Tuesday, October 23, 2007

SAT prep questions, Oct. 23, 2007

Match the appropriate number with the appropriate letter….

1) 1.Dallas--US prosecutors failed to persuade a jury [in Dallas] to convict five leaders of a Muslim charity on any of the charges, or even reach a verdict on many of the 197 counts. NYT A1

2)22. DC--A government audit expected to be released Tuesday says that records documenting the work of DynCorp International, the State Department’s largest contractor, are in such disarray that the department cannot say “specifically what it received” for most of the $1.2 billion it has paid the company since 2004 to train the police in Iraq. NYT A1

3) 3.Atlanta--For more than five months, the lake that provides drinking water to almost five million people here has been draining away in a withering drought. … Scientists have warned of impending disaster. And life, for the most part, has gone on just as before. The response to the worst drought on record in the Southeast has unfolded in ultra-slow motion. All summer, more than a year after the drought began, fountains sprayed and football fields were watered, prisoners got two showers a day and Coca-Cola’s bottling plants chugged along at full strength. On an 81-degree day this month, an outdoor theme park began to manufacture what was intended to be a 1.2-million-gallon mountain of snow. …. a history of inaction in Georgia and across the South when it comes to managing and conserving water, even in the face of rapid growth. Between 1990 and 2000, water use in Georgia increased 30 percent. But the state has not yet come up with an estimate of how much water is available during periods of normal rainfall, much less a plan to handle the worst-case event — dry faucets. … a sense of urgency has been slow to take hold. Last year, a bill died in the Georgia Legislature that would have required that low-flow water devices be installed in older houses before they are resold. Most golf courses are classified as “agricultural.” And Georgia is not at the back of the pack. Alabama, where severe drought is even more widespread, is even further behind in its planning. … It’s been develop first and ask questions later,” said Gil Rogers, a lawyer with the Southern Environmental Law Center.

4) 4. 250,000 evacuated in California as fires spread. NYT A1

5) 5. The Dollar’sGot Further to Slide. As the US economy moves from being an engine of global growth to a parth that is in line with the average of other major countries, the trade deficit will narrow and a weaker dollar will be part of that adjustment. WSJ A19

a) a)They can’t even get a conviction in Texas?!?!?!

b) b)So gimme an ADDITIONAL $46 billion for the war!! NYT A13

c) c)Ecology is a tool of Satan.

d) d)Malibu .. is the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world. … stand at the mouth of Malibu Canyon or sleep in the Hotel St. George for any length of time and you eventually will face the flames. It’s a statistical certainty. … If Southern Californians seemed unprepared for [Ponet Square and Malibu fires of 1993] they had no one to blame but themselves. The conflagrations of 1993 came down grimly familiar pathways—an there was no shortage of omens. Ignoring every lesson of the recent fires and earthquakes, two new mega-developments … are under construction in the environmentally sensitive, fire-prone Santa Clarita and Leona Valley areas of northern Los Angeles County…. Suburban firestorms are becoming ever more apocalyptic. The social cost of fire has increased in almost geometric relation to the linear growth of firebelt suburb populations…. Politicians and the media have allowed the essential lanuse issue—the rampant, uncontrolled proliferation of firebelt suburbs—to be camouflaged in a neutral discourse about natural hazards and public safety… The $100 million cost of mobilizing 15,000 firefighters during Halloween week 1993 may be an increasingly common entry in the public ledger.. –Mike Davis, ECOLOGY OF FEAR (1998), from chapter entitled “The Case for Letting Mailbu Burn” pp. 97, 98, 122, 142, 143 , 146-7

e) N Card, 2006: . . . overall the result is easy to predict: a regulatory pole will emerge in Eurasia, one closer to the geographic center of the world, and there will be a slowdown in the flow of goods, capital, and migration that currently nourishes the United States. The United States will then have to live like other nations, notably by reigning in its huge trade deficit, a constraint that would imply a 15 to 20 percent drop in the standard of living of the population. . . –Emmanuel Todd,p. 199 (2002)

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