[postlink]http://xb-cc0910.blogspot.com/2009/08/passagethomas.html[/postlink]
Passages1. Juan loves to play games. His favorite game is chess because it requires a great deal of thought. Juan also likes to play less demanding board games that are based mostly on luck. He prefers Monopoly because it requires luck and skill. If he’s alone, Juan likes to play action video games as long as they aren’t too violent.
2. Maria is watching too much television. A toddler shouldn’t be spending hours staring blankly at a screen. Worse yet, some of her wild behavior have been inspired by those awful cartoons she watches. We need to spend more time reading books with her and pull the plug on the TV!
3. Someday we will all have robots that will be our personal servants. They will look and behave much like real humans. We will be able to talk to these mechanical helpers and they will be able to respond in kind. Amazingly, the robots of the future will be able to learn from experience. They will be smart, strong, and untiring workers whose only goal will be to make our lives easier.
4. A number of recent books with titles like Raising Cain, Real Boys, and Lost Boys all focus on the same issue: Today’s teenaged boys are feeling more anxiety than ever before about their physical appearance. Bombarded by advertising featuring well-muscled, semi-clad young men, teenage boys are experiencing what teenage girls have been coping with for years. They are afraid that they cannot possibly live up to the media’s idealized image of their gender. Young boys below the average in height, weight, or both suffer the most. Often, they are brutally teased by their brawnier peers. Some react to the ridicule by heading for the gym and lifting weights. Yet even those who successfully “bulk up” don’t like feeling that they are considered worthless if they lose their hard-won muscle tone. Others, convinced that no amount of body building can help, often withdraw from social contact with their peers. This is their way of avoiding taunts about their size or shape. Still, they are understandably angry at being badly treated because of their body type. Although school psychologists generally recognize that boys today are having severe body image problems, they are at a loss about what to do to solve those problem.
5. In 1997, the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission reported that skateboarding injuries were up by 33 percent. Mountain climbing injuries were also up by 20 percent. Similarly, snowboarding injuries showed an increase of thirty-one percent. By all accounts, many Americans are having a love affair with risky sports; as a result, they are injuring themselves in ever greater numbers. One reason for the growing participation in risky, or extreme, sports has been put forth by Dan Cady, a professor of popular culture at California State University. According to Cady, previous generations didn’t need to seek out risk. It was all around them in the form of disease epidemics, economic instability, and global wars. At one time, just managing to stay alive was risky, but that feeling has all but disappeared, at least for members of the privileged classes. To a degree Cady’s theory is confirmed in the words of adventure racer Joy Marr. Marr says that risk has been “minimized” in everyday life, forcing people to seek out challenges in order to prove themselves. (Source: Karl Taro Greenfield. “Life on the Edge.” Time. September 6, 1999, p.29).
6. In several states across the nation, there has been successful drive to end “social promotion.” In other words, children who do not achieve the required score on a standardized test will no longer be promoted to the next grade. Instead, they will have to repeat the grade they have finished. Yet despite the calls for ending social promotion--many of them from politicians looking for a crowd-pleasing issue--there is little evidence that making children repeat a grade has a positive effect. If anything, research suggests that forcing children to repeat a grade hurts rather than helps their academic performance. In 1989, University of Georgia Professor Thomas Holms surveyed sixty-three studies that compared the performance of kids who had repeated a grade with those who had received a social promotion. Holms found that most of the children who had repeated a grade had a poorer record of academic performance than the children who had been promoted despite poor test scores. A similar study of New York City children in the 1980s revealed that the children who repeated a grade were more likely to drop out upon reaching high school. The call to end social promotion may have a nice ring to it in political speeches. Yet there is little indication that it does students any real good.
7. Marketing executives in television work with a relatively stable advertising medium. In many ways, the television ads aired today are similar to those aired two decades ago. Most television ads still feature actors, still run 30 or 60 seconds, and still show a product. However, the differing dynamics of the Internet pose unique challenges to advertisers, forcing them to adapt their practices and techniques on a regular basis.
In the early days of Internet marketing, online advertisers employed banner and pop-up ads to attract customers. These techniques reached large audiences, generated many sales leads, and came at a low cost. However, a small number of Internet users began to consider these advertising techniques intrusive and annoying. Yet because marketing strategies relying heavily on banners and pop-ups produced results, companies invested growing amounts of money into purchasing these ad types in hopes of capturing market share in the burgeoning online economy. As consumers became more sophisticated, frustration with these online advertising techniques grew. Independent programmers began to develop tools that blocked banner and pop-up ads.
The popularity of these tools exploded when the search engine Google, at the time an increasingly popular website fighting to solidify its place on the Internet with giants Microsoft and Yahoo, offered free software enabling users to block pop-up ads. The backlash against banner ads grew as new web browsers provided users the ability to block image-based ads such as banner ads. Although banner and pop-up ads still exist, they are far less prominent than during the early days of the Internet.
A major development in online marketing came with the introduction of pay-per-click ads. Unlike banner or pop-up ads, which originally required companies to pay every time a website visitor saw an ad, pay-per-click ads allowed companies to pay only when an interested potential customer clicked on an ad. More importantly, however, these ads circumvented the pop-up and banner blockers. As a result of these advantages and the incredible growth in the use of search engines, which provide excellent venues for pay-per-click advertising, companies began turning to pay-per-click marketing in droves. However, as with the banner and pop-up ads that preceded them, pay-per-click ads came with their drawbacks. When companies began pouring billions of dollars into this emerging medium, online advertising specialists started to notice the presence of what would later be called click fraud: representatives of a company with no interest in the product advertised by a competitor click on the competitor's ads simply to increase the marketing cost of the competitor. Click fraud grew so rapidly that marketers sought to diversify their online positions away from pay-per-click marketing through new mediums.
Although pay-per-click advertising remains a common and effective advertising tool, marketers adapted yet again to the changing dynamics of the Internet by adopting new techniques such as pay-per-performance advertising, search engine optimization, and affiliate marketing. As the pace of the Internet's evolution increases, it seems all the more likely that advertising successfully on the Internet will require a strategy that shuns constancy and embraces change.
8. "Hurry, Dad. We're ready to go!" exclaimed Heather. Heather and Danny finished their chores early and were waiting by the door. It seemed to take their father a long time to finish his breakfast! Danny began to wonder how long it would take him. "Please hurry up, dad," he said, Heather and I have been waiting forever!"
At last their father said, "OK, kids, let's go!" The three of them walked out the door. "Bye, Mom!" called Heather.At the store Heather and Danny walked up and down the aisles. Their dad followed behind them. Danny pointed and whispered to Heather. Heather nodded her head, smiling. "Well, kids, what do you think?" asked their father.
"This one!" both children shouted at once. Soon, their new cat, Tiger, was on his way home!
