarded as real. I would suggest that we cannot possibly regard the gods and goddesses of another age and culture the way members of that culture themselves regarded their gods and goddesses. I figure that the ancient Greeks and Romans regarded their gods and goddesses much as we regard our film stars. The minute we become conscious of worship, the worship dies. It loses its magical power. We become self-conscious. So the obsession with celebrities is an act of primitive cultural innocence.

11

We have a pantheon of amazing figures; we are swimming in it; we are living in a magical world. It is natural for us to be transfixed by these characters because we are thirsty for magic. We are not satisfied with our earthly existence, nor should we be. We are humans and humans hunger for the divine. Our religions have failed us, our philosophies have failed us, our government has failed us, and our writers have…well, nevermind. You get what I’m saying: Embrace celebrity worship! Do not be ashamed! It is a real hunger that you are feeding!

12

I would suggest that you build on your interest in celebrities in several ways. For one thing, try to understand your particular responses to particular celebrities in terms of your own interests and struggles. What do your likes and dislikes of various celebrities say about you as a person, your aspirations, your secret hopes, your values? Expand on this. Perhaps you could keep a journal or a scrapbook. Perhaps you could embark on something akin to fan fiction, using the gods and goddesses of our media world as characters in tales of your own creation. Or perhaps, using readily available video software, you could create movies of your own with digital images of stars found on the Internet. If you are a writer and feel your interest is taking you away from writing, I would suggest bringing your writing to bear on your interest.

13

As for me, I also have a private pantheon of characters about whom I feel deeply, but they are boring and embarrassing. For instance, my secret sorrow lately has been the disappearance of Aaron Brown from CNN. I find his being supplanted by the crass young “360” man quite disappointing; I found him at first, as I said in an e-mail to a colleague back when Brown started, a little unctuous. But after a time I came to enjoy Brown’s avuncular style. Primarily what I enjoyed was his judgment—the professional sifting and sorting of stories. This was an appreciation mostly of craft, of how someone works; but then I am a fairly work-centered person. I also liked the fact that Aaron Brown was not trying to make me feel anything (this is very telling about me). I resent the attempts of newspeople to make me feel. I do not want to be made to feel—especially by newspeople. I feel plenty already. I am not deficient in feeling. I am deficient in understanding. I grit my teeth every time Anderson Cooper comes on the screen. I resent him. I wish he would go away. I wish him a bad fate of some sort, I’m not sure what—perhaps that he would fall into the mud. If I were a child playing with little figures of newspeople, I think I would make Anderson Cooper fall in the mud and have to crawl around in it. That probably says a lot about my primitive drives and fears, perhaps more than I would like to know.

14

What do I like on television? I like History Channel World War II stuff with bombs and fighter planes. I like stuff like “What if the moon disappeared?” Because at heart, I’m a little comic-book science boy, fascinated by strange tales of the earth! (This is a clue to my mythic life.) Frankly, all those celebrities remind me of the pain of being an outsider in high school. I feel more comfortable identifying with grim scientists.

15

So it’s interesting for me to think about this in relation to my own life. And it’s interesting to note, as I consider it, how strongly I feel about these things! Aaron Brown’s departure was a genuine personal loss, about which I might have written an essay if I did not fear seeming foolish. Or, more precisely, if I did not fear parading my personal feelings without any kind of argument to back them up. It was just a personal thing.

16

Point being, it’s interesting and instructive to ask ourselves what we like about celebrities. It tells us more about ourselves than perhaps we would like to know. So if I were you, rather than fighting your interest in celebrity lives, I would try to build on it, take it to a deeper level, make an art of it. Especially since you are a writer: Your subject is right in front of you. What is the meaning of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt? What are her special powers? What does she represent? I do not know, but you probably do.

“Why am I Obsessed with Celebrity Gossip?” This article first appeared in Salon.com, at http://www.Salon.com. An online version remains in the Salon archives. Reprinted with permission.

Source: http://www.salon.com/2006/01/06/celebrities_3/

Meaning

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Karen Sternheimer

Video

Karen Sternheimer is a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California. Her book, Celebrity Culture and the American Dream: Stardom and Social Mobility (2011), explores how celebrity culture reflects society as a whole. In this video, Sternheimer discusses how our obsession with celebrities’ relationships reveals our anxieties about marriage. Click the image below to watch the video, and then respond to the questions that follow.

View Transcript.

Karen Sternheimer

Source: http://www.ncsociology.org/sociationtoday/v101/dead.htm

Meaning

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Tom Ashbrook and Ty Burr

Audio Interview

Tom Ashbrook is the host of the National Public Radio show On Point. In this brief excerpt from the show, Ashbrook interviews Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr, about the idea behind his book Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame (2012). Listen to the excerpt, and then answer the questions that follow.

View Transcript.

On Point with Tom Ashbrook is a Production of WBUR, Boston and is distributed by NPR.

Source: http://onpoint.wbur.org/2012/10/05/the-strange-power-of-celebrity

Meaning

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Timothy J. Bertoni and Patrick D. Nolan

Academic Paper

Timothy J. Bertoni and Patrick D. Nolan are sociologists at the University of South Carolina. In their academic research study, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Sociation Today, Bertoni and Nolan use data collected from New York Times obituaries ranging from 1850 to 2000 to test their hypothesis that our society has become more secular and hedonistic. This excerpt presents the authors’ sources in APA documentation style, which is commonly used in sociology and other social sciences. To view the authors’ full analysis and the charts compiling their data, visit the original source. Read the excerpt, and then respond to the critical reading questions that follow.

1

Although the specific names will vary, everyone can recite from memory a list of famous or infamous figures from the past—Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Sir Isaac Newton, Madame Curie, Galileo, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell—people whose names live on because of the notable achievements or discoveries they made. But we also recall others such as P.T. Barnum, Sally Rand, Annie Oakley, and “Buffalo Bill” Cody, people known largely for their “celebrity.” This raises the question: Have we always been obsessed with celebrity and celebrities, or is this a product of the increased disposable income and leisure afforded by advancing industrial technology? To address this question, we develop a quantitative measure of the cultural attention directed toward celebrities and achievers, and use it to explore trends across the 20th Century.

2

Advancing industrialization has produced concomitant trends of increasing technological productivity and declining rates of population growth. Together they have produced a more than thirteen-fold growth in real per capita wealth and income in the United States since 1870 (Nolan & Lenski, 2009, p. 219). Anecdotally, this increasing income “surplus” appears to have enabled the population to shift its attention away from issues of survival and subsistence and toward leisure, entertainment, and amusement—more secular “hedonistic” pursuits. At the same time, science, technology, and secular ideologies have greatly undermined and eroded the influence of theistic religions (Nolan & Lenski, 2009, p. 237).

3

Increasing per capita wealth and increasing leisure time have offered the opportunity for more people to indulge in more hedonistic urges and pursuits, and, this, in turn, has created a growing number of occupations that cater to these pursuits. We believe that, together, these trends may have fundamentally transformed American culture.

4

If they have, we would expect this transformation to manifest itself in observable “collective representations” (e.g., Durkheim, 1895/1982), and, a reasonable place to look for evidence of this is in the popular mass media, more specifically, editorially-chosen and prominently-featured published obituaries. If the cultural importance of secular hedonism has increased, we would expect that there would be a concomitant increase in the relative proportion of “celebrity,” (e.g., athletes, actors, entertainers) and a decline in religious (e.g., clergy) and “producer” (e.g., scientists, industrialists, and inventors) obituaries. Such a trend (social fact) would reflect either a shift in the editorial judgment of the press, since featured obituaries reflect editors’ twin judgments of the individual’s “importance” and of the potential reader interest in them, a shift in the relative numbers of people employed in these occupational categories, or some combination of the two.

5

The pursuit of pleasure, hedonism, has unquestionably been an aspect of all human societies. But its form, direction, and scale have varied greatly. Art history suggests that religious art, music, and ceremony dominated entertainment in the middles ages, while secular activities predominate in advanced industrial societies today. This shift is not simply a shift in individual tastes, but an institutional shift organized around a growing market economy, political liberty, and slowing population growth. In our opinion, the growing prominence of, and attention directed toward, entertainers, actors, and star athletes is merely a collective representation of this underlying socio-cultural change.

6

We hypothesize, therefore, that with advancing industrialization and the growing economic surplus it produces, there will be a growing proportion of obituaries for secular hedonistic occupations and a declining proportion of obituaries of religious, scientific, and industrial figures. We will test our hypothesis with data obtained from The New York Times—”The Newspaper of Record.”

Measures and Methods

7

We will test our arguments with three sets of hypotheses. The first hypothesis in each set is the “weaker” form, which merely posits proportional changes in the obituaries of people in certain occupational categories. The second is the “stronger” form, which posits, further, that the change is greater than the change in the relative numbers of people employed in such occupations. Thus, support for the second would imply that the change is the result of greater (or lesser) importance and attention being accorded to the activity/occupational category, not simply changes in the relative number of people employed in them.

Hypotheses:

8

Data to test the hypotheses were gathered from The New York Times obituaries and Statistical Abstracts of the United States. We first briefly review a special feature on “notable deaths” in 1852 (published in January of 1853), and then sample obituaries for the years 1900, 1925, 1950, 1975, and 2000. Since the U.S. is argued to have crossed the industrial threshold about 1870 (Nolan & Lenski, 2009, p. 197), we have a snapshot of the state of affairs in a late pre-industrial phase and a systematic sample of changes across succeeding phases/degrees of industrialization. By tracing the distributions of obits over time, it may be possible to trace the state of these social facts through this period.…

[Eds. Note: To review the authors’ analysis of the data and view charts that compile the results, go to the original source.]

To Summarize

9

H1a is strongly supported. Celebrity obits increase in all years, reaching 28 percent in 2000, the largest percentage for any category in all times examined.

10

H1b is strongly supported. The increasing prominence of celebrity obits clearly outpaces changes in employment—with the lagged ratio reaching nearly 28, and the contemporaneous ratio, more than 31! By far, the most striking and consistent trend in the focal occupational categories is the increase in the ratios for the celebrity occupations.

11

H2a is substantially supported. After increasing modestly from 1900 to 1950, religious obituaries plummet to zero in 2000, the only occupational category, in any year, to have zero obits.

12

H2b is substantially supported. Religious obituaries, highly overrepresented in 1925 and 1950, drop substantially in 1975, and as noted above are zero in 2000.

13

H3a receives some support. Manufacturing obituaries peak in 1950, but by the end the century are only a third of the level they were at its beginning. Business and finance obituaries basically hold steady (or increase slightly) from 1900 through 1975, but then drop substantially in 2000.

14

H3b receives mixed support. Greatly underrepresented overall, the trend in contemporaneous and lagged ratios for manufacturing and industry is essentially flat, while both ratios for business and finance steadily and substantially decreased across the time period examined.

Discussion

15

These results show substantial support for our predictions. Most striking are the concomitant increases in celebrity, and declines in religious obituaries, documenting the increasing secularization and hedonism of American culture, together with its shift away from concern with issues of subsistence. The magnitude of these trends is seismic. While the Greeks may have looked to their gods for guidance and entertainment, we turn increasingly to our celebrities—entertainers and athletes.

16

As a result, the power of celebrities has also dramatically increased. As Mills (1956/2000, p. 4) wrote, “If such celebrities are not at the head of any dominating hierarchy, they do often have the power to distract the attention of the public or afford sensations to the masses, or, more directly, to gain the ear of those who do occupy positions of direct power.” Additional evidence of celebrities gaining access to power are the notable careers of Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the influence of U2’s Bono and Oprah Winfrey, just to name a few. The author Alan Schroeder (2004) details more of these relationships of celebrities with political power in his book Celebrity-In-Chief. These elites with their increasing influence, and public attention, have filled the vacuum created by the declining influence of (theistic) religious elites and other institutions. In the process, “factoids,” “sound bites,” “infotainment,” and “arguing heads” have blurred the line between news (information) and entertainment and replaced reasoned debate (to the extent it existed anywhere outside our imagination) with noise and distraction....

17

Finally, it has been suggested that an alternative explanation for rising hedonism, as we have measured it here, is that hedonism is just being “outsourced.” Hedonism itself is not on the rise; rather, individuals, instead of producing their own music, art, and films, are now buying it on a market and thereby are creating and financing entertainment and sports celebrities. There is undoubtedly some truth to this, however the spectacular increases in more personalized, individual hedonistic activities and paraphernalia (e.g., YouTube, Facebook, Wii, podcasting, blogging, “flashmobs”) suggest that consideration of this dimension further might only serve to magnify the trends observed here, for these venues and technologies of self-entertainment were not available in the past, even for the wealthiest and most privileged members of society. Their very existence, thus, further supports our argument.

18

In advanced industrial societies more people are able to purchase secular pleasures and thus sustain a vast and differentiated secular hedonistic industry. More people are more engaged in pursuing a greater variety and volume of entertainment and are less concerned with issues of subsistence and mere survival. Hedonism has been discussed by thoughtful people as early as ancient Greece, where it received its name. But in the past, it has been viewed largely a matter of individual choice. While we do not reject the importance of such micro level processes, in this study we have taken a more macroscopic view, taking seriously Durkheim’s (1895/1982) argument that social facts have an external objective reality. Our findings of increasing celebrity, and declining religious and producer, obituaries document a macro-social trend of increasing hedonism and declining religiosity, at least in one advanced industrial society. As we noted above, we believe our argument differs dramatically from the secularization thesis so strongly critiqued by Stark (1999), but should he, or others, disagree, the evidence presented here would suggest that reports of its death are greatly exaggerated.

References

Durkheim, E. (1982). The rules of sociological method. (S. Lukes, Ed.; W. D. Halls, Trans.) New York, NY: Free Press. (Original work published 1895)

Mills, C. W. (2000). The power elite. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1956)

Nolan, P. & Lenski, G. (2009). Human societies: An introduction to macrosociology. (10th ed.). Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Nolan, P. & Lenski, G. (2009). Studying human societies: A primer and guide: A student study guide. (10th ed.). Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Schroeder, A. (2004). Celebrity-in-chief: How show business took over the White House. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Stark, R. (1999). “Secularization, R.I.P.” Sociology of Religion, 60, 249-273.

Stark, R. (2011). The triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus movement became the world’s largest religion. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/dpB005C6IJZA

Reprinted by permission of Sociation Today.

Source: http://www.ncsociology.org/sociationtoday/v101/dead.htm

Meaning

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Shannon Kintner

Photo Essay and Article

This photo essay provides a glimpse into the life of Charlie, a five-year-old boy diagnosed with non-severe autism. Click through the slideshow to view all of the pictures, read the accompanying student newspaper article, and then respond to the critical reading questions that follow.

1

“You go bye-bye?” says Charlie Minto, 5, to Kari Hughes, a behavioral therapist. Charlie was diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified (in lay terms, non-severe autism) in October of this past year. He receives in-home behavior therapy five days a week. When he’s finished with it and ready for playtime, he doesn’t keep it to himself.

2

“No, Charlie, it’s not time for me to go yet,” Hughes responds. In one year, however, Charlie might be saying “bye-bye” to his therapists forever.

3

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the guidelines used to diagnose different types of disorders, will be released in its fifth edition in May 2013 with its first set of revisions in seventeen years. While the changes are not yet complete, the proposed new definition of autism may be more rigorous than the current one. Many families are worried that, due to the revised wording of the definition, their loved ones will lose the diagnosis, and with it, their services through state, school, and insurance companies.

4

Mindy Minto, Charlie’s mother, worries that the costs for the behavioral, occupational, and speech therapies that Charlie needs will be prohibitive. “My fear is that he won’t get the help he needs and that he won’t…be the Charlie that he can be, he won’t rise to his full potential. And that’s concerning.”

Meaning

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Frank Deford

Audio

Frank Deford has been a journalist at Sports Illustrated for over fifty years. Also a regular contributor to National Public Radio, Deford has been selected U.S. Sportswriter of the Year six times and earned an Emmy for his coverage of the Seoul Olympics in 1988. In this audio piece, which originally aired on Deford’s NPR segment Sweetness and Light, Deford explores our culpability in the intersection of football and head injuries. Click below to listen to the selection, and then respond to the questions that follow.

View transcript.

©2012 National Public Radio, Inc. Audio from news commentary by Frank Deford was originally broadcast on NPR's Morning Edition on May 9, 2012, and is used with permission of NPR. Any unauthorized duplication is strictly prohibited.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2012/05/09/152250525/mind-games-football-and-head-injuries

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Brian Hurst

Infographic

In 2015, GOOD, described as a “magazine for the global citizen,” partnered with the insurance company Progressive to produce Data for GOOD, analyses of statistics and other research aimed at answering such questions as, Does our infrastructure influence our safety? and How have design and technology innovations really transformed us? Drawing on data from devices that monitor driving behavior as well as from other sources, this Data for GOOD infographic explains how aggressive driving has a negative impact on the environment. View the infographic, and then respond to the questions that follow.

Meaning

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Consumer Reports Web Editors

Video

Consumer Reports is a nonprofit organization dedicated to reviewing products ranging from cars to ice cream. Click the image below to watch this review, and then respond to the questions that follow.

View transcript.

"Best Vanilla Ice Cream" From Consumer Reports, © 2014 Consumers Union. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.

Source: consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2014/06/best-vanilla-ice-cream/index.htm

Meaning