Section A Multiple-Choice Questions
In this section there are several passages by fourteen multiple choice questions. For each multiple choice qutestion, there are four suggested answers marked A. B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO.
PASSAGE ONE
Last week oil prices finally stopped rising. They now hover around $43 a barrel, a 20-year high. The average American family will spend about $2,700 on gasoline this year (driving 22,000 miles). That"s twice as much as it spent on gas two years ago. These prices are having a predictable consequence. The consumer price index has risen by 4.9 percent to date, versus 1.9 percent last year. And last week President Bush"s economic adviser, Gregory Mankiw, acknowledged that a $10 rise in the price of oil probably translates into a half-percentage-point drag on economic growth. For countries like Japan, China and India, the effect is even greater. How did this happen And can Washington—or anybody—do much about it
The answer that flashed on our television screens is instability in the Middle East. Pipeline explosions in Iraq, tensions with Iran and terror attacks in Saudi Arabia all contribute to what analysts call the "security premium" on the price of oil. But that premium might be exaggerated. Oil prices are rising for broader, structural reasons. The world may have to get used to expensive oil.
The largest ingredient in current oil prices has been a massive increase in demand. This year"s growth is double what it has been for the past six years (on average). That"s because the United States is in recovery, Japan"s economy is finally back and Asia—particularly China and India—is growing fast. In fact, this year is likely to have the strongest global growth on record in three decades—unless oil prices choke it off.
While demand is up, supply can"t rise much. For a variety of reasons, almost no oil-producing country has "surplus capacity"—the ability to put substantially more oil into tile market. Oil companies have been slow to increase investments in production, and these expenditures take a few years to bear fruit. "Right now oil markets are tighter than they were on the eve of the 1973 oil shocks. And they will stay tight for the next two years. That makes the geopolitics of oil crucial," says Daniel Yergin, the chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
If there is trouble anywhere, it will probably cause an oil shock. And think of the possibilities—instability in Venezuela, Nigeria, Indonesia, Libya, Saudi Arabia or, of course, Iraq. Last year the markets could absorb the loss of Iraqi oil (during the war). This year they can"t. Iraq has to stay online. And all these other countries have to stay stable.
There is only one country with significant surplus capacity—Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has increased its production repeatedly over the past two years, or else prices would be higher still than they are. And the Saudis are making investments that will increase their surplus capacity by the end of the year. In a tight oil market, Saudi Arabia is the pivotal player.
Consider the irony. One of the Bush administrations (privately stated) reasons for going to war in Iraq was to reduce our dependence on Saudi Arabia"s oil power. It was a reasonable idea. But having botched the occupation, with Iraqi oil more insecure now than before the war, America is today more dependent on Saudi Arabia than ever before. Fortunately the Saudi regime has proved a responsible and reliable player, in this realm. "The Saudis are the central bankers of the world of oil. And they take that role seriously," says Yergin.
What to do about this new reality George Bush proposes to increase U. S. production in Alaska. John Kerry calls for increased conservation. Bush is correct to argue that some increase in American production is important. In 1973, the United States imported one third of its oil from abroad. Today it imports two thirds. And exploration does not have to be ecologically devastating. Even if the major oilfields that are assumed to exist there were discovered in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, only a few thousand acres of the 19 million-acre refuge would be affected.
But the more lasting solution to America"s oil problem has to come from energy efficiency. American demand is the gorilla fueling high oil prices—more than instability or the rise of China or anything else. Between 1990 and 2000, the global trade in oil increased by 9.5 billion barrels. Half of that was accounted for the rise in U. S. imports.
America is consuming more because it is growing more—but also because over the past two decades, it has become much less efficient in its use of gasoline, the only major industrial country to slide backward. The reason is simple: three letters—SUV. In 1990 sport utility vehicles made up 5 percent of America"s cars. Today they make up 55 percent. They violate all energy-efficiency standards because of an absurd loophole in the law that allows them to be classified as trucks.
Bashing the Saudis is easy these days. Controlling our own wastefulness is more difficult. But making no mistake as to which one will make a difference.
PASSAGE TWO
The most important thing now is for Democrats not to panic. Despite what your gut is telling you, this is not the end of the world. The republic survived one run of the George & Dick Show. It will survive another. But I recognize that for those of us who really, really wanted to send President Bush into early retirement, it"s hard to stop sobbing long enough to think rationally about the next four years.
The disappointment wouldn"t weigh so heavily if the promise of victory hadn"t swirled so tantalizingly close. John Kerry"s finest days, the period when he looked the most presidential, came during the debates, with the campaign finish line twinkling on the horizon. Throughout October, as the race pulled tighter than Paris Hilton"s jeans, Kerry volunteers flooded the purple states to energize their voters—tens of thousands of them newly registered.
And then ... defeat. Now, with the image of Bush"s victory speech seared into Democrats" forebrain, the temptation to abandon all hope is almost overwhelming, especially for those who, fight up to the end, refused to entertain the possibility of a second term.
Just before Election Day, I quizzed some of my liberal friends about how they would cope with a Kerry loss. Their answers were variations on the famous five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Of course, the more politically obsessive the friend, the more anger and depression were emphasized. One die-hard Bush hater couldn"t even contemplate acceptance. "I will be incapacitated," he declared.
Bitterly divided as the country is, many Kerry supporters instead must simply learn how to function at whatever stage of recovery they can attain. I know plenty of folks who plan to nurse their anti-Bush ire, using it as a motivating tool to work even harder for a Democratic victory next time. Such chronic rage may sound unhealthy—but it did the trick for Newt Gingrich"s troops in the wake of Bill Clinton"s 1992 win.
For some liberals, the first step forward will be less political than personal as they struggle to repair the damage done to relationships with friends and colleagues who backed Bush, "I"ve sat around listening to people I normally respect talk about how they planned to vote for him, and I just want to shake them," fumed my exceedingly gentle best friend, who spent the summer registering Kerry voters in her suburban Tampa, Fla., neighborhood. But beyond mending fences, my friend had no ideas for how to work through her blues. "It"s not like there"s really anything you can do—other than move to another country."
Unfortunately, what for too many Democrats will be tempted to do is indulge in the traditional orgy of recriminations over where the party went astray. A strikingly amorphous candidate, Kerry provides more than the usual fodder for Dems" eternal squabble over what they should stand for: moderates can claim Kerry was too liberal to woo swing voters; lefties will say he was too inside-the-Beltway to energize the angry, disillusioned masses; and the increasingly unbalanced Ralph Nader will declare him another loathsome Republicrat slave to corporate America.
This sort of infighting may feel cathartic, but it is dangerously counterproductive, serving largely to confirm Republicans" claims that Democrats lack the core values necessary to run the country. Besides, Kerry"s problem wasn"t his policies; it was his personality. The guy was simply too cerebral, too equivocating and too out of touch with Middle America to wrest enough purple-state voters from even a seriously tarnished Bush. Sure, his Vietnam medals were pretty, but no Democrat who attended Swiss boarding school, hails from Massachusetts and raves about his love of French skiers had a snowball"s chance of unseating good ole W.
So we ran an unlikable candidate, and we lost. There"s no reason to go nuts and launch a civil war over whether to embrace A1 Sharpton or Zell (Mad Dog) Miller as our ideological guru for 2008. However we opt to handle our grief, Kerry supporters need to" pull themselves together on Inauguration Day—because if you thought the past four years have been scary, just imagine the policy atrocities to be attempted by a Bush White House freed from the concerns of re-election. With George & Dick on the loose, self-pity and finger pointing are unaffordable distractions for liberals. To paraphrase renowned political sage Jesse Ventura: Democrats haven"t got time to bleed.
PASSAGE THREE
When my wife, Meg, suffered a severe stroke that immobilized her left side, I knew we would be facing a grueling odyssey involving several hospitals, dozens of doctors and countless therapy sessions. What I wasn"t prepared for was the American Way of Managed Health Care, a system that is bureaucratic and often dysfunctional. Yes, medical practitioners in the United States are generally considered among the best in the world, and my wife primarily had first-rate care, but their back-office practice—a business dominated by third-party payers—is badly run at worst and woefully confusing at best.
Meg"s stroke occurred while we were vacationing in the south of France last summer. After being stabilized in the emergency room of a small hospital, she was transferred immediately to a large teaching hospital, where she received excellent treatment in a world-renowned stroke pavilion. When I received the bill for her
stay at the Pasteur Hospital in Nice, I asked the deputy administrator for an itemized statement. I knew I"d need to show it to our health-insurance company—the one-page invoice for more than
20,000. The administrator was puzzled. There were only two daily rates, he explained, one for soins intensifs—or intensive care—and another for non-acute care. There were no extra charges; the numerous ambulance transfers, MRI brain scans, X-rays and assorted tests associated with any serious injury or illness were all-inclusive. In fact, the only supplement was
10.67—about $13—a day for food which, although not three-star bistro quality, was certainly a bargain, and better than anything you can eat in a U.S. hospital.
I"m not arguing that the French healthcare system should be a world benchmark, but compared with what we faced when we returned home, it was a model of simplicity and efficiency. Of course, everything in American medical care is à la carte, and the invoices are so dense with codes and abbreviations, it"s a wonder anyone can decipher them. I often wonder, how much does this cost the American public annually
At one New York hospital, we received bills from doctors we"d never heard of, including one who charged for an office visit when Meg couldn"t even get out of bed. The managed care provider"s computer sent him a check without question. Had he not billed us for the co-payment I never would have noticed the error. Over the past few months, I spent hours clearing up these kinds of mistakes. A doctor friend who heads a department in a large hospital admitted that these kinds of complaints are all too common.
Meg"s medical tab has reached nearly $300,000, which seems monumental, even given the nature of her catastrophic injury. Thankfully, we were covered for most of it. Yet $90,000 of that figure had little or nothing to do with patient care. Roughly 30 cents of each health-care dollar goes to administration, or the processing of paperwork. If that figure could be reduced by a third, even $30,000 would go a long way toward extending her rehab treatments. (Meg"s 2004 benefits have run out.)
When Meg was finally discharged after spending 56 days in hospitals, we received co-payment bills for her medical equipment, including an itemized statement for every extra on her wheelchair (no, the brake extensions, foot pedals, armrest, anti-tip bars, seat and seat belt are not included). But the provider billed us two ways, one for leasing the chair and another for purchase. Even now, after numerous phone calls, I still don"t know whether we own or are renting the wheelchair.
The outpatient rehab therapy sessions presented their own set of challenges. The hospital sent a number of bills—printed in alphanumeric codes—for additional thousands of dollars even though we made the proper co-payments at the time of treatment. Billing administrators barely raised an eyebrow when I told them I had spent too much time on hold and would no longer bother calling to dispute the charges. (We have since received automated early-morning phone calls asking us to contact the hospital.)
I"ve checked with others who have had protracted negotiations with health-care providers and insurers over complex medical treatment. They echo my frustration. Why is it incumbent on the recipient to spend countless hours rectifying the medical administration"s mistakes How much extra does this process add to the nation"s annual health-care bill
Medicare—our government-subsidized system that cares for the elderly—has a much better record in administrative costs. It spends between three and four cents of every dollar on paperwork and processing. A single-payer system is easier and cheaper to run. We"ve had a two-tier health-care system in the United States for a while, and only one tier works. Isn"t it time for man-aged care to slim down and help its patients get better instead of burdening them with needlessly expensive paperwork
PASSAGE FOUR
You can spot them in the grocery store. They"re the morns with the shopping cart cover that"s supposed to protect babies from lurking germs. You can see them on the playground hovering over their toddlers, negotiating toy disputes for their 7-year-olds. They"re in high school, phoning teachers if their children bring home anything other than A"s. They"re even at college-intervening with professors, setting up their children"s dorm rooms and bank accounts and keeping in near-constant contact with their kids via cell phone and instant messaging.
They"re not just parents, they"re superparents.
And while in many communities the above behavior is par for the parental course, experts say that superparenting is really not so super. It"s more like overanxious, over-vigilant and just plain overdone.
Fragile creatures
"Certainly, there are plenty of neglected children in America. But in middle class and upper middle class communities the coddled kid is becoming the norm," says Peter N. Stearns, a social historian at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and the author of "Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America."
"In the last few decades the belief became popular that children are exceptionally fragile creatures and we should treat them that way," says Stearns.
The fact that many Americans are waiting longer to become parents and are having fewer children has also contributed greatly to the phenomenon. "If you have one or two children—rather than four or five—obviously, the individual child becomes much more precious," he says.
Andrea J. Buchanan, author of "Mother Shock: Loving Every (Other) Minute of It," says she sees a clear link between uber-parenting and today"s highly educated mommyforce. "When it comes time to have children," she says, "many career-oriented women still end up putting their career on the backburner and their children on the front." At the same time, many mothers (and fathers) try to bring the same work ethic to parenting as they once did to their careers: they"re willing to work hard, they"re ambitious and competitive, and they have a desire for accomplishment, control and results.
Buchanan says she thinks the problem starts even before the baby arrives. "I like to use the trip analogy," she says. "Instead of just packing your suitcase and reading the tour book, many pregnant women are now made to feel they must learn how to fly the plane. So this is where it begins. You get sucked into it fight then." "Parents are given this false notion that they can and should control all aspects of child-rearing from conception to the child"s post-doctoral work," she says.
"The sum effect has been that parenting has become complicated beyond what most of us believe we can handle on our own," says Dr. Bernardo J. Carducci, a professor of psychology at Indiana University in New Albany, Ind., and the director of its Shyness Research Institute.
"As we make parenting more and more complicated," he says, "what happens is people are uncertain of what to do. Every time you have uncertainty, you have anxiety." According to Carducci, fear is the stuff of overparenting.
Maternal bling-bling
"Much of the $6 billion that Americans spend annually on baby gear is spent because marketers have scared us into buying it or because everyone we know has a certain stroller or diaper bag," Carducci says. It"s what he calls maternal bling-bling—stuff we get to make us feel like we"re good parents.
"To alleviate your anxiety you buy what the marketers say you need and what the other mothers in Mommy and Me have," he says. "That"s conformity. You can look at a suburban morn and a rapper and see the same thing. They"re surrounded by this stuff. It"s a way to compare yourself to others and announce to the world that you"re a "good" mom."
"Then, once a child starts school, the chances for overparenting and the pitfalls for not doing so abound," says Dr. Alexandra Barzvi, clinical coordinator for the Institute of Anxiety and Mood at the New York University Child Study Center. "Many parents are even worked up about which preschool their child gets into," she says. "They see it as a very competitive world and they introduce this to their children right away." By the time the children are ready to try to get into college, the parental anxiety—as well as the child"s—is often out of control. The Child Study Center recently introduced a workshop to help teens and their parents deal with the anxiety of applying for college.
"In our society now, a child"s success in school has become emblematic of your success as a parent," says Stearns. So if you have a kid who gets into (never mind graduates from) Harvard, that"s as good as a stellar (although long-awaited) performance review.
"While over-anxious parenting may make us feel better in the short-term," says Carducci, "there are long-term consequences. Over-anxious parents raise emotionally fragile kids—kids who can"t stand on their own. They don"t know how to make sound decisions and they aren"t equipped to deal with failure and frustration."
"Frustration tolerance is the best predictor of self-esteem," notes Carducci. When a child can endure failing, pick himself up and carry on, he gains strength and confidence. When he knows he"s done something on his own—whether he succeeds or fails—he"ll be proud of his effort.
Charting their own course
On the other hand, if a child is made to believe that he couldn"t survive without his dad or mom bailing him out or somehow protecting him, it has the opposite result. Carducci says it sends a clear message to kids that they are incapable of success or decision-making without their parents. Furthermore, many professionals contend overparented kids are at a higher risk for anxiety disorders and depression. They also tend to have trouble charting their course later in life.
"Hot-house raised kids often need a period in which they need to wander later," says Steams. "This isn"t bad necessarily, but it"s not how life used to be. Kids used to graduate college and then enter the workforce." He sees the delayed growing up, where kids meander after college, as their way of reclaiming their childhood—leading the less directed and controlled life that they probably should"ve had as youngsters.
"Another impact," says Steams, "has been on something even less intangible." "Parenting has become less enjoyable and that"s really the shame," says Steams.
Dr. George Cohen, a clinical professor of pediatrics at George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C., and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics, says that while overparenting can be a problem, there"s also the good side of it—at least the children are lucky enough to have parents who are vigilant and care, albeit perhaps a little too much. "Finding a happy medium-parenting enough but not too much—is sometimes easier said than done," says Cohen.
It"s not even that people who overparent are fanatics necessarily. They"re more than likely just confused and uncertain. "A lot of times the reason some parents are overly anxious is because they don"t know what to do," he says. "They read one article and it tells them to do one thing, another article tells them to do the opposite. Parents often don"t know what to believe or where to turn."
A good pediatrician can do an anxious parent a world of good, according to Cohen. "Sometimes people can start out as an overanxious parent but as they become much more comfortable they strike a better balance," he says.
Love them the way they are.
Nobody is suggesting that parenthood can or should be anxiety-free. What they are suggesting is that parents love their children for who they are, not what they want them to be. Most people don"t excel in every subject. So getting straight A"s is probably more about what you want rather than a true reflection of your child"s abilities. The following might be the solutions to America"s oil problem except ______.(PASSAGE ONE)