1. Read the following passage from “The Case for a National ID Card.”

After representative John Dingell was asked to drop his pants at Washington’s National Airport last week, some people felt safer. Others, like me, decided that we’d lost our collective minds. A near strip search of a 75-year-old Congressman whose artificial hip has set off a metal detector—while suspected al-Qaeda operative Richard Reid slips onto a Paris-to-Miami flight with a bomb in his shoe—isn’t making us safer. It’s making us ridiculous for entrusting our security to an unskilled police force that must make split-second decisions on the basis of incomplete data.

Incidents like this—and airport waits longer than the flight itself—have pushed me into the camp of the national ID card. Yes, a tamperproof ID smacks of Big Brother and Nazis intoning “Your papers, please,” but the Federal Government already holds a trove of data on each of us. And it’s less likely to mess up or misuse it than the credit-card companies or the Internet fraudsters, who have just as much data if not more. (Two years ago, for a Time article, I ordered dinner for 30 entirely online, and I am still plagued by vendors who know I like my wine French and my ham honey-baked.)

The idea of a national ID card leaped into the headlines just after Sept. 11. Oracle chairman Larry Ellison offered to donate the pertinent software. Ellison went to see Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was noncommittal despite his obvious enthusiasm for expanding government powers into other areas that trouble civil libertarians.

Work Cited:

Carlson, Margaret. “The Case for a National ID Card.” TIME. 14 Jan. 2002.

What claim does Margaret Carlson make in this passage?

Question

2. Read the following passage from “The Case for a National ID Card.”

After representative John Dingell was asked to drop his pants at Washington’s National Airport last week, some people felt safer. Others, like me, decided that we’d lost our collective minds. A near strip search of a 75-year-old Congressman whose artificial hip has set off a metal detector—while suspected al-Qaeda operative Richard Reid slips onto a Paris-to-Miami flight with a bomb in his shoe—isn’t making us safer. It’s making us ridiculous for entrusting our security to an unskilled police force that must make split-second decisions on the basis of incomplete data.

Incidents like this—and airport waits longer than the flight itself—have pushed me into the camp of the national ID card. Yes, a tamperproof ID smacks of Big Brother and Nazis intoning “Your papers, please,” but the Federal Government already holds a trove of data on each of us. And it’s less likely to mess up or misuse it than the credit-card companies or the Internet fraudsters, who have just as much data if not more. (Two years ago, for a Time article, I ordered dinner for 30 entirely online, and I am still plagued by vendors who know I like my wine French and my ham honey-baked.)

The idea of a national ID card leaped into the headlines just after Sept. 11. Oracle chairman Larry Ellison offered to donate the pertinent software. Ellison went to see Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was noncommittal despite his obvious enthusiasm for expanding government powers into other areas that trouble civil libertarians.

Work Cited:

Carlson, Margaret. “The Case for a National ID Card.” TIME. 14 Jan. 2002.

Which of the following sentences from Carlson’s essay provides evidence for the central point or thesis of her argument?

Question

3. Read the following passage from “The Case for a National ID Card.”

Enter Richard Durbin. In concert with the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (yes, the dreaded DMVs have their own trade group), the Illinois Senator is proposing legislation that would create a uniform standard for the country’s 200 million state-administered driver’s licenses. Durbin noticed that the driver’s license has become “the most widely used personal ID in the country. If you can produce one, we assume you’re legitimate,” he says. At present, nearly anyone can get a license; 13 of the 19 hijackers did. Having those licenses “gave the terrorists cover to mingle in American society without being detected.”

Since we’re using the driver’s license as a de facto national ID, Durbin argues, let’s make it more reliable. As it stands, the chief requirement is that one knows how to drive. This is fine if the only intent is to ensure that someone behind the wheel has mastered turn signals, but it shouldn’t be sufficient to get someone into a federal building, the Olympics or an airplane. All a terrorist needs to do is shop around for a lax state (Florida still doesn’t require proof of permanent residency) or resort to a forger with a glue gun and laminator.

A high-tech, hard-to-forge driver’s license could become a national E-ZPass, a way for a law-abiding citizen to move faster through the roadblocks of post–9/11 life. It’s no digitalized Supercard, but the states would have uniform standards, using bar codes and biometrics (a unique characteristic, like a palm print) and could cross-check and get information from other law-enforcement agencies. Polls show 70% of Americans support an even more stringent ID. But Japanese-American members of Congress and Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta are keenly sensitive to anything that might single out one nationality. Yet an ID card offers prospects of less profiling. By accurately identifying those who are in the U.S. legally and not on a terrorist watch list, the card would reduce the temptation to go after random members of specific groups.

Work Cited:

Carlson, Margaret. “The Case for A National ID Card.” TIME. 14 Jan. 2002.

Which of the following is a stated assumption in the passage?

Question

4. Read the following passage from “One Thing They Aren’t: Maternal.”

In a word — ha. As much as we may like to believe that mother animals are designed to nurture and protect their young, to fight to the death, if need be, to keep their offspring alive, in fact, nature abounds with mothers that defy the standard maternal script in a raft of macabre ways. There are mothers that zestily eat their young and mothers that drink their young’s blood. Mothers that pit one young against the other in a fight to the death and mothers that raise one set of their babies on the flesh of their siblings….

…Researchers long viewed infanticide and similar acts of maternal skullduggery as pathological, a result of the mother’s being under extreme stress. A farmer’s child pokes around in a rabbit’s nest, for example, and the mother rabbit responds by methodically consuming every one of her eight baby bunnies. By standard reckoning, it made little genetic sense for a mother to destroy her young, and maternal nurturing was assumed to be a hard-wired affair.

More recently, scientists have accrued abundant evidence that “bad” mothering is common in nature and that it is often a centerpiece of the reproductive game plan.

Work Cited:

Angier, Natalie. “One Thing They Aren’t: Maternal.” The New York Times. 9 May 2006. Web.

Which of the following statements is not related to the author’s central claim?

Question

5. In the passage below, Angier explains the flaws in the assumption that mothers would be nurturing unless under extreme stress. What kind of fallacy is the belief that mothers should be nurturing?

Researchers long viewed infanticide and similar acts of maternal skullduggery as pathological, a result of the mother’s being under extreme stress. A farmer’s child pokes around in a rabbit’s nest, for example, and the mother rabbit responds by methodically consuming every one of her eight baby bunnies. By standard reckoning, it made little genetic sense for a mother to destroy her young, and maternal nurturing was assumed to be a hard-wired affair.

More recently, scientists have accrued abundant evidence that “bad” mothering is common in nature and that it is often a centerpiece of the reproductive game plan.

Work Cited:

Angier, Natalie. “One thing They Aren’t: Maternal.” The New York Times. 9 May 2006. Web.

Question

6. Read the following passage from “Working at McDonald’s.”

Far from providing opportunities for entrepreneurship (the lemonade stand) or self- discipline, self-supervision, and self-scheduling (the paper route), most teen jobs these days are highly structured — what social scientists call “highly routinized.”

True, you still have to have the gumption to get yourself over to the hamburger stand, but once you don the prescribed uniform, your task is spelled out in minute detail. The franchise prescribes the shape of the coffee cups; the weight, size, shape, and color of the patties; and the texture of the napkins (if any). Fresh coffee is to be made every eight minutes. And so on. There is no room for initiative, creativity, or even elementary rearrangements. These are breeding grounds for robots working for yesterday’s assembly lines, not tomorrow’s high-tech posts.

Work Cited:

Etzioni, Amitai. “Working at McDonald’s.” The Miami Herald. 24 Aug. 1986. Web.

Which of the following sentences is NOT evidence in support of the author’s claim that fast food jobs are too structured to help employees develop initiative?

Question

7. Read the following passage from “Working at McDonald’s.”

The pay, oddly, is the part of the teen work-world that is most difficult to evaluate. The lemonade stand or paper route money was for your allowance. In the old days, apprentices learning a trade from a master contributed most, if not all of their income to their parents’ household. Today, the teen pay may be low by adult standards, but it is often, especially in the middle class, spent largely or wholly by the teens. That is, the youngsters live free at home (“after all, they are high school kids”) and are left with very substantial sums of money.

Where this money goes is not quite clear. Some use it to support themselves, especially among the poor. More middle-class kids set some money aside to help pay for college, or save it for a major purchase — often a car. But large amounts seem to flow to pay for an early introduction into the most trite aspects of American consumerism: Flimsy punk clothes, trinkets, and whatever else is the last fast-moving teen craze.

One may say that this is only fair and square; they are being good American consumers and spend their money on what turns them on. At least, a cynic might add, these funds do not go into illicit drugs and booze. On the other hand, an educator might bemoan that these young, yet unformed individuals, so early in life are driven to buy objects of no intrinsic educational, cultural, or social merit, learn so quickly the dubious merit of keeping up with the Joneses in ever-changing fads, promoted by mass merchandising.

Work Cited

Etzioni, Amitai. “Working at McDonald’s.” The Miami Herald. 24 Aug. 1986. Web.

Etzioni analyzes whether teens’ spending habits are good or bad through multiple perspectives or counterarguments. Which of the following counterarguments most closely resembles the author’s perspective?

Question

8. Read the following passage from “Let’s Put Pornography Back in the Closet.”

The Hollywood Ten were correct in claiming the First Amendment. Its high purpose is the protection of unpopular ideas and political dissent. In the dark, cold days of the 1950s, few civil libertarians were willing to declare themselves First Amendment absolutists. But in the brighter, though frantic, days of the 1960s, the principle of protecting unpopular political speech was gradually strengthened.

It is fair to say now that the battle has largely been won. Even the American Nazi party has found itself the beneficiary of the dedicated, tireless work of the American Civil Liberties Union. But — and please notice the quotation marks coming up — “To equate the free and robust exchange of ideas and political debate with commercial exploitation of obscene material demeans the grand conception of the First Amendment and its high purposes in the historic struggle for freedom. It is a misuse of the great guarantees of free speech and free press.”

Work Cited:

Brownmiller, Susan. “Let’s Put Pornography Back in the Closet.” Newsday. 1979. Print.

Which of the following sentences provides the best evidence for the author’s claim that the fight to strengthen “the principle of protecting unpopular political speech” has been won?

Question

9. Read the following passage from “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor.”

So here we sit, say fifty people in our lifeboat. To be generous, let us assume it has room for ten more, making a total capacity of sixty. Suppose the fifty of us in the lifeboat see 100 others swimming in the water outside, begging for admission to our boat or for handouts. We have several options: We may be tempted to try to live by the Christian ideal of being “our brother’s keeper,” or by the Marxist ideal of “to each according to his needs.” Since the needs of all in the water are the same, and since they can all be seen as “our brothers,” we could take them all into our boat, making a total of 150 in a boat designed for sixty. The boat swamps, everyone drowns. Complete justice, complete catastrophe.

Work Cited:

Hardin, Garrett. “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor.” Psychology Today. Sept. 1974. Web.

What claim does the author make?

Question

10. Read the following passage from “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor.”

The fundamental error of spaceship ethics, and the sharing it requires, is that it leads to what I call “the tragedy of the commons.” Under a system of private property, the men who own property recognize their responsibility to care for it, for if they don’t they will eventually suffer. A farmer, for instance, will allow no more cattle in a pasture than its carrying capacity justifies. If he overloads it, erosion sets in, weeds take over, and he loses the use of the pasture.

If a pasture becomes a commons open to all, the right of each to use it may not be matched by a corresponding responsibility to protect it. Asking everyone to use it with discretion will hardly do, for the considerate herdsman who refrains from overloading the commons suffers more than a selfish one who says his needs are greater. If everyone would restrain himself, all would be well; but it takes only one less than everyone to ruin a system of voluntary restraint. In a crowded world of less than perfect human beings, mutual ruin is inevitable if there are no controls. This is the tragedy of the commons.

Work Cited:

Hardin, Garrett. “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor.” Psychology Today. Sept. 1974. Web.

Which of the following assumptions must a reader share with the author in order for the reader to find the argument effective?

Question