The author would most likely agree with which of the following statements about corporate
Annoyed by the proliferation of "front" organizations, corporations are likely to reduce their efforts to work with minority-owned subcontractors in the near future.
B. Although corporations showed considerable interest in working with minority businesses in the 1970's, their aversion to government paperwork made them reluctant to pursue many government contracts.
C. The significant response of corporations in the t970's is likely to be sustained and conceivably be increased throughout the 1980's.
D. Although corporations are eager to cooperate with minority-owned businesses, a shortage of capital in the 1970's made substantial response impossible.
How many really suffer as a result of labor market problems? This is one of the most critical yet contentious social policy questions. In many ways, our social statistics exaggerate the degree of hardship.
Unemployment does not have the same dire consequences today as it did in the 1930's when most of the unemployed were primary breadwinners, when income and earnings were usually much closer to the margin of subsistence, and when there were no countervailing social programs for those failing in the labor market. Increasing affluence, the rise of families with more than one wage earner, the growing predominance of secondary earners among the unemployed, and improved social welfare protection have unquestionably mitigated the consequences of joblessness. Earnings and income data also overstate the dimensions of hardship. Among the millions with hourly earnings at or below the minimum wage level, the overwhelming majority are from multiple-earner, relatively affluent families. Most of those counted by the poverty statistics are elderly or handicapped or have family responsibilities which keep them out of the labor force, so the poverty statistics are by no means an accurate indicator of labor market pathologies.
Yet there are also many ways our social statistics underestimate the degree of labor-market- related hardship. The unemployment counts exclude the millions of fully employed workers whose wages are so low that their families remain in poverty. Low wages and repeated or prolonged unemployment frequently interact to undermine the capacity for self-support. Since the number experiencing joblessness at some time during the year is several times the number unemployed in any month, those who suffer as a result of forced idleness can equal or exceed average annual unemployment, even though only a minority of the jobless in any month really suffer. For every person counted in the monthly unemployment tallies, there is another working part-time because of the inability to find full-time work, or else outside the labor force but wanting a job. Finally, income transfers in our country have always focused on the elderly, disabled, and dependent, neglecting the needs of the working poor, so that the dramatic expansion of cash and in-kind transfers does not necessarily mean that those failing in the labor market are adequately protected.
As a result of such contradictory evidence, it is uncertain whether those suffering seriously as a result of thousands or the tens of millions, and, hence, whether high levels of joblessness can be tolerated or must be countered by job creation and economic stimulus. There is only one area of agreement in this debate--that the existing poverty, employment, and earnings statistics are inadequate for one of their primary applications, measuring the consequences of labor market problems.
Which of the following is the principal topic of the passage? ______
A. What causes labor market pathologies that result in suffering.
B. Why income measures are imprecise in measuring degrees of poverty.
C. Which of the currently used statistical procedures are the best for estimating the incidence of hardship that is due to unemployment.
D. How social statistics give an unclear picture of the degree of hardship caused by tow wages and insufficient employment opportunities.
Species interdependence in nature confers many benefits on the species involved, but it can also become a point of weakness when one species involved in the relationship is affected by a catastrophe. Thus, flowering plant species dependent on insect pollination, as opposed to self- pollination or wind pollination, could be endangered when the population of insect-pollinators is depleted by the use of pesticides.
In the forests of New Brunswick, for example, various pesticides have been sprayed in the past 25 years in efforts to control the spruce budworm, an economically significant pest. Scientists have now investigated the effects of the spraying of Matacil, one of the anti-budworm agents that is least toxic to insect-pollinators. They studied Matacil's effects on insect mortality in a wide variety of wild insect species and on plant fecundity, expressed as the percentage of the total flowers on an individual plant that actually developed fruit and bore seeds. They found that the most pronounced mortality after the spraying of Matacil occurred among the smaller bees and one family of flies, insects that were all important pollinators of numerous species of plants growing beneath the tree canopy of forests. The fecundity of plants in one common indigenous species, the red-osier dogwood, was significantly reduced in the sprayed areas as compared to that of plants in control plots where Matacil was not sprayed. This species is highly dependent on the insect-pollinators most vulnerable to Matacil. The creeping dogwood, a species similar to the red-osier dogwood, but which is pollinated by large bees, such as bumblebees, showed no significant decline in fecundity. Since large bees are not affected by the spraying of Matacil, these results add weight to the argument that spraying where the pollinators are sensitive to the pesticide used decreases plant fecundity.
The question of whether the decrease in plant fecundity caused by the spraying of pesticides actually causes a decline in the overall population of flowering plant species still remains unanswered. Plant species dependent solely on seeds for survival or dispersal are obviously more vulnerable to any decrease in plant fecundity that occurs, whatever its cause. If, on the other hand, vegetative growth and dispersal (by means of shoots or runners) are available as alternative reproductive strategies for a species, then decreases in plant fecundity may be of little consequence. The fecundity effects described here are likely to have the most profound impact on plant species with all four of the following characteristics, a short life span, a narrow geographic range, an incapacity for vegetative propagation, and a dependence on a small number of insect- pollinator species. Perhaps we should give special attention to the conservation of such plant species since they lack key factors in their defenses against the environmental disruption caused by pesticide use.
Which of the following best summarizes the main point of the passage? ______
A. Species interdependence is a point of weakness for some plants, but is generally beneficial to insects involved in pollination.
B. Efforts to control the spruce budworm have had deleterious effects on the red-osier dogwood.
C. The use of pesticides may be endangering certain plant species dependent on insects for pollination.
D. The spraying of pesticides can reduce the fecundity of a plant species, but probably does not affect its overall population stability.
Which of the following proposals best responds to the issues raised by the author? ______
A. Innovative programs using multiple approaches should be set up to reduce the level of unemployment.
B. A compromise should be found between the positions of those who view joblessness as an evil greater than economic control and those who hold the opposite view.
C. New statistical indices should be developed to measure the degree to which unemployment and inadequately paid employment cause suffering.
D. Consideration should be given to the ways in which statistics can act as partial causes of the phenomena that they purport to measure.