Vocabulary Test 48

[passage-header](This passage is adapted from Alan Ehrenhalt, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City, 2013, Vintage. Demographic inversion is a phenomenon that describes the rearrangement of living patterns throughout a metropolitan area.)[/passage-header]   84546We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs, or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. The 2010 census certainly did not turn up evidence of a middle-class stampede to the nations cities. The news was mixed: Some of the larger cities on the East Coast tended to gain population, albeit in small increments. Those in the Midwest, including Chicago, tended to lose substantial numbers. The cities that showed gains in overall population during the entire decade tended to be in the South and Southwest. But when it comes to measuring demographic inversion, raw census numbers are an ineffective blunt instrument. A closer look at the results shows that the most powerful demographic events of the past decade were the movement of African Americans out of central cities (180,000 of them in Chicago alone) and the settlement of immigrant groups in suburbs, often ones many miles distant from downtown. Central-city areas that gained affluent residents in the first part of the decade maintained that population in the recession years from 2007 to 2009. They also, according to a 2011 study by Brookings, suffered considerably less from increased unemployment than the suburbs did. Not many young professionals moved to new downtown condos in the recession years because few such residences were being built. But there is no reason to believe that the demographic trends prevailing prior to the construction, the bust will not resume once that bust is over. It is important to remember that demographic inversion is not a proxy for population growth; it can occur in cities that are growing, those whose numbers are 42279flat, and even in those undergoing a modest decline in size55758.
   18230America's major cities face enormous fiscal problems, many of them the result of public pension obligations they incurred in the most prosperous years of the past two decades79283. Some, Chicago prominent among them, simply are not producing enough revenue to support the level of public services to which most of the citizens have grown to feel entitled. 61787How the cities are going to solve this problem, I do not know88247. 37289What I do know is that if the fiscal crisis was going to drive affluent professionals out of central cities, it would have done so by now30124. There is no evidence that it has.
   83920The truth is that we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end88980. And we need to adjust our perceptions of cities, suburbs, and urban mobility as a result.
   95791Much of our perspective on the process of metropolitan settlement dates, whether we realize it or not, from a paper written in 1925 by the University of Chicago sociologist Ernest W. Burgess33441. 13243It was Burgess who defined four urban/suburban zones of settlement38894: a central business district; an area of manufacturing just beyond it; then a residential area inhabited by the industrial and immigrant working class; and finally an outer enclave of single-family dwellings.
   Burgess was right about the urban America of 1925; he was right about the urban America of 1974. 64755Virtually every city in the country had a downtown, where the commercial life of the metropolis was 80798conducted; it had a factory district just beyond; it had districts of working-class residences just beyond that, and it had residential suburbs for the wealthy and the upper middle class at the far end of the continuum69291. 28352As a family moved up the economic ladder, it also moved outward from crowded working-class districts to more spacious apartments and, eventually, to a suburban home94921. The suburbs of Burgess's time bore little resemblance to those at the end of the twentieth century, but the theory still essentially worked. People moved ahead in life by moving farther out.
   But in the past decade, in quite a few places, this model has ceased to describe reality. There are still downtown commercial districts, but there are no factory districts lying next to them. There are scarcely any factories at all. These close-in parts of the city, whose few residents Burgess described as dwelling in "submerged regions of poverty, degradation, and disease", are increasingly the preserve of the affluent who work in the commercial core. And just as crucially newcomers to America are not settling on the inside and accumulating the resources to move out; they are living in the suburbs from day one.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:
(This passage is adapted from Emily Anthes, Frankenstein's Cat, 2013.)[/passage-header]   When scientists first learned how to edit the genomes of animals, they began to imagine all the ways they could use this new power. Creating brightly colored novelty pets was not a high priority. Instead, most researchers envisioned far more consequential applications, hoping to create genetically engineered animals that saved human lives. One enterprise is now delivering on this dream. Welcome to the world of pharming, in which simple genetic tweaks turn animals into living pharmaceutical factories.
   53499Many of the proteins that our cells crank out naturally make for good medicine. Our bodies' own enzymes, hormones, clotting factors, and antibodies are commonly used to treat cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and more93455. 42998The trouble is that its difficult and expensive to make these compounds on an industrial scale, and as a result, patients can face shortages of the medicines they need. Dairy animals, on the other hand, are 41493expert protein producers, their udders swollen with milk45597. So the creation of the first transgenic animals---first mice, then other species---in the 1980s gave scientists an idea: What 65143if they put the gene for a human antibody or enzyme into a cow, goat, or sheep? If they put the gene in just the right place, under the control of the right molecular switch, maybe they could engineer animals that produced healing human proteins in their milk59518. Then doctors could collect medicine by the bucketful.
    Throughout the 1980s and '90s, studies provided proof of principle, as scientists created transgenic mice, sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, and rabbits that did, in fact, make therapeutic compounds in their milk.
   94444At first, this work was merely gee-whiz, scientific geekery, lab-bound thought experiments come true34533. 80905That all changed with ATryn, a drug produced by the Massachusetts firm GTC Biotherapeutics. ATryn is antithrombin, an anticoagulant that can be used to prevent life-threatening blood clots10651. The compound, made by our liver cells, plays a key role in keeping our bodies clot-free. 86900It acts as a molecular bouncer, sidling up to clot-forming compounds and escorting them out of the bloodstream46291. 71054But as many as 1 in 2,000 Americans are born with a genetic mutation that prevents them from making antithrombin74998. These patients are prone to clots, especially in their legs and lungs, and they are at elevated risk of suffering from fatal complications during surgery and childbirth. Supplemental antithrombin can reduce this risk, and GTC decided to try to manufacture the compound using genetically engineered goats.
    To create its special herd of goats, GTC used microinjection, the same technique that produced GloFish and AquAdvantage salmon. The company's scientists took the gene for human antithrombin and injected it directly into fertilized goat eggs. Then they implanted the eggs in the wombs of 68619female goats. When the kids were born, some of them proved to be transgenic, the human gene nestled safely in their cells. 53784The researchers paired the antithrombin gene with a promoter (94525which is a sequence of DNA that controls gene activity81896) that is normally active in the goat's mammary glands during milk production91149. 

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]People around the world unanimously agree that gold is a valuable mineral. Gold has been seen as a precious commodity by many cultures throughout time, and Americans of the 1840s were no different. When James W. Marshall, a carpenter and sawmill owner, discovered a gold nugget in the American River, California was forever changed. News of his discovery attracted thousands of immigrants from other parts of California, as well as other places around the United States and the World.
   In the Sierra Nevada, a mountain range that runs 400 miles through California, years of erosion caused by rainfall and the downhill flow of mountain streams loosened pieces of gold that had been embedded in the solid rock formed over 100 million years ago. California is largely made of quartz previously found at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Underwater volcanoes melted the quartz into magma and pushed it up towards the surface, sometimes forming islands. Due to the movements of the Earth's tectonic plates, these islands were pushed together and against the West Coast. This movement and accumulation of land over millions of years formed the area known as California. The gold that was dispersed across the sea floor became concentrated and redistribution throughout the veins of quartz in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. 

[passage-header]The following passage explores the history and impact of public higher education in the United States.[/passage-header]Every year, hundreds of thousands of students graduate from U.S.public universities. Many of the largest and most elite schools in the nation fall into the category of public, or state, institutions. Unlike private universities, which generally operate independently from any government influence, public higher education was established through government legislation and is sustained through state or federal involvement in various ways. 

"The Mower to the Glowworms"
Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late,
And studying all the summer night,
Her matchless songs does meditate;
Ye country comets, that portend
No war nor prince's funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass's fall;
Ye glowworms, whose officious flame
To wandering owners shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim,
And after foolish fires do stray;
Your courteous lights in vain you waste,
Since Juliana here is come,
For she my mind hath so displaced
That I shall never find my home.

[passage-header]The excerpt is taken from a novel. Mr. Harding, now an old man, has lost his position as the Warden of a hospital for old men. He has just come from an unsuccessful interview with Mr. Slope concerning his reappointment to the position.[/passage-header]    Mr. Harding was not a happy man as he walked down the palace pathway, and stepped out into the close. His position and pleasant house were a second time gone from him; but he could endure it. He had been schooled and insulted by a man young enough to be his son; but that he could put up with. He could even draw from the very injuries which had been inflicted on him some of that consolation which, we may believe, martyrs always receive from the injustice of their own sufferings. He had admitted to his daughter that he wanted the comfort of his old home, and yet he could have returned to his lodgings in the High Street, if not with exultation, at least with satisfaction, had that been all. But the venom of the chaplain's harangue had worked into his blood, and sapped the life of his sweet contentment.
     '47041New men are carrying out new measures, and are carting away the useless rubbish of past centuries!10746' What cruel words these had been - and how often are they now used with all the heartless cruelty of a Slope! A man is sufficiently condemned if it can only be shown that either in politics or religion he does not belong to some new school established within the last score of years. He may then regard himself as rubbish and expect to be carted away. A man is nothing now unless he has within him a full appreciation of the new year; an era in which it would seem that neither honesty nor truth is very desirable, but in which success is the only touchstone of merit. We must laugh at everything that is established. Let the joke be ever so bad, ever so untrue to the real principles of joking; nevertheless we must laugh - or else beware the cart. We must talk, think, and live up to the spirit of the times, or else we are naught. 81138 New men and new measures, long credit and few scruples, great success or wonderful ruin, such are now the tastes of Englishmen who know how to live 45737! Alas, alas! Under such circumstances, Mr. Harding could not but feel that he was an Englishman who did not know how to live. This new doctrine of Mr. Slope and the rubbish cart sadly disturbed his 76943 equanimity.
    'The same thing is going on throughout the whole country!' 'Work is now required from every man who receives wages!' And had he been living all his life receiving wages, and doing no work? Had he in truth so lived as to now in his old age justly be reckoned as rubbish fit only to be hidden away in some huge dust-hole? The 52628 school of men to whom he professes to belong, the Grantlys, the Gwynnes, are afflicted with no such self-accusations as these which troubled Mr. Harding. They, as a rule, are as satisfied with the wisdom and propriety of their own conduct as can be any Mr. Slope or any Bishop with his own. But, unfortunately for himself, Mr. Harding had little of this self-reliance. When he heard himself designated as rubbish by the Slopes of the world, he had no other resources than to make inquiry within his own bosom as to the truth of the designation. Alas, alas! The evidence seemed generally to go against him.
[passage-footer]Adapted from: The Warden, Anthony Trollope (1855)[/passage-footer]

[passage-header]The passage is taken from "The Rule of the Road," an essay written by a twentieth-century essayist. 
[/passage-header]    A stout old lady was walking with her basket down the middle of a street in Petrograd to the great confusion of the traffic and with no small peril to herself. It was pointed out to her that the pavement was the place for pedestrians, but she replied: 'I'm going to walk where I like. We've got liberty now.' It did not occur to the dear old lady that if liberty entitled the pedestrian to walk down the middle of the road, then the end of such liberty would be universal chaos. Everybody would be getting in everybody else's way and nobody would get anywhere. Individual liberty would have become social anarchy.
    40189 There is a danger of the world getting liberty-drunk in these days like the old lady with the basket, and it is just as well to remind ourselves of what the rule of the road means.19508. 38037 It means that in order that the liberties of all may be preserved, the liberties of everybody must be curtailed 10486. When the policeman, say, at Piccadilly Circus, steps into the middle of the road and puts out his hand, he is the symbol, not of tyranny, but of liberty. You may not think so. You may, being in a hurry, and seeing your car pulled up by this 26056 insolence of office, feel that your liberty has been outraged. How dare this fellow interfere with your free use of the public highway? Then, if you are a reasonable person, you will reflect that if he did not interfere with you, he would interfere with no one, and the result would be that Piccadilly Circus would be a maelstrom that you would never cross at all. You have submitted to a curtailment of private liberty in order that you may enjoy a social order which makes your liberty a reality.
    Liberty is not a personal affair only, but a social contract. It is an accommodation of interests. In matters which do not touch anybody else's liberty, of course, I may be as free as I like. If I choose to go down the road in a dressing-gown who shall say me nay? You have liberty to laugh at me, but I have liberty to be indifferent to you. And if I have a fancy for dyeing my hair, or waxing my moustache (which heaven forbid), or wearing an overcoat and sandals, or going to bed late or getting up early, I shall follow my fancy and ask no man's permission. I shall not inquire of you whether I may eat mustard with my mutton. And you will not ask me whether you may follow this religion or that, whether you may prefer Ella Wheeler Wilcox to Wordsworth, or champagne to shandy.
    In all these and a thousand other details, you and I please ourselves and ask no one's leave. We have a whole kingdom in which we rule alone, can do what we choose, be wise or ridiculous, harsh or easy, conventional or odd. But directly we step out of that kingdom, our personal liberty of action becomes 26731 qualified by other people's liberty. I might like to practice on the trombone from midnight till three in the morning. If I went on to the top of Everest to do it, I could please myself, but if I do it in my bedroom my family will object, and if I do it out in the streets the neighbors will remind me that my liberty to blow the trombone must not interfere with their liberty to sleep in quiet. There are a lot of people in the world, and I have to accommodate my liberty to their liberties.
    50110 We are all liable to forget this, and unfortunately, we are much more conscious of the imperfections of others in this respect than of our own 47904. 51256 A reasonable consideration for the rights or feelings of others is the foundation of social conduct 37865.
    98867 It is in small matters of conduct, in the observance of the rule of the road, that we pass judgment upon ourselves, and declare that we are civilized or uncivilized 28868. 74393 The great moments of heroism and sacrifice are rare. 86189 It is the little habits of commonplace intercourse that make up the great sum of life and sweeten or make bitter the journey 61100.
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[passage-header][/passage-header]    The Ring at Casterbridge was merely the local name of one of the finest amphitheaters, if not the very finest remaining in Britain.
     Casterbridge announced old Rome in every street, alley and precinct. It looked Roman, bespoke the art of Rome, concealed the dead men of Rome. It was impossible to dig more than a foot or two deep about the town fields and gardens without coming upon some tall soldier or other of the Empire, who had laid there in his silent unobtrusive rest for a space of fifteen hundred years. He was mostly found lying on his side, in an oval scoop in the chalk, like a chicken in its shell; his knees drawn up to his chest; sometimes with the remains of his spear against his arm; a brooch of bronze on his breast or forehead; an urn at his knees, a jar at his throat, a bottle at his mouth; and mystified conjecture pouring down upon him from the eyes of Casterbridge street boys, who had turned a moment to gaze at the familiar spectacle as they passed by.
     Imaginative inhabitants, who would have felt an unpleasantness at the discovery of a comparatively modern skeleton in their gardens, were quite unmoved by these 21240hoary shapes. They had lived so long ago, their time was so unlike the present, their hopes and motives were so widely removed from ours, that between them and the living there seemed to stretch a gulf too wide for even a spirit to pass.
     The Amphitheater was a huge circular enclosure, with a notch at opposite extremities of its diameter north and south. It was to Casterbridge what the ruined Coliseum is to modern Rome, and was nearly of the same magnitude. The dusk of evening was the proper hour at which the true impression of this 57171suggestive place could he received. Standing in the middle of the arena at that time, thereby degrees became apparent its real vastness, which a cursory view from the summit at noon-day was apt to obscure. Melancholy, impressive, lonely yet accessible from every part of the town, the historic circle was the frequent spot for appointments of a furtive kind. Intrigues were arranged there; tentative meetings have there experimented after divisions and feuds. But one kind of appointment- in itself the most common of any- seldom had the place in the Amphitheaters; that of happy lovers.
     Why, seeing that it was pre-eminently an airy, accessible, and sequestered spot for interviews, the cheerfullest form of those occurrences never took kindly to the soil of the ruin, would be a 97653curious inquiry. Perhaps it was because its associations had about them something sinister. Its history proved that. Apart from the sanguinary nature of the games originally played therein, such incidents attached to its past as these: that for scores of years the town gallows had stood at one corner; that in 1705 a woman who had murdered her husband was half-strangled and then burnt there in the presence of ten thousand spectators. Tradition reports that at a certain stage of the burning her heart burst and leaped out of her body, to the terror of them all, and that not one of those ten thousand people ever cared particularly for hot roast after that. In addition to these old tragedies, pugilistic encounters almost to the death had come off down to recent dates in that secluded arena, entirely invisible to the outside world save by climbing to the top of the enclosure, which few townspeople in the daily 28905round of their lives ever took the trouble to do. So that, though close to the turnpike-road, crimes might be perpetrated there unseen at mid-day.
     Some boys had latterly tried to impart gaiety to the ruin by using the central arena as a cricket-ground. But the game usually languished for the aforesaid reason- the dismal privacy which the earthen circle enforced, shutting out every appreciative passer's vision, every commendatory remark from outsiders-everything, except the sky; and to play at games in such circumstances was like acting to an empty house. Possibly, too, the boys were timid, for some old people said that at certain moments in the summer time, in broad daylight, persons sitting with a book or dozing in the arena had, on lifting their eyes, beheld the slopes lined with a gazing legion of Hadrian's soldiery as if watching the gladiatorial combat; and had heard the roar of their excited voices, that the scene would remain but a moment, like a lightning flash, and then disappear.
     Henchard had chosen this spot as being the 95672safest from observation which he could think of for meeting his long-lost wife, and at the same time as one easily to be found by a stranger after nightfall. As Mayor of the town, with a reputation to keep up, he could not invite her to come to his house till some definite course had been decided on.
[passage-footer]Adapted from: The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy (1886)[/passage-footer]

[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]The extract is taken from Darwin's book, The Voyage of the Beagle. In the book, he describes his voyage around the world as a ship's naturalist. On this voyage, he gathered evidence that was to lead him to put forward his Theory of Evolution.  [passage-footer]
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Everybody at all addicted to letter writing, without having much to say, which will include a large proportion of the female world at least, must feel with Lady Bertram, that she was out of luck in having such a capital piece of Mansfield news, as the certainty of the Grants going to Bath, occur at a time when she 74215could make no advantage of it, and will admit that it must have been very mortifying to her to see it fall to the share of their thankless son, and treated as concisely possible at the end of a long letter, instead of having it to spread over the largest part of a page of her own - For though Lady Bertram, rather at home in the epistolary line, having early in her marriage, from the 36699want of other employment, and the circumstance of Sir Thomas's being in Parliament, got into the way of making and keeping correspondents, and formed for herself a very creditable, commonplace, 77823amplifying style, so that a very little matter was enough for her; she could not do entirely without any; she must have something to write about, 19238even to her niece, and being so soon to lose all the 61137benefit of Dr. Grant's gouty symptoms and Mrs. Grant's morning calls, it was very hard upon her to be deprived of one of the last epistolary uses she could put them to.
There was a rich amends, however, preparing for her. Lady Bertram's hour of good luck came. Within a few days from the receipt of Edmund's letter, Fanny had one from her aunt, beginning thus:
"My dear Fanny, I take up my pen to communicate some very alarming intelligence, which I make no doubt will give you much concern."