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.

Which of the following assumptions must a reader share with Carlson for her argument to be successful?

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2. 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.

How does Carlson use testimony as evidence for her point?

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

It is not ideal to leave a national problem to the states, but because of the general squeamishness about federal “papers” in the Congress, Durbin’s proposal—congressional oversight of state DMVs— may be the best way to go. And if the government doesn’t act, corporations will. Delta and American Airlines already provide separate lines for premium passengers; Heathrow Airport in London has an iris scan for people who have registered their eyeballs. An airline-industry association is at work on a Trusted Traveler card. Do we really want frequent-flyer status to be the basis for security decisions, or more plastic cards joining the too many we already have?

This ID would require one virtual strip search instead of many real ones. Durbin says the card would remove the anonymity of a Mohamed Atta but not the privacy of others. With a card, Dingell could have confirmed his identity (though he made a point of not pulling rank). With the presumption that he wasn’t a terrorist, a once-over with a wand—with his pants on—would have lent credence to his claim that he possessed an artificial hip, not a gun. The Durbin card would at least let us travel with our clothes on.

Work Cited:

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

What overall claim does Carlson make?

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

In the blockbuster movie The March of the Penguins, the emperor penguins were portrayed as fairy parents, loving every egg they laid and mourning every egg that cracked before its time. Among the less storied royal penguins, a mother lays two eggs each breeding season, the second 60 percent larger than the first. Just before the second egg is laid, the mother unsentimentally rolls the first egg right out of the nest.

In Magellanic penguins, the mother also lays two eggs and allows both to hatch; only then does she begin to discriminate. Of the fish she brings to the nest, she gives 90 percent to the larger chick, even as the smaller one howls for food. In the pitiless cold of the Southern Cone of South America, the underfed bird invariably dies.

Work Cited:

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

In this passage, Angier is offering counterarguments--opposite viewpoints—to the portrayal of penguin parenting in The March of the Penguins. Which of the following is not a counterargument that Angier explains?

Question

5. Which of the following fallacies occurs in the bolded first paragraph of the following passage from “One thing They Aren’t: Maternal”?

What is wrong with these coldhearted mothers, to give life then carelessly toss it away? Are they freaks or diseased or unnatural? Cackling mad like Piper Laurie in Carrie?

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.

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.”

At first, such jobs may seem right out of the Founding Fathers’ educational manual for how to bring up self-reliant, work-ethic-driven, productive youngsters. But in fact, these jobs undermine school attendance and involvement, impart few skills that will be useful in later life, and simultaneously skew the values of teen-agers — especially their ideas about the worth of a dollar…

…The hours are often long. Among those 14 to 17, a third of fast-food employees (including some school dropouts) labor more than 30 hours per week, according to the Charper-Fraser study. Only 20 percent work 15 hours or less. The rest: between 15 to 30 hours.

Often the stores close late, and after closing one must clean up and tally up. In affluent Montgomery County, Md., where child labor would not seem to be a widespread economic necessity, 24 percent of the seniors at one high school in 1985 worked as much as five to seven days a week; 27 percent, three to five. There is just no way such amounts of work will not interfere with school work, especially homework. In an informal survey published in the most recent yearbook of the high school, 58 percent of the seniors acknowledged that their jobs interfere with their school work.

Work Cited:

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

Which of the following sentences provides evidence for the author’s claim that jobs undermine school attendance and involvement?

Question

7. 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.

Etzioni’s point is that teen jobs don’t help them develop career skills. Which of the following counterarguments does the author acknowledge? That is, which statements from an opposite viewpoint does the author address?

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

Nowadays, since the porn industry has become a multimillion dollar business, visual technology has been employed in its service. Pornographic movies are skillfully filmed and edited, pornographic still shots using the newest tenets of good design artfully grace the covers of Hustler, Penthouse, and Playboy, and the public — and the courts — are sadly confused… .

…Justice William O. Douglas wrote in his dissent to the Miller case that no one is “compelled to look.” This is hardly true. To buy a paper at the corner newsstand is to subject oneself to a forcible immersion in pornography, to be demeaned by an array of dehumanized, chopped-up parts of the female anatomy, packaged like cuts of meat at the supermarket. I happen to like my body and I work hard at the gym to keep it in good shape, but I am embarrassed for my body and for the bodies of all women when I see the fragmented parts of us so frivolously, and so flagrantly, displayed.

Work Cited:

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

Which of the following statements provides evidence for the author’s claim that “[t]o buy a paper at the corner newsstand is to subject oneself to a forcible immersion in pornography”?

Question

9. 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.

What claim does the author make?

Question

10. Read the following passage from Hardin’s article, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” about the ways ownership and responsibility differ with shared property.

While this last solution [refusing to help] clearly offers the only means of our survival, it is morally abhorrent to many people. Some say they feel guilty about their good luck. My reply is simple: “Get out and yield your place to others.” This may solve the problem of the guilt-ridden person’s conscience, but it does not change the ethics of the lifeboat. The needy person to whom the guilt-ridden person yields his place will not himself feel guilty about his good luck. If he did, he would not climb aboard. The net result of conscience-stricken people giving up their unjustly held seats is the elimination of that sort of conscience from the lifeboat.

Work Cited:

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

Which of the following statements does not follow from Hardin’s perspective on the role of guilt in the ethics of the life boat?

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