Part 2 Directions

quickly water freezes at 33 feet above ground (the typical height of an anemometer, an instrument that measures wind speed), while the newer replacement index is based on readings at a height of five feet above ground—the average “face level.”

A scientific definition to that elusive characteristic of the weather known as “cold” was first put forth by Antarctic explorer Paul A. Siple and his colleague Charles F. Passel in 1939. Some of the tests used water-filled plastic cylinders to measure the speed at which water freezes at different air temperatures and wind speeds. Siple coined the term “wind chill” to describe their concept of the relative cooling power (or heat removal) of the human body with various combinations of wind speed and low temperatures.

The widely accepted wind chill formula is designed to provide a consistent measure to ensure public safety. There are a number of definitions for the wind chill factor, but simply put, it combines air temperature and wind speed to come up with a reading of what it really feels like outside. The stronger the wind during a given temperature reading, the lower the wind chill factor. Wind moving past exposed skin during cold weather increases the body’s heat loss. If the temperature is low, and the wind is strong, the body often cannot keep up with heat loss, and the skin temperature decreases. Wind chill pertains to all warmblooded animals—including pets, wildlife, livestock, and of course, people.

Outdoor enthusiasts who create their own wind or increase the existing wind—by skiing, snowmobiling, or running for example—can increase the apparent wind chill. Air movement evaporates moisture from the exposed skin, decreasing the temperature. In the summer this feels great—a reason fans are so popular—because it has a cooling effect on an overheated person. However, this same experience can have serious consequences during cold weather in situations

where it’s good to retain as much heat as possible. Any part of the body touching a cold surface also takes away body heat (known as conduction), as does breathing cold air. Other elements of the weather such as wind speed, relative humidity, and sunshine also influence comfort. The health and metabolism1 of a person— along with the type of clothing worn—will also affect how cold a person feels. Becoming extraordinarily cold can have adverse effects; two of which are outlined below.

Frostbite is tissue damage caused by exposure to intense cold, and usually occurs when wind chill temperatures fall below 25 degrees F. The early stages of frostbite are a burning or stinging sensation in the affected parts. The skin will be bright pink at first as ice crystals begin to form under the surface. Numbness sets in as the skin turns to pale white, with a hint of gray or yellow spotting. When actual frostbite occurs, parts of the body begin to freeze. It usually starts with the extremities—spreading to the cheeks, and on to the hands and feet. Medical attention is essential! Until help arrives, or the victim can be taken to the nearest treatment center, keep affected body parts as warm as possible. Fingers are usually frostbit first, and they can be slipped under the arm pits, inside the upper thighs, or in the mouth for warmth. You can also make body temperature rise by

flexing the affected hand or foot. Without assistance—and sometimes even with it—possible consequences of frostbite are gangrene, severe infection, and in extremely bad instances, amputation.

Another result of wind chill is hypothermia, the rapid cooling of the body’s inner core to below its normal temperature of 98.6 degrees F. Some of the symptoms are violent shivering, slurred speech, exhaustion, drowsiness, disorientation, and impaired judgment. Hypothermia gradually overcomes a person who has been chilled by wet clothing, low temperatures, or brisk winds.The important thing to remember is, temperatures do not have to drop below freezing for this condition to set in. Smoking, drinking, or taking prescription drugs or illegal narcotics present added dangers in wind chill conditions. All of these dull your sensitivity to the circumstances, and have physical effects that will make you more susceptible to frostbite and hypothermia.

With winter always offering the possibilities of low temperatures, it’s important to be aware of the wind chill factor, and what it can mean. Wind chill charts for regular reference are available wherever outdoor equipment is sold. When you venture out in winter, dress for both the weather and the wind. Wear loose-fitting, lightweight, warm clothing in several layers, which can be removed to prevent perspiration and subsequent chilling. Snug mittens are better protection than fingered gloves. If you take the proper precautions, when wind chill comes whipping at your nose you’ll be ready!

— Tom and Joanne O’Toole

adapted from “Wind Chill Makes It Colder Than You Think”

1. The new method for calculating windchill used by the National Weather Service is based on

readings taken

(1) at a 5-foot elevation

(2) every day at noon

(3) near the Canadian border

(4) above the Arctic circle

2. In cold weather, a body loses heat more rapidly than normal when

(1) air pressure fluctuates

(2) heartrate is elevated

(3) wind hits exposed skin

(4) movement is restricted

3. As used in line 37, the term “adverse” most nearly means

(1) significant (3) lasting

(2) excessive (4) harmful
4. What conditions will most likely cause frostbite to occur?

(1) Air temperature decreases and wind speed decreases.

(2) Air temperature decreases and wind speed increases.

(3) Air temperature increases and wind speed decreases.

(4) Air temperature increases and wind speed increases.
5. Which symptom is characteristic of frostbite?

(1) irritated skin

(2) slurred speech

(3) violent shivering

(4) impaired judgment

Text
…Some call it the “blender effect,” others “a giant biology experiment with no one in charge.” What it boils down to is this: All over the world, in nearly every region and kind of ecosystem, animals and plants that evolved somewhere else are turning up where they’re not wanted—having been transported by us, inadvertently or intentionally. Burmese pythons are imported to Florida from Asia for the pet trade and end up being dumped in the Everglades by people who find that they don’t make such great pets after all. Pythons are generalists—longlived, not too fussy about what they eat—so they survive, find one another, and breed.

Likewise, Western species pop up in the East. The red-eared slider turtle, native to the Mississippi Basin, has been shipped all over the world as a pet and for food. The turtle is spreading across Asia and southern Europe, devouring native frogs, mollusks1, and even birds.

Some alien species are beneficial. Most agricultural plants and animals in North America are aliens, for instance—native to Europe, South America, or elsewhere. Japanese oysters and clams are mainstays of the shellfish industry worldwide. But some transplants have an outsize effect on the ecosystems into which we deliver them. Ecologists call these “invasive species.”

It’s too soon to know how invasive the Burmese python will prove, but consider the case of the brown tree snake, a native of New Guinea and Australia. A few of them stowed away aboard military equipment after World War II and disembarked on the island of Guam. There they found no brown tree snake enemies and no brown tree snake rivals and tens of thousands of birds that had

never known a terrestrial2 predator. In this land of milk and honey the snakes have multiplied exponentially, reaching densities of up to 13,000 a square mile. Their venomous bites account for a disquieting number of emergency room visits; their climbing habits have caused more than 2,000 electrical outages; and 8 of Guam’s 11 native forest bird species have been wiped out.

North America got its wake-up call with the arrival of the zebra mussel, a thumbnail-size mollusk native to the Black Sea that showed up in Lake St. Clair, Ontario, in 1988. Zebra mussels like to attach themselves to a hard surface, and they don’t mind a crowd. They’ll clump on rock, they’ll clump in pipe, and they’ll clump mussel-next-to-mussel-atop-mussel in astonishing congregations of as many as 70,000 individuals a square foot. Within two years zebra mussels tiled the shallows of the Great Lakes. Intake pipes from utilities and factories became choked with mussels. Lights dimmed. Ships’ rudders jammed. Businesses closed. Eradication proved impossible, and today the U.S. and Canada lose about 140 million dollars a year to the mussels.

Aggressive plants may be the most destructive of all invasive species. Mile-aminute weed, Mikania micrantha, a perennial vine from Central and South America, was planted in India to camouflage airfields during World War II. Today it camouflages large swaths of southern Asia, overrunning forests and crops and smothering life under a green blanket.

“Before humans started moving around, the rate of species movement was a geologic rate3,” says Jim Carlton, an invasives expert who is the director of the Maritime Studies Program of illiams College and Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut. “Now we’re moving species faster and farther than they ever would or could have moved in nature.”

That movement comes with a shocking price tag. The state of Florida spends 50 million dollars every year controlling invasive plants. New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and the federal government have spent 175 million dollars battling the tree-killing Asian long-horned beetle. The 2001 hoof-and-mouth disease outbreak in England cost businesses there nearly four billion dollars. In all, experts estimate, invasives cost the U.S. alone more than 140 billion dollars yearly.

The less quantifiable4 effects are no less terrible. The ecologist E. O. Wilson ranks invasive species second only to habitat destruction in the magnitude of the threat they pose. In removing natural barriers to species movements, Wilson says, we’re changing the very nature of wild places, replacing unique animal and plant communities with a generic, impoverished hodgepodge5 world of hardy generalists: a world not of Sumatran rhinos, golden turtles, Blackburnian warblers, and giant saguaro but merely one of cats, rats, crows, and West Nile virus. ...

Restricting the entry into the United States of alien species such as Caulerpa6 and zebra mussels, already known to be invasive elsewhere, would be almost automatic, one would think. The reality is more complex—and far more difficult. In most countries, unless a species is on a short blacklist of noxious7 weeds or injurious wildlife, or restricted under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, you’re free to import it. (Australia and New Zealand have abandoned this presumption of innocence in favor of a more effective “clean list”of approved species; species not on the list are denied entry.)

Further hampering prevention efforts in the U.S. is a lack of coordination between government agencies, and the fact that agencies have multiple, sometimes conflicting mandates. The U.S. Department of Agriculture keeps the noxious-weed list, but focuses primarily on protecting agriculture and the nursery trade, not wilderness. Thus it took the USDA five years to list melaleuca, the highly invasive Australian paperbark tree that had converted 500,000 acres of

native Florida wetlands to forest.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regulates the trade in wild animals, but it’s also charged with promoting industries like aquaculture8 that are often responsible for introducing invasives. When three species of Asian carp escaped from catfish farms into the Mississippi River, Illinois petitioned the wildlife service to add Asian carp to the injurious wildlife list; aquaculturists lobbied against the listing. Three years later a decision is still pending. In the meantime, the U.S. and state governments are resorting to a nine-million-dollar electric barrier to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes. State departments of fish and game, for their part, are charged with protecting the environment from invasives, but they often manage alien game species such as feral pigs and exotic deer for hunters.

Some experts believe the answer is a well-funded national center for invasive species based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention model. Though Congress took a first step in 1999, establishing the National Invasive Species Council, it has remained underfunded.

“As a society we’ve adopted an exclusively reactive mode,” says David Lodge, an ecologist at the University of Notre Dame. “Invasives aren’t like other forms of pollution. They don’t stop spreading when you stop releasing them. They grow, and they grow in an accelerating manner. Doing nothing to prevent them is a particularly damaging policy.” ...

— Susan McGrath

excerpted from “Attack of the Alien Invaders”

(1) zoo attractions (2) pets

(3) gourmet ingredients (4) shoes
2. As used in line 7, “generalists” most nearly means species that are

(1) adaptable (3) native

(2) unusual (4) harmless
3. According to the text, zebra mussels transported by ships from the Black Sea to the Great Lakes

have

(3) caused financial loss (4) ruined lakefront views

approximately

(1) 50 million dollars (2) 175 million dollars

(3) 4 billion dollars (4) 140 billion dollars

Organic food and materials are ringing up green for grocery stores and other retailers.

Once considered a niche1 market with questionable economic benefits, organic farming is the fastest-growing and most profitable field in agriculture, and demand for food produced without hormones, pesticides or other chemicals is exploding. ...

“Sales continue to grow, and there are new lines coming on every day,” said Doug Wills, general manager of Buehler’s Parkside grocery store at Dover [Ohio]. “Of course, there’s produce, but we’re starting to see it more in meats, dairy and deli items. More people also are switching to organic soaps and detergents. It’s obviously a market that you just have to look at and take seriously.”

Buehler’s has done that, starting [by] rearranging the store in February to showcase a Nature’s Choice section, which is about 70 percent complete. Wills said that it is about 25 [feet] long, “which is very large for within a store.” It is the fourth largest section at Dover, behind dairy, meat and produce. The renovation was to accommodate growth in organic products and improve traffic flow for customers.

“We get a lot of comments and requests,” Wills said. “The shopper who starts using organic is one we find to be very dedicated to those types of products. For years, I’ve had one particular customer who has kept me informed about new products coming out. We find these customers are a great help because they seek out those products and places that handle them.” ...

“The thing that I’m most excited about is the continued increase in organic dairy products with no fertilizers and no pesticides,” he said. “There are a lot of people out there looking for those products, and I know an area dairy farmer who’s looking into going organic.”

The Organic Trade Assn. [OTA] states the U.S. organic dairy sector racked up $2.1 billion in sales last year [2005], up 24 percent from 2004. The OTA said organics now make up 3.5 percent of all dairy products sold in the U.S.

Buehler’s corporate spokeswoman Mary McMillen said organic business is growing steadily, with the percentage varying by location of the Wooster-based company’s 11 stores. ...

She said the number of items available varies from thousands to hundreds, depending on demand at individual stores. The largest volume of sales is in produce and dairy, with dairy also the fastest growing category. Buehler’s has carried some organic items — predominately produce — for more than 10 years. The amount of fresh organic produce changes daily and a sign is posted showing how much is available in Giant Eagle at Dover.

“A whole section of our produce is called Nature’s Basket, and we have frozen, dairy and dry grocery organic products,” said Mike Carrothers, assistant store manager. “It’s a growing area. We have four, double-sized gondolas with products like spices, potato chips and juices.” ...

“I think we carry pretty much everything they offer, so compared to a few years ago, it’s increased a thousand percent,” Carrothers said. “There are a lot more people looking for organics. We’ve had nothing but good response from customers that we have good selection.”

Retailers are expanding organic food sections, driving up demand for people to work in the field. Wal-Mart, the largest buyer of organic foods, is also developing additional organic products, according to the Associated Press.

Washington State University created America’s first organic farming degree

under soils professor John Reganold. He said organic agriculture is attractive for several reasons — it doesn’t use expensive fertilizers and other chemicals, it is perceived as healthier to eat, and it produces less stress on farmland.

A university in Canada and one in Wales are the only ones in the world offering organic degrees. Michigan State University and Colorado State are on the verge of offering organic degrees. But Washington State had a headstart with three decades of pioneering research on organic farming. It owns its [own] organic research farm.

Washington state apple growers have been leaders in converting to organic farming, largely to cut down on pesticide use, which is expensive and hazardous to apply for a labor-intensive crop, Reganold said. The organic farming industry, which has suffered from a lack of trained workers, is cheering the move.

“As an organization that hires people with organic agriculture experience, I see it certainly as significant,” said Jake Lewin of the California Certified Organic Farmers.

Made up of 1,300 businesses, the group sees the degree program as helping to legitimize organic farming, Lewin said. Until now, organic farming courses were piecemeal.

An organic farming degree is also a natural for Washington [State], where many citizens are interested in protecting the environment. There are 597 organic farms in Washington, and lots of farmers markets and organic food stores.

Enrollment in traditional agricultural programs has been declining at Washington State in the past decade, in part because of a declining number of family farms and more farm kids seeking better-paying careers.

Reganold said interest in organic farming has been rising, even among students who were not raised on farms. ...

Graduates in organic farming can also expect to be hired by grocery and restaurant chains.

“Large corporations increasingly interested in meeting the nation’s growing appetite for organic foods are seeking employees who understand organic agriculture systems, which are significantly different than conventional agriculture,” Perillo said.

Spurred by the widening acceptance of all things organic, many boutique retailers and some mainstream chains are adding new lines of apparel stitched together using cotton that has been grown without genetic modification and without chemical fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides. ...

Organic cotton advocates say organic farming is better for the soil. Traditional cotton farming can use up to one-third of a pound of chemical pesticides and fertilizers to produce one pound of cotton, according to a recent report by the Sustainable Cotton Project in Davis, Calif.

Sales of organic-cotton products reached $275 million last year, up more than two-fold from 2001, according to a new study by the Oakland-based advocacy group Organic Exchange. That sales number includes apparel, home textiles and personal-care products, but the majority of sales are apparel.

— Lee Morrison

excerpted and adapted from “Going natural:

Organic food keeps growing in popularity”

1 In order for a product to be classified as “organic,” how must the product be grown?

(1) without mechanical equipment

(2) in a laboratory setting

(3) without chemical additives

(4) on a family farm

undergoing a period of

(1) imbalance (3) uncertainty

(2) expansion (4) conflict

segment that experienced explosive growth after 2004 is

(1) dairy (3) produce

(2) clothing (4) beverages

(1) potatoes (3) corn

(2) cotton (4) apples
5 Jake Lewin expresses the opinion of many in the organic field that there is a need for

(1) education programs

(2) health controls

(3) economic management

(4) foreign marketing
6 Since 2001, the sale of organic cotton has

(1) declined (3) doubled

(2) leveled (4) quadrupled

Text
When teacher Jeremy Gypton was reviewing the Civil War material for his American history class at Empire High School in Vail, Arizona, he found something he’d never read before, even though he has a degree in history: the complete Constitution of the Confederate States of America.

A traditional textbook might have made a passing reference to the document. But there are no textbooks at Empire.…

When Empire High School opened in July of last year [2005], students weren’t issued backpack-breaking stacks of textbooks. They were handed an Apple iBook with a wireless Internet connection, because the school eschews textbooks in favor of laptops and electronic content.

In science class, they don’t just discuss cell division. They go online and watch it in real time. In Michael Frank’s first-year biology class, students access their lab instructions, then organize data and graph the results of their work. Later, they will correlate the data from the experiment in a PowerPoint presentation. In Melinda Jensen’s honors math class, students went online to learn about game theory when two game-theory researchers won the Nobel Prize in economics. “It was a great class discussion. You can’t do that in a regular classroom,” Jensen notes. “It would have been something you had to plan ahead of time.”

Plenty of schools have instituted pilot programs using laptops to supplement their traditional curriculum. But Empire is one of very few in the country — perhaps the only school — that has eliminated textbooks almost entirely in grades nine through 12.

“The key to making this work is not having the textbooks,” says Calvin Baker, superintendent of the Vail Unified School District. “You walk in any of the classrooms in this school and it’s a different feel, different from a textbook school, different from a school where kids just happen to have laptops so they’re doing their homework on laptops, but sometimes they use them and sometimes they don’t.”

“Laptops are part of the fabric of everything that goes on at Empire. That’s the way it should be,” he adds. “We all use laptops to gather information, store information, and distribute information. That’s the way the world turns now.”

Of course, there are downsides. The computers crash. A few weeks into the project, students hacked the filters that had prevented them from going to forbidden places online, though security was soon restored. Some tried to get away with playing games during work time. That didn’t last long; teachers can view what’s on any student’s screen at any moment and virtually reach out and

throw games in the desktop trash.

“The laptops don’t change human nature,” Baker says. “Students are always going to be testing limits.”

For teachers, it’s a matter of monitoring and keeping control, just as always. “It comes down to teaching skills and classroom management,” says Matt Donaldson, an assistant principal and math teacher. “Whether you’re using computers or a notebook, if the teacher is on top of what’s going on in the classroom, you aren’t going to have those problems.”

Mark Schneiderman, director of education policy for the Software & Information Industry Association, a Washington, D.C.-based trade association, says the most recent survey, two years ago, indicated that about 600 school districts nationwide had pilot programs supplying laptops to individual students.

Henrico County Public Schools in Virginia began using laptops for 23,000 middle and high school students in 2001. The state of Maine opened an ambitious program to supply more than 30,000 students in 243 middle schools with laptops in January 2002. Legislators later expanded the program to about a third of the state’s high school students. But in those schools and others, laptops are used in tandem1 with old-fashioned textbooks.

“My sense is that the situation in the Vail school is relatively unique,” Schneiderman says. “There may be a few other, smaller such efforts under way, but it’s pretty unique.”

That’s just what school officials intended when they began planning a new school to alleviate overcrowding in the district. They were already aggressively using technology, linking schools with a wireless system and showing grades and attendance online in real time. They visited a laptop high school in the California Bay Area and talked to Apple about the resources available.

“There was no question students at the laptop school were more engaged,”Baker says. “But we were confident we could do it better.”

The schools the Empire planning team visited were using laptops as frosting, as another layer to traditional instruction. “It wasn’t fundamentally changing the structure of what was happening in classrooms, so we had the idea that if you really wanted to change what was happening in school, you had to take away textbooks,” Baker says.

Empire was a new school without old textbooks. So they simply didn’t order any. Making it easier and logical to move away from textbooks, Baker adds, is thenational trend of teaching to standards. No longer do teachers start at the beginning of a textbook, make sure they’re halfway through by Christmas, and then race through the Vietnam War in May. Even if they use textbooks, they jump back and forth, extracting what they need to meet the standard.…

“One of our teachers expressed it well,” Baker says. “She said, ‘The way I explain it to friends is the difference between teaching in a traditional high school and Empire is the difference between swimming in a pool and swimming in the ocean.’ ”

Students can go as deep as they want into material. “Books can be very limiting,” Jensen says. “It’s very interesting to work without the boundaries that are created by a book.”

Striding outside those boundaries also means students have to evaluate the material they find, something Gypton thinks provides more teaching moments. “I’ve come to realize that critical thinking may not be a natural thing,” Gypton says. “It is a skill that has to be taught. It has to be developed. And you can’t develop critical thinking if your material is shallow and only painted in broad brush strokes.”

They also didn’t anticipate how clueless students were about using the technology. They may know about video games and myspace.com, but the notion that middle school and high school students are digital experts is overstated, Gypton says.

“It’s bunk,” he says. “I had kids for three or four weeks who didn’t know how to work Microsoft Word. When they’d save something they’d look at me with this sad look in their eyes and say, ‘Where did it go?’ ”

Paper does show up, though rarely. Jensen has her students do math problems on paper. And her honors class wanted textbooks so they could work ahead.…

It’s too early to gauge the effect on learning at Empire. But a study of Maine’s laptop initiative by the Maine Education Policy Research Institute at the University of Southern Maine concluded there were numerous advantages. Among them:

• More than four out of five teachers reported students were more engaged in learning.

• More than 70 percent of teachers reported that the laptops more effectively helped them meet curriculum goals and individualize curriculums.

• Students who took the laptops home were more likely to complete class work.

• Students who no longer had laptops reported getting less work done.

At Empire, students like using laptops, though they chafe2 at the restrictions placed on them — filtering software prevents instant messaging, the teens’ communication choice these days, even when they’re using the laptop at home.

“A lot of people think we should have fewer restrictions when we’re at home,” says Jason Ash, a 15-year-old sophomore. Ash says he’s more organized because everything from assignments to grades is in one place online.

Brad Morse, a 17-year-old junior, liked the fact he could go online and view more illustrations when his class was studying the Continental Congress. “If I don’t understand something, I can go on Google and look it up and learn more,” he says.

That’s typical, Jensen says. “Students come in all the time with websites where they’ve found helpful resources about what we’re learning. It really creates a feeling of community.”

Morse and others admit they were initially easily distracted, sometimes using e-mail and playing games during class in the first few weeks. But the school put a stop to that. “Now they have all the teachers monitor us so we’re not as easily distracted,” says Ashley Coulter, a 15-year-old sophomore.

Jensen, in her fourth year of teaching, is energized daily. “I feel like the kids here are so interesting and so creative and so much fun that every day I look forward to seeing them,” she says. “I don’t know if they’re more interesting because they’re more engaged or if we got students who were more willing to think outside the box.”

—Jim Morrison

excerpted from “Ending the Paper Chase”

Southwest Airlines Spirit, May 2006
1. As used in line 9, the word “eschews” most nearly

means

(2) arranges (4) rejects

(1) has eliminated almost all textbooks

(2) uses only classroom discussion

(3) follows a traditional curriculum

(4) has expanded testing
3. Some early problems with Empire’s laptop program were a result of

(1) inadvertent training errors

(2) inadequate technical support

(3) inappropriate computer use

(4) insufficient budget allocations
4. According to Matt Donaldson (lines 41 through 44),

effective use of computers in the classroom is

directly related to a teacher’s

(1) knowledge of technology

(2) skill in supervising students

(3) ability to evaluate students

(4) willingness to experiment
5. According to the text, what did Empire hope to

achieve with its policy regarding textbooks and

laptops?

(1) increase in textbook use

(2) improvement of test scores

(3) uniformity of teaching standards

(4) changes in instructional techniques