Passage II : 31. But the more the term is used, the more confusion reigns, at least for those not familiar with the niceties of the underpinning science.
Passage II : 34. Geologists examine layers of rock called “strata”, which tell a story of changes to the functioning of Earth’s surface and near-surface processes, be these oceanic, biological, terrestrial, riverine, atmospheric, tectonic or chemical.
Passage III : 35. The purpose of advertising, according to orthodox economic theory, is to provide us with information about the goods and services offered in the marketplace.
Passage III : 36. Without that stream of information we consumers won’t make informed choices, and Adam Smith’s invisible hand will be not only invisible but also blind.
Passage III : 37. We won’t know when a better frozen dinner comes along, nor will we know where to get the best deal on a new car.
Passage III : 38. The contents of marketing messages themselves, however, show the simple-mindedness of that explanation
Passage III : 39. Classified ads and yellow pages telephone directories would suffer if advertising were only about telling people who already want something where to get it and what it costs.
Passage III : 40. Rather, advertising is intended to expand the pool of desires, awakening wants that would lie dormant otherwise – or, as critics say, manufacturing wants that would not otherwise exist.
Passage IV : 42. The game gives players the chance to catch Pokemon lying on a real-world view from the phone’s camera.
Passage IV : 43. It’s only been out a few days but it’s already proved a monster hit, so much so that at times the game’s service had been overwhelmed.
Passage IV : 44. Like the original game, it’s all about catching and battling Pokemon, although things work a little bit differently.
Passage IV : 46. The Pokemon pop up at random using your phone’s GPS location, although there have been some concerns that people might absent-mindedly run into the road while trying to catch Pokemon.
Passage IV : 47. But it’s very easy to get immersed and carried away, and there are likely to be a lot of children playing.
Reading Comprehension : 48. Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.
Reading Comprehension : 49. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking – perhaps even a new sense of the self.
Reading Comprehension : 50. “We are not only what we read.” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at the Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.
Reading Comprehension : 51. Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.
Reading Comprehension :52. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.”
Reading Comprehension : 53. Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Passage II : 54. A study of 100 reefs, published in Science Magazine, shows the interval between bleaching events in recent decades has shortened dramatically.
Passage II : 55. It has gone from once every 25-30 years in the early 1980s to an average of just once every six years today.
Passage II : 56. Bleaching is caused by anomalously warm water, which prompts coral polyps to eject their symbiotic algae.
Passage II : 57. This drains the corals of their color and is fatal unless conditions are reversed in a reasonably short time.
Passage II : 58. But even if temperatures fall back quickly, it can still take many years for damaged reefs to fully recover.
Passage II : 59. Aside from their beauty, tropical corals provide important ecosystem services upon which the livelihoods of many millions of people depend.
