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In the days before preschool academies were all but mandatory for kids under 5, I stayed home and got my early education from Mike Douglas. His TV talk show was one of my mother"s favorite programs, and because I looked up to my mother, it became one of my favorites too. Yet I quickly developed my own fascination with Douglas, who died lastweek. Maybe it was the plain set—a couple of chairs and little else—or maybe it was the sound of people talking about ideas and events rather than telling stories. Whatever it was, to my 4-year-old mind it was all terribly adult, like my mother"s morning coffee. It was—relatively. The grown-up world I live in now is another matter. Thanks in part to the proliferation and polarization of talk shows in the last 20 years or so—the generation after Douglas and his big-tent gentility went off the air—public conversations have become scary monsters indeed. Like other forms of entertainment, the programming of commercial talk shows today has moved beyond niche to hermetic. The idea of a host booking guests as varied as Jerry Rubin, Malcolm X and Richard Nixon—and treating them all with a certain deference, as Douglas did—is unheard of. Equally amazing is to consider that Douglas was a moderate; though he didn"t always share his guests" views, he nonetheless insisted on everybody having his or her say. What he did, in other words, was more important than who he was. That was probably an easy dictate for an old-schooL modest guy such as Douglas to follow. And now Oprah Winfrey is sincere enough, but her viewership is a cult of personality, not of people or issues.like her contemporaries, Oprah chooses her guests and issues to suit her show, rather than allowing guests and issues to be the show. She prefers uplift and empowerment, which is more palatable than name-calling, the hallmark of Bill O"Reilly or Howard Stern. But spin is spin, and in her own way Oprah gets as tiresome as those guys. Ultimately, these shows fail to convey the fullness of the conversation, the sense that America is one place—or one host—with many voices at equal volume. That doesn"t mean everybody"s right. But to have everybody engaged and feeling a stake in the outcome of the discussion is priceless. Engagement is nothing less than national security: I felt that as a preschooler, watching Mike Douglas on TV, and I feel it now. The age of irony, they would say, fueled by information that moves at the speed of light, demands a different approach. It can be inferred from Paragraph 1 that the author_____.
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Partly due to a historical development marked by worldwide colonialism, urbanization, and globalization, in the course of this century humankind is likely to experience its most extreme cultural loss. As K David Harrison notes in When Languages Die, "The last speakers of probably half of the world"s languages are alive today." Their children or grandchildren are pressured to speak only thedominant language of their community or country. Under one estimate, more than 50% of the 6,900 or so languages identified nowadays are expected to become extinct in a matter of a few ecades. The precise criteria for what counts as a distinct language are controversial—especially those regarding closely related linguistic systems, which are often inaccurately referred to as dialects of the same language. The problem is complicated by the insufficiency of studies about the grammar of many of the world"s endangered languages. In addition, from a cognitive standpoint any two groups of individuals whose languages are mutually intelligible may in fact have distinct mental grammars. As a cognitive system, a language shows dynamic properties that cannot exist independently of its speakers. This is the sense in which the Anatolian languages and Dalmatian are extinct. Therefore, language preservation depends on the maintenance of the native-speaking human groups. Unfortunately, the most accelerated loss of distinct languages takes place where economic development is rapid, worsening the breakdown of minority communities that speak different languages. In this perspective, a language often begins to die long before the passing of the last speaker: New generations may start using it only for limited purposes, increasingly shifting to the community"s dominant language. In this process, knowledge of the dying language erodes both at the individual level and at the community level. Linguistic diversity itself may be the worst loss at stake, because it may be the most promising and precise source of evidence for the range of variation allowed in the organization of the human cognitive system. For instance, Harrison discusses many strategies for manipulating quantities across languages, often endangered ones. The rapid loss of linguistic diversity substantially hinders comparative investigation about the multiple ways in which a single cognitive domain can be organized. Linguists are well aware that their efforts alone cannot prevent this loss. Community involvement, especially with government support, has proven essential in slowing or even reversing language loss in different cases (e.g., Basque and Irish). Crucially, endangered languages must be acquired by new generations of speakers. Here the biological metaphor adopted by Harrison applies appropriately—documentation of dead languages is akin to a fossil record, providing only partial clues about complex cognitive systems. One of the difficulties in differentiating one language from another is that _____.
In the days before preschool academies were all but mandatory for kids under 5, I stayed home and got my early education from Mike Douglas. His TV talk show was one of my mother"s favorite programs, and because I looked up to my mother, it became one of my favorites too. Yet I quickly developed my own fascination with Douglas, who died lastweek. Maybe it was the plain set—a couple of chairs and little else—or maybe it was the sound of people talking about ideas and events rather than telling stories. Whatever it was, to my 4-year-old mind it was all terribly adult, like my mother"s morning coffee. It was—relatively. The grown-up world I live in now is another matter. Thanks in part to the proliferation and polarization of talk shows in the last 20 years or so—the generation after Douglas and his big-tent gentility went off the air—public conversations have become scary monsters indeed. Like other forms of entertainment, the programming of commercial talk shows today has moved beyond niche to hermetic. The idea of a host booking guests as varied as Jerry Rubin, Malcolm X and Richard Nixon—and treating them all with a certain deference, as Douglas did—is unheard of. Equally amazing is to consider that Douglas was a moderate; though he didn"t always share his guests" views, he nonetheless insisted on everybody having his or her say. What he did, in other words, was more important than who he was. That was probably an easy dictate for an old-schooL modest guy such as Douglas to follow. And now Oprah Winfrey is sincere enough, but her viewership is a cult of personality, not of people or issues.like her contemporaries, Oprah chooses her guests and issues to suit her show, rather than allowing guests and issues to be the show. She prefers uplift and empowerment, which is more palatable than name-calling, the hallmark of Bill O"Reilly or Howard Stern. But spin is spin, and in her own way Oprah gets as tiresome as those guys. Ultimately, these shows fail to convey the fullness of the conversation, the sense that America is one place—or one host—with many voices at equal volume. That doesn"t mean everybody"s right. But to have everybody engaged and feeling a stake in the outcome of the discussion is priceless. Engagement is nothing less than national security: I felt that as a preschooler, watching Mike Douglas on TV, and I feel it now. The age of irony, they would say, fueled by information that moves at the speed of light, demands a different approach. According to Paragraph 3, Mike Douglas _____.
"It keeps you grounded, puts you in a situation that keeps you out of trouble, and puts you with a group that has the same mind-set," says Molly Skinner, a sophomore at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, appraising the nonathletic benefits she experienced while playing soccer in high school. According to one new study, suiting up for the high school team does seem to givegirls a boost when it comes to getting a college diploma. The recent study, conducted by professors from Brigham Young University (BYU) and West Chester University of Pennsylvania (WCUP), found that women who played sports in high school were 73 percent more likely to earn a bachelor"s degree within six years of graduating from high school than those who did not. (The study did not look at male athletes.) Their analysis of data from 5,103 women collected as part of a U.S. Department of Education study found that even among girls who face statistical challenges finishing college based on socioeconomic background, the athletes still had more than 40 percent higher college completion rates than nonathletes, regardless of whether they played at the college level. "In times when we worry about improving academic performance or outcomes, we wonder should we be devoting time and money to extracurricular activities" asks BYU Prof. Mikaela Dufur, one of the study"s authors. "These are important arenas for—in our case—girls to make connections with others and adults who help encourage them to succeed." At the collegiate level, though, the measure of women"s sports remains as murky (unclear) as ever, thanks to the politics of Title DC Enacted in 1972, Title DC guarantees women equal opportunity in collegiate sports, but its critics contend that many schools reach that balance by cutting men"s teams rather than adding women"s.A July report on Title DC from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has done little to settle the debate. That study found increases in student participation in college athletics on both sides of the gender line, though the growth rate was higher for women"s teams and female athletes. Title DC critics say that the GAO report relies too heavily on National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) data, which can obscure the number of men"s teams cut from particular schools as more colleges join the NCAA verall. While the political debate continues, female athletes themselves seem to be focusing on the finish line. "I think that sports teaches you to persevere," says Virginia Tech-bound Rachel Plumb, who raced on her high school"s cross country team. "It teaches you to keep an eye on a goal." According to the first paragraph, _____.
Alison Preston of the University of Texas at Austin"s Center for Learning and Memory explains:A short-term memory"s conversion to a long-term memory requires changes within the brain that protect the memory from interference from competing stimuli or disruption from injury or disease. This time-dependent process of stabilization, whereby our experiences achieve a permanent record in ourmemory, is referred to as "consolidation". Memory consolidation can occur at many organizational levels in the brain. The cellular and molecular portions of memory consolidation typically take place within the first minutes or hours of learning and result in changes to neurons (nerve cells) or sets of neurons. Systems-level consolidation, involving the reorganization of brain networks that handle the processing of individual memories can then happen on a much slower time frame of days or even years. The consolidation process that affects declarative memories-recollections of general facts and specific events—relies on the function of some specific structures in the brain. At the cellular level, memory is expressed as changes to the structure and function of neurons. For example, new synapses—the connections between neurons through which they exchange information—can form to allow for communication between new networks of neurons. Alternatively, existing synapses can be strengthened to allow for increased sensitivity in the communication between two neurons.Consolidating such synaptic changes requires the synthesis of new RNA and proteins in the structures, which transform temporary alterations in synaptic transmission into persistent modifications of synaptic architecture. With time, the brain systems also change. Initially, the specific structure works in concert with sensory-processing regions distributed in the neo-cortex (the outermost layer of the brain) to form the new memories. Within the neo-cortex, representations of the elements that constitute an event in our life are distributed across multiple brain regions according to their content. When a memory is first formed, the specific structure rapidly combines this distributed information into a single memory, thus acting as an index of representations in the sensory-processing regions. As time passes, cellular and molecular changes allow for the strengthening of direct connections among the neocortical regions, enabling access to the memory independent of the structure. Thus, while damage to the structure from injury or particular disorder hampers the ability to form new declarative memories, such a disruption may not impair memories for facts and events that have already been consolidated. Thus, an amnesiac with hippocampal damage would not be able to learn the names of current presidential candidates but would be able to recall the identity of our 16th president. The structure damage may not disturb consolidated memories for facts and events because _____.
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