Vocabulary Test 38

[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. 

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:
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In these trying times, when buying ordinary foodstuff can burn a hole in your pockets, comes the news that can actually help us save some hard cash when we go out to shop the next time. According to a Stanford University study, the first of its kind in the world, there is no evidence to suggest that there are more nutritional benefits from expensive organic food than those grown by conventional methods. The researchers add that there is no difference in protein and fat content between organic and conventional milk and the vitamin count is similar in both types. The only benefit is that organic foods are not contaminated with pesticides but then before you chew on that plate of organic okra with roti made from organic wheat, they are not 100% pesticide free either. In India, organic food has been growing at 20-22% and the export market is valued at Rs. 1,000 crores. Obviously, the study is not good news for that sector and for people who are big on organic food.

In India, eating organic food is more of a style statement than due to health worries because the stuff is expensive. But people who can, do indulge in not only organic vegetables but even organic eggs laid by 'happy hens', who are allowed to roam around freely whereas 'unhappy hens' are kept in coops. Then there are companies that have installed music channels in their cowsheds and the milk from those sheds are sold at a marked up price since it has more nutritional value because the animals are happy thanks to lilting 24x7 music. We don't yet know any farmer using music to improve his crop quality, but then you never know: plants are known to respond to music.

Why such pickiness about food? These days, the huge number of TV shows and articles that we see and read on food provide bread and butter for the specialist. But instead of decoding food, its sources and what has gone into growing it, isn't it much better to enjoy what's on the plate?

[passage-footer](Adapted from The Hindustan Times)[/passage-footer]

[passage-header]"Fable" [/passage-header]In heaven
Some little blades of grass
Stood before God.
"What did you do?"
Then all save one of the little blades
Began eagerly to relate
The merits of their lives.
This one stayed a small way behind,
Ashamed.
Presently, God said,
"And what did you do?"
The little blade answered. "O my Lord,
Memory is bitter to me,
For if I did good deeds
I know not of them."
Then God, in all his splendor,
Arose from his throne.
"O best little blade of grass!" he said.

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:
[/passage-header]Their adobe house was the same as two decades before, four large rooms under a thatched roof and three square windows facing south with their frames painted sky blue. Lin stood in the yard facing the front wall while flipping over a dozen mildewed books he had left to be sunned on a stack of firewood. 64644Sure thing, he thought, Shuyu doesn't know how to take care of books. Maybe I should give them to my nephews. These books are of no use to me anymore.30311
   Beside him, 55737chickens were strutting and geese waddling. A few little chicks were passing back and forth through the narrow gaps in the paling that fenced a small vegetable garden. In the garden pole beans and 26122long cucumbers hung on trellises, 43939eggplants curved like ox horns, and lettuce heads were so robust that they covered up the furrows. In addition to the poultry, his wife kept two pigs and a goat for milk. 31915Their sow was oinking from the pigpen, which was adjacent to the western end of the vegetable garden. Against the wall of the pigpen, a pile of manure waited to be carted to their family plot, where it would go through high-temperature composting in a pit for two months before being put into the field.
   26735The air reeked of distillers' grains mixed in the pig feed. Lin disliked the 29422sour smell, which was the only uncomfortable thing to him here. 90914From the kitchen, where Shuyu was cooking, came the coughing of the bellows28098. In the south, elm and birch crowns shaded their neighbors' straw and tiled roofs. Now and then a dog barked from one of these homes.
   Having turned over all the books, Lin went  out of the front wall, which was three feet high and topped with thorny jujube branches. In one hand he held a dog-eared Russian dictionary he had used in high school. Having nothing to do, he sat on their grinding stone, thumbing through the old dictionary. He still remembered some Russian vocabulary and even tried to form a few short sentences in his mind with some words. But he couldn't recall the grammatical rules for the case changes exactly, so he gave up and let the books lie on his lap. Its pages fluttered a little as a breeze blew across. He raised his eyes to watch the villagers hoeing potatoes in a  distant field, which was so vast that a red flag was planted in the middle of it as a marker so that they could take a break when they reached the flag. Lin was fascinated by the sight, but he knew little about farm work.  
[passage-footer](1999)
The excerpt above is from Ha Jin's Waiting.[/passage-footer]

[passage-header]Read the poem given below and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]99020Methought I saw 60815my late espoused Saint
Brought to me like 43465Alcestis from the grave[passage-footer]
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[passage-header]The extract is taken from a book written sixty years ago by a British scientist in which he considers the relationship between science and society.[/passage-header]  The pioneers of the teaching of science imagined that its introduction into education would remove the conventionality, artificiality, and backward-looking-ness which were characteristic of classical studies, but they were gravely disappointed. So in their time, had the humanists thought that the study of the classical authors in the original would banish at once the dull pedantry and superstition of medieval scholasticism. The 95346 professional schoolmaster was a match for both of them and has almost managed to make the understanding of chemical reactions as dull and as dogmatic an affair as the reading of Virgil's Aeneid.  
   The chief claim for the use of science in education is that it teaches a child something about the actual universe in which he is living, in making him acquainted with the results of scientific discovery, and at the same time teaches him how to think logically and inductively by studying scientific method. A certain limited success has been reached in the first of these aims, but practically none at all in the second. Those privileged members of the community who have been through a secondary or public school education may be expected to know something about the elementary physics and chemistry of a hundred years ago, but they probably know hardly more than any bright boy can pick up from an interest in the wireless or scientific hobbies out of school hours.
   As to the learning of scientific method, the whole thing is 44698palpably a farce. Actually, for the convenience of teachers and the requirements of the examination system, it is necessary that the pupils not only do not learn scientific method but learn precisely the reverse, that is, to believe exactly what they are told and to reproduce it when asked, whether it seems nonsense to them or not. The way in which educated people respond to such quackeries as spiritualism or 19675 astrology, not to say more dangerous ones such as racial theories or currency myths show that fifty years of education in the method of science in Britain or Germany has produced no visible effect whatever. The only way of learning the method of science is the long and bitter way of personal experience, and, until the educational or social systems are altered, to make this possible, the best we can expect is the production of a minority of people who are able to acquire some of the techniques of science and a still smaller minority who are able to use and develop them.
[passage-footer]Adapted from: The Social Function of Science, John D Bernal (1939)[/passage-footer]

[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][/passage-header]I have yet to meet a poetry-lover under thirty who was not an introvert, or an introvert who was not unhappy in adolescence. At school, particularly, maybe, if as in my own case, it is a boarding school, he sees the extrovert successful, happy, and good and himself unpopular or neglected; and what is hardest to bear is not unpopularity, but the consciousness that it is deserved, that he is grubby and inferior and frightened and dull. Knowing no other kind of society than the 92355 contingent, he imagines that this arrangement is part of the eternal scheme of things, that he is doomed to a life of failure and envy. It is not till he grows up, till years later he runs across the heroes of his school days and finds them grown commonplace and sterile, that he realizes that the introvert is the lucky one, the best adapted to an industrial civilization the collective values of which are so infantile that he alone can grow, who has educated his fantasies and learned how to draw upon the resources of his inner life. [passage-footer]Adapted from an article written by W.H Auden.[/passage-footer]

[passage-header]The passage is taken from a description of the life of certain Pacific Islanders written by a pioneering sociologist.[/passage-header]     By the time a child is six or seven, she has all the essential avoidances well enough by heart to be trusted with the care of a younger child. And she also develops a number of simple techniques. She learns to weave firm square balls from palm leaves, to make pinwheels of palm leaves or frangipani blossoms, to climb a coconut tree by walking up the trunk on flexible little feet, to break open a coconut with one firm well-directed blow of a knife as long as she is tall, to play a number of group games and sing the songs which go with them, to tidy the house by picking up the litter on the stony floor, to bring water from the sea, to spread out the copra to dry and to help gather it in when rain threatens, to go to a neighboring house and bring back a lighted faggot for the chief's pipe or the cook-house fire.
     But in the case of the little girls, all these tasks are merely supplementary to the main business of baby-tending. Very small boys also have some care of the younger children, but at eight or nine years of age, they are usually relieved of it. Whatever rough edges have not been smoothed off by this responsibility for younger children are worn off by their contact with older boys. For little boys are admitted to interesting and important activities only as long as their behavior is circumspect and helpful. Where small girls are 57275 brusquely pushed aside, small boys will be patiently tolerated and they become adept at making themselves useful. The four or five little boys who all wish to assist in the important business of helping a grown youth lasso reef eels, organize themselves into a highly efficient working team; one boy holds the bait, another holds an extra lasso, others spoke eagerly about in holes in the reef looking for prey, while still another tucks the captured eels into his lavalava. The small girls, burdened with heavy babies or the care of little staggers who are too small to adventure on the reef, discouraged by the hostility of the small boys and the scorn of the older ones, have little opportunity for learning the more adventurous forms of work and play. So while the little boys first undergo the chastening effects of baby-tending and then have many opportunities to learn effective cooperation under the supervision of older boys, the girls' education is less comprehensive. They have a poke eagerly about in holes in the reef looking for prey, while still another tucks the captured eels into his lavalava. The small girls, burdened with heavy babies or the care of little staggers who are too small to adventure on the reef, discouraged by the hostility of the small boys and the scorn of the older ones, have little opportunity for learning the more adventurous forms of work and play. So while the little boys first undergo the chastening effects of baby-tending and then have many opportunities to learn effective cooperation under the supervision of older boys, the girls' education is less comprehensive. They have a 70490 high standard of individual responsibility, but the community provides them with no 17859 lessons in cooperation with one another. This is particularly apparent in the activities of young people; the boys organize quickly; the girls waste hours in bickering, 21798 innocent of any technique for quick and efficient cooperation.
[passage-footer]Adapted from: Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead(1928)[/passage-footer]

[passage-header]"Brass Spittoons"[/passage-header]Clean the spittoons, boy.
80511Detroit,
Chicago,
Atlantic city,
Palm Beach27033.
Clean the spittoons.
The steam in hotel kitchens,
And the smoke in hotel lobbies,
And the slime in hotel spittoons:
Part of my life.

46241Hey, boy!
A nickel,
A dime,
A dollar,
Two dollars a day.
67417Hey, boy!
A nickel,
A dime,
A dollar,
93286Two dollars
18824Buys shoes for the baby.
House rent to pay.
God on Sunday
My God!

Babies and church
and woman and Sunday
all mixed up with dimes and
dollars and clean spittoons
and house rent to pay
22882Hey, Boy!

91570A bright bowl of brass is beautiful to the Lord.
81704Bright polished brass like the cymbals
57107Of King David's dancers,
12404Like the wine cups of Solomon.
75938Hey, Boy!
61858A clean spittoon on the altar of the Lord.
25571A clean bright spittoon all newly polished,-
At least I can offer that.
49112Com'mere boy! [passage-footer]

* a spittoon is a receptacle for spit (usually in a public place)

"Brass Spittoons" was written by Langston Hughes, one of the most prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance.

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