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passage 5-8
11-15.BCADD
21-25.CBBCA
Space Tourism
Make your reservations now. The space tourism industry is officially open for business, and tickets are going for a mere $20 million for a one-week stay in space. Despite reluctance from National Air and Space Administration (NASA), Russia made American businessman Dennis Tito the world's first space tourist. Tito flew into space aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket that arrived
Passage
In 1854 my great-grandfather, Morris Marable, was sold on an auction block in Georgia for
$500. For his white slave master, the sale was just “business as usual.” But to Morris Marable
and his heirs, slavery was a crime against our humanity. This pattern of human rights violations
against enslaved African-Americans continued under racial segregation for nearly another century.
The fundamental problem of American democracy in the 21st century is the problem of “structural
racism” the deep patterns of socio-economic inequality and accumulated disadvantage that are
coded by race, and constantly justified in public speeches by both racist stereotypes and white
indifference. Do Americans have the capacity and vision to remove these structural barriers that
deny democratic rights and opportunities to millions of their fellow citizens?
This country has previous
Passage Eight
Every fall, like clockwork, Linda Krentz of Beaverton, Oregon, felt her brain go on strike. “I just couldn’t get going in the morning,” she says. “I’d get depressed and gain 10 pounds every winter and lose them again in the spring.” Then she read about seasonal affective disorder, a form of depression that occurs in fall and winter, and she saw the light-literally. Every morning now she turns on a specially constructed light box for half an hour and sits in front of it to trick her brain into thinking it’s still enjoying those long summer days. It seems to work.
Krentz is not alone. Scientists estimate that 10 million Americans suffer from seasonal depression and 25 million more develop milder versions. But there’s never been definitive proof that treatment with very bright lights makes a difference. After all, it’s hard to do a double-blind test when the subjec
Passage Five
Low-level slash-and-burn farming doesn’t harm rainforest. On the contrary, it helps farmers and improves forest soils. This is the unorthodox view of a German soil scientist who has shown that burnt clearings in the Amazon, dating back more than 1,000 years, helped create patches of rich, fertile soil that farmers still benefit from today.
Glaser has shown that most of this fertile organic matter comes from “black carbon