Reading - 001

 

The dark regions in the starry night sky are not pockets in the universe that are devoid of stars as had long been thought.

Stars can be far enough from Earth to be obscured even by very sparesely distributed matter.

The inward force of gravity is balanced by the generation of heat.

Thus, ethologists can accomplish little-beyond reminding us that we are animals until they study humans as cultural beings.

Describe mechanisms by which the skin protects itself against pathogens.

Unsaturated fatty acid, an important component of the lipids in sebum collected from the skin surface, inhibit the growth of several bacterial and fungal cutaneous pathogens. These acids are a metabolic product of certain gram-poisitive members of the cutaneous community, which break down the more complex lipids in freshly secreted sebum.

Among the natural defenses of the skin against pathogeic organisms are all of the following except the tendency of the pathogens toward homeostasis.

Overlooked part of the significance of a prohibition governing one aspect of yarn production in medival Europe

The passage suggests that the author would regard which of the following areas of inquiry as most likely to reveal the slaves' cultural continuities with Africa?

 

by forcing our surrender to the authority of the clock, systematic timekeeping has imposed a form of tyranny on society.

 

Computers have become adpet in rarefied domains once thought to be uniquely human. However, they simultaneously have failed to master certain tasks basic to the human experience, including spatial orientation and object recognition, and in so doing, have shown us how impressive such fundamental skills truly are.

 

Even if the story now seems a surprisingly innocuous overture to the author's later, more fully developed narrations, it prefigures some of the key traits of those bleaker tales.

 

Once white stepped down from a political platform, where his daring, defamatory speeches provoked baying applause from audiences, he was courteous and considerate even to poiticians he had just slandered in the speech. 

 

As the finances of the energy-trading firm began unraveling, what eventually became unmistakable was that the company had been concocting "value" out of thin air, thanks not to the trading strategies it promoted as visionary but to financial games that turned a once-solid entity into the most notorious debacle in an era of corporate scandals.

 

Kept hidebound by cloying commerical radio and clueless record executives, the American popular music scene has frequently depended on cities at the edges of the cultural map to provide a much-needed shot of orginality. The momentary consensus about what the next big thing is seems to come out of nowhere-as if someone blows a whistle only those in the know can hear, and suddenly record executives and journalists are crawling all over what had previously been an obsucre locale.

 

the idea that pianists should be musician-scholars whose playing reflected the way composers wanted their music to sound replaced the notion that pianists should be virtuosos whose performances thrilled audiences with emotional daring and showy displays of technique.

 

Bureaucrats tend to guard their authority jealously. So it is surprising that the European Commission is proposing to hand back some of its antitrust powers to national governments. Such a willingness to devolve power is quite encouraging. Perhaps the commission, so often a byword for meddling, bungling, and even corruption, is starting to put its house in order following the forced resignation of the previous lot of commissioners last year.

 

Coleman's book on Wideman's literary career addresses the needs of a general, if well-read, public rather than the esoteric vanities of scholarly specialists, whom he neither ignores nor flatters.