A Look at the Fast-Food Industry by Eric Schlosser — Unit test Answers

Read the excerpt from "The Environmental Ethic." Mother Earth . . . is no more than the commonality of organisms and the physical environment they maintain with each passing moment, an environment that will destabilize and turn lethal if the organisms are disturbed too much. . . . To disregard the diversity of life is to risk catapulting ourselves into an alien environment. We will have become like the pilot whales that inexplicably beach themselves on New England shores.Which of the following choices best expresses the type of appeal Wilson uses in this passage?

Read the excerpt from "The Environmental Ethic."It is fashionable in some quarters to wave aside the small and obscure, the bugs and weeds, forgetting that an obscure moth from Latin America saved Australia’s pastureland from overgrowth by cactus, that the rosy periwinkle provided the cure for Hodgkin’s disease and childhood lymphocytic leukemia, that the bark of the Pacific yew offers hope for victims of ovarian and breast cancer, that a chemical from the saliva of leeches dissolves blood clots during surgery, and so on down a roster already grown long and illustrious despite the limited research addressed to it.Which of the following claims is best supported by the evidence in this excerpt?

Read this excerpt from "Mad Cow, Furious Farmer.”The disease was first detected in England in 1986, though some scientists think the very first cases started at least ten years before. Cows usually eat only grass and other plants, but farmers had been feeding them a meat and bone mixture that made the cows plumper. But somehow, at least one batch of the mixture had become contaminated with what was then an unknown killer: a prion.By 1993, British farmers were reporting up to one thousand new cases of BSE a week. Governments all around the world reacted by increasing testing for the disease and not allowing any cows to be eaten if they were at risk of having the disease. As sheep can also get a prion disease called scrapie, they were tested as well. Farmers were angry that they were losing their livestock, and nobody knew how to protect cows and people from the disease.Consumers were also in a panic when they learned about BSE, and for a very good reason: prions are infectious. If you eat a prion from a "mad cow” or sheep, you are at risk for developing a human version of BSE. The public felt betrayed that their governments had underreacted to the problem or covered it up.Eventually, in 1997, governments began to ban farmers from feeding their livestock high-risk meat and bone mixtures. With that ban, the epidemic quickly peaked, and by 2010 had largely disappeared. Over the years, half a million cows and two hundred people had been killed by prions.

Read this excerpt from "Herd about the Flu.”The flu shot helps prevent huge numbers of infections. Even when it doesn’t fully prevent infection in every person, the shot makes any flu infection less serious. On a global scale, the vaccine can reduce the number of infections only if most people in the community take it. That’s because vaccines need to reach enough people to achieve a "herd immunity,” the level of immunity needed to prevent the virus from spreading. If too few people get the vaccine, the people who receive it may not be well protected against infection.So the next time you are at the drugstore, and you see No Flu Shots Available, think about the reasons behind it. Drug makers are scared to make too many flu shots because they could lose too much money. They then make fewer flu shots and the effect of the flu shots becomes weaker because not enough people take it. People become more reluctant to take the flu shot since they don’t think it will fully work. The demand goes down further and the flu companies make even fewer shots the next year.This could continue until the community changes its mind and we all get the flu shot. "That is a community responsibility," says the president of Merck, one of the two remaining flu vaccine manufacturers.

Read this excerpt from "Heads Up on Sports Safety.”The dangers to your head depend on the sport, but some general principles guide helmet design. First, the helmet needs to be as cool and lightweight and comfortable as possible. Second, the helmet needs to be hard enough and fit well enough to protect the skull and brain. For some athletes, like hockey goalies or baseball catchers, the helmet also needs to protect the face from fast pucks or balls. Third, it must not prevent the wearer from seeing or hearing. Fourth, it cannot cause more injuries than it prevents.It turns out that the way to address many of these concerns is to use hard but flexible, light, strong materials on the outside and soft materials on the inside. Scientists create new plastics all the time, but sometimes the best designs come from using old materials in new ways. One recent design makes the shell of helmets out of Kevlar, the same kind of light plastic used in bulletproof vests.

Read the excerpt from Freakonomics. It’s worth thinking about the incentive a wrestler might have to throw a match. Maybe he accepts a bribe (which would obviously not be recorded in the data). Or perhaps some other arrangement is made between the two wrestlers. Keep in mind that the pool of elite sumo wrestlers is extraordinarily tight-knit. Each of the sixty-six elite wrestlers fights fifteen of the others in a tournament every two months. Furthermore, each wrestler belongs to a stable that is typically managed by a former sumo champion, so even the rival stables have close ties. Which of the following claims is best supported by the evidence in this excerpt?

Read the excerpt from Freakonomics. Now let’s look at the win-loss percentage between the 7–7 wrestlers and the 8–6 wrestlers the next time they meet, when neither one is on the bubble. In this case, there is no great pressure on the individual match. So you might expect the wrestlers who won their 7–7 matches in the previous tournament to do about as well as they had in earlier matches against these same opponents—that is, winning roughly 50 percent of the time. You certainly wouldn’t expect them to uphold their 80 percent clip. As it turns out, the data show that the 7–7 wrestlers win only 40 percent of the rematches. Eighty percent in one match and 40 percent in the next? How do you make sense of that?Which type of evidence does the authors use in this excerpt to support the claim that some sumo wrestlers will intentionally lose a match?

Which best describes why it is important for Omar to use citations in his research paper?

Which is the best example of a thesis statement for an argumentative essay about zoos and animal welfare?

Which of the following pieces of evidence from Fast Food Nation best supports the author’s claim that teenagers are the ideal candidates for working in the fast food industry?

Flora needs a copy of Romeo and Juliet for class. Which type of online text source should she use?

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Which is the best example of online multimedia?

Which best describes the effect created by pairing the text Food Safety Myths Exposed and the video transcript from Dr. X and the Quest for Food Safety?

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