1. Read the following passage from “Spring Cleaning Our Lives” by Ellen Goodman:

From time to time, from spring to spring, we would talk about retrieving whole rooms from their musty existence as museum hall and storage company. But like an annual resolution to lose weight and shape up, our good intentions would disappear behind closed doors.

Work Cited

Goodman, Ellen. “Spring Cleaning Our Lives.” SF Gate. 13 Apr. 2002.

Goodman states, “But like an annual resolution to lose weight and shape up, our good intentions would disappear behind closed doors.” This quotation is an example of which of the following patterns of organization?

Question

2. The following paragraphs from Ellen Goodman’s article are organized primarily around which pattern of organization?

I suppose the fault was largely mine. I belong to a family of packrats. I grew up in a home where rubber bands were saved on doorknobs for a rainy day, although what we would do with those bands when it rained was unclear. My aunt next door has a collection of plastic ice cream containers that date back to the invention of plastic.

My husband, on the other hand, has been nicknamed the human Zamboni. He would weed a garden with a backhoe if you gave him half a chance. His idea of cleaning out the house was to hire a dumpster and slowly tip the attic into it.

Work Cited

Goodman, Ellen. “Spring Cleaning Our Lives.” SF Gate. 13 Apr. 2002.

Question

3. What is the organizational pattern for the following passage?

GENERALIZED ANXIETY DISORDER

As some 1 in 75 people with panic disorder know, anxiety may at times suddenly escalate into a terrifying panic attack—a minutes-long episode of intense fear that something horrible is about to happen to them. Heart palpitations, shortness of breath, choking sensations, trembling, or dizziness typically accompany the panic. The experience is unpredictable and so frightening that the sufferer often comes to fear the fear itself and to avoid situations where panic has struck. Agoraphobia is fear or avoidance of situations in which escape or help might not be available when panic strikes. Given such fear, people may avoid being outside the home, being in a crowd, or traveling in a plane or train or on an elevator.

PHOBIAS

Phobias focus anxiety on some specific object, activity, or situation. Phobias—irrational fears that disrupt behavior—are a common psychological disorder that people often accept and live with. Some specific phobias are incapacitating, however…

Other people suffer from irrational fears of specific animals or insects, or of such things as heights, blood, or tunnels. Sometimes it is possible to avoid the fear-arousing stimulus: One can hide during thunderstorms or avoid high places. With a social phobia, an intense fear of being scrutinized by others, the anxious person will avoid potentially embarrassing social situations. The person may avoid speaking up, eating out, or going to parties—or will sweat, tremble, or have diarrhea when doing so. Compared with the other disorders discussed in this chapter, phobias appear at a younger age—often by the early teens.

OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER

As with generalized anxiety and phobias, we can see aspects of our own behavior in the obsessive-compulsive disorder. We may at times be obsessed with senseless or offensive thoughts that will not go away. Or we may engage in compulsive, rigid behavior— rechecking a locked door, stepping over cracks in the sidewalk, or lining up our books and pencils “just so” before studying.

Obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors cross the fine line between normality and disorder when they become so persistent that they interfere with the way we live or when they cause distress. Checking to see that the door is locked is normal; checking the door 10 times is not. Hand washing is normal; hand washing so often that one’s skin becomes raw is not. At some time during their lives, often during their late teens or twenties, 2 or 3 percent of people cross that line from normal preoccupations and fussiness to debilitating disorder. The obsessive thoughts become so haunting, the compulsive rituals so senselessly time-consuming, that effective functioning becomes impossible.

Work Cited:

Myers, David G. Psychology. New York: Worth, 2004. Print.

Question

4. According to the passage below, what was the original cause of the Great Sneaker Wars?

During the 1950s and 1960s, most serious basketball players wore simple canvas sneakers—usually Converse or Keds. Encouraged by increasing TV coverage, interest in sports exploded in the late 1960s and 1970s, as did a wildly competitive international sneaker industry. First Adidas dominated the industry, then Nike and Reebok. The Great Sneaker Wars have since continued unabated, although they may have peaked at the 1992 Olympics when pro-basketball stars Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley—Nike endorsers—refused to display the Reebok logo on their team jackets at the awards ceremony. Reebok had paid dearly to sponsor the Olympics and wanted the athletes to fall in line. A compromise was eventually worked out in which the two players wore the jackets but hid the Reebok name.

Work Cited:

Campbell, Richard, Christopher R. Martin, and Bettina Fabos. Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000. Print.

Question

5. Which of the following is not an organizational pattern used in the following passage?

Barter vs. Cash

Most financing of television syndication is based on either cash or barter. In a cash deal, the distributor of a program offers a series for syndication to the highest bidder in a market—typically a station trying to fill a particular time slot. Due to exclusive contractual arrangements, programs air on only one broadcast outlet per market. For example, Viacom, which distributes the Cosby Show, offers it in hundreds of television markets around the country. Whichever local station bids the most in a particular market gets the rights to that program, usually for a contract period of two or three years. A small-market station in Fargo, North Dakota, might pay a few thousand dollars to air a week’s worth of episodes; in contrast, some Top 10 markets paid well over $150,000 a week for Cosby in the late 1980s.

One common variation of a cash deal is called cash-plus. For shows that are successful in syndication, distributors may retain some time to sell national commercial spots. When Cosby went into syndication, for example, Viacom, in addition to receiving cash for the show from various local outlets, also sold a minute of ad time to national advertisers. When the two-hundred-plus local stations received the programs, they already contained a minute’s worth of national ads. Some syndicators use cash-plus deals to keep down the cost per episode; in other words, stations pay less per episode in exchange for giving up ad slots to a syndicator’s national advertisers.

Although syndicators prefer cash deals, barter deals are usually arranged for new or untested programs. In a straight barter deal, no money changes hands between the local station and the syndicator. Instead, a syndicator offers a new program to a local TV station in exchange for a split of the advertising revenue. The program’s syndicator will try to make an arrangement with the station that attracts the largest number of local viewers, though this is not always possible. The syndicator then sells some ads at the national level, charging advertisers more money if the program has been sold into a large number of markets. This guarantees the wide national distribution that the networks receive for prime-time shows.

As an example, in the early 1990s, Star Trek: The Next Generation (before it became a part of the new UPN network) was offered by its producer-distributor, Paramount, in a 7/5 barter deal. Paramount did not charge cash per episode. Instead, during each airing it retained seven minutes of ad time to sell national spots and left stations with five minutes of ad time to sell local spots.

Work Cited:

Campbell, Richard, Christopher R. Martin, and Bettina Fabos. Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000. Print.

Question

6. What is the following passage comparing and contrasting?

Unlike most Westerners, who now raise their children to be independent, many Asians and Africans live in communal cultures, cultures that focus on cultivating emotional closeness. Rather than being given their own bedrooms and entrusted to day care, infants and toddlers typically sleep with their mothers and spend their days close to a family member. Children of communal cultures grow up with a stronger sense of “family self”—a feeling that what shames the child shames the family. Compared with Westerners, people in Japanese and Chinese cultures, for example, exhibit greater shyness toward strangers and greater concern for social harmony and loyalty. “My parents will be disappointed in me” is a concern of 7 percent of American and Italian teenagers and 14 percent of Australian teens, but nearly 25 percent of teens in Taiwan and Japan. . . .

Because we are so mindful of how others differ from us, we often fail to notice the similarities predisposed by our shared biology. Crosscultural research can help us by leading us to appreciate both our cultural diversity and our human kinship. Compared with person-to-person differences within groups, the differences between groups are small. Regardless of our culture, we humans share the same life cycle. We all speak to our infants in similar ways and respond similarly to their coos and cries. All over the world, the children of parents who are warm and supportive feel better about themselves and are less hostile than the children of parents who are punitive and rejecting.

Work Cited:

Myers, David G. Psychology. New York: Worth, 2004. Print.

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7. What is the main difference between exocrine and endocrine glands covered in this passage from Life: The Science of Biology?

Animals have two types of glands. Some, such as sweat glands and salivary glands, release secretions that are not hormones through ducts that lead outside the body. Sweat gland ducts open onto the surface of the skin, salivary gland ducts open into the mouth, and the duct from the pancreas carries digestive enzymes into the digestive tract. Such glands are called exocrine glands because they secrete their products to the outside of the body (the Greek exo- means “outside of”).

Glands that secrete hormones do not have ducts; they are called endocrine glands because they secrete their products into extracellular fluid, from which the hormones enter the blood, which is inside the body. Cells of most endocrine glands synthesize hormones and store them until they are stimulated to secrete their signals. Collectively, endocrine glands make up the endocrine system.

Work Cited:

Purves, William K. Life: The Science of Biology. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2001. Print.

Question

8. Which of the following is an appropriate definition of the term attachment as explained in the following passage from Cole, Cole and Lightfoot’s textbook The Development of Children?

Infants’ expression of emotion also seemed to change in conjunction with locomotion. The parents of babies who had begun to crawl reported that their babies now became angry more frequently and more intensely when their efforts to achieve a goal were frustrated. The babies who crawled also seemed to become more upset when their parents left their sides. One mother reported:

If I leave the room she gets upset unless she’s busy and doesn’t see it. But as soon as she notices, she starts hollering. I don’t think it mattered the first four months. When she started doing more, sitting up, crawling, that’s when she’d get upset when I would leave.

Many developmental psychologists believe that these new forms of emotional expression signal a new, emotionally charged bond, which they call attachment. Eleanor Maccoby lists four signs of attachment in babies and young children:

1. They seek to be near their primary caregivers. Before the age of 7 to 8 months, few babies plan and make organized attempts to achieve contact with their caregivers; after this age, babies often follow their caregiver closely, for example.

2. They show distress if separated from their caregivers. Before attachment begins, infants show little disturbance when their caregivers walk out of the room.

3. They are happy when they are reunited with the person they are attached to.

4. They orient their actions to the caregiver, even when he or she is absent. Babies listen for the caregiver’s voice and watch the caregiver while they play.

Work Cited:

Cole, Michael, Sheila R. Cole, and Cynthia Lightfoot. The Development of Children. New York: Worth, 2005. Print.

Question

9. Read the following excerpt from Myer’s Psychology textbook:

By definition, experience is key to learning. More than 200 years ago, philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume echoed Aristotle’s conclusion from 2000 years earlier: We learn by association. Our minds naturally connect events that occur in sequence: We associate them. If, after seeing and smelling freshly baked bread, you eat some and find it satisfying, then the next time you see and smell fresh bread, your experience will lead you to expect that eating some will be satisfying again. And if you associate a sound with a frightening consequence, then your fear may be aroused by the sound itself. As one 4-year-old exclaimed after watching a TV character get mugged, “If I had heard that music, I wouldn’t have gone around the corner!”

Simpler animals can learn simple associations. When disturbed by a squirt of water, the sea snail Aplysia will protectively withdraw its gill. If the squirts continue, as happens naturally in choppy water, the withdrawal response diminishes. (The snail’s response “habituates.”) But if the sea snail repeatedly receives an electric shock just after being squirted, its withdrawal response to the squirt alone becomes stronger. The animal associates the squirt with the impending shock. More complex animals can learn more complex associations, especially those that bring favorable consequences. Seals in an aquarium will repeat behaviors, such as slapping and barking, that prompt people to toss them a herring.

By linking two events that occur close together, both the sea snail and the seal exhibit associative learning. The sea snail associates the squirt with impending shock; the seal associates slapping and barking with receiving a herring. In both cases, the animals learned something important to their survival: to associate the past with the immediate future.

Work Cited:

Myers, David G. Psychology. New York: Worth, 2004. Print.

What is the primary pattern of organization in this passage?

Question

10. What is the pattern of organization used in the passage below from Blanchard’s Exploring the World of Business?

If you go to work at a quality-conscious company like Xerox, you will become expert in using the problem-solving process. You will also find it invaluable in many other situations. In fact, formal problem solving can even help you study better. Here is the process.

STEP 1. Identify the problem. The individual or group considers various ways of looking at the problem and chooses the one that is most helpful in solving it. This requires opening your mind (and your team’s agenda) to lots of ideas, then focusing in on the most useful problem definition.

STEP 2. Analyze the problem. Look for causes, issues, and questions. Gather the information you need to understand the problem. Again, start by opening up to lots of potential causes. Then close in on one or a few key causes for action.

STEP 3. List possible solutions. Be creative. Think of lots of ideas. At Xerox, employees ask, “How could we make a change?” Then think about each option to make it as clear as possible.

STEP 4. Select and plan one solution. Which is the best way? Compare the options in as many ways as possible. Then focus on how to implement the one you chose.

STEP 5. Implement the solution. Follow through on your plan to solve the problem or make the change.

STEP 6. Check the solution. How well does it work? Identify any continuing problems and start the process again.

Work Cited:

Blanchard, Kenneth H. Exploring the World of Business. New York: Worth, 1996. Print.

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