#58passages
Part B. Intermediate Level
Lesson 6. Health
Passage 1. Living Over 100 Years Old
Would you like to live to 100? Many people would. Some have dreamed of living even longer, perhaps forever. We know this has long been a popular idea because for hundreds of years, many cultures have had legends about ways to avoid growing old.
In Europe in the 1400s, people heard one such legend about a wonderful spring somewhere in Eastern Asia. Drinking the water from this spring was supposed to make a person young again. It’s likely that this story reached the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon, and it may have been on his mind when he traveled to the Americas in the 1490s.
After arriving in Puerto Rico, Ponce de Leon heard about an island with a similar spring, and he decided to go look for it. He invested in three ships, and in 1513 he went searching for the island. However, he ended up in Florida, never finding the island or the spring, which people now call the Fountain of Youth.
When Ponce de Leon died eight years later, he was 61, which may not seem very old, but living to 61 was actually a very long life for a man of his times and his lifestyle.
It used to be generally agreed that the human body could not possibly last more than 120 years. No scientist today believes 120 to be the limit because people have already lived beyond that age.
A woman in France, Jeanne Louise Carmont, made it to 122 years and 164 days. Today, people in many parts of the world are living longer lives than their ancestors did, partly because of better public health services and safer drinking water. Greater understanding of how to treat heart problems has made a big difference in life expectancy as well.
Scientists are learning more all the time about how we can live longer, healthier lives, and maybe someday they’ll even learn how to stop the aging process completely. While you’re waiting for that day to come, there are things you can do to increase your life expectancy. Do you think you can follow these three rules?
Rule No. 1: Treat your body well
Your everyday lifestyle influences how long you will live. For example, smoking can take years off your life, and even if it doesn’t make you sick, it will affect your skin and make you look older. So don’t smoke, get enough sleep, lead an active life, and be sure to eat right. In other words, eat foods that are good for you and don’t eat too much.
Rule No. 2： Don’t take risks
Forget about motorcycles and wear your seatbelt when you travel by car. Also, try to choose a nice, safe way to make a living. If you can avoid it, don’t do a dangerous job like going to sea and working on a fishing boat.
Rule No. 3: Choose your parents carefully
Perhaps you’re asking, “how can anybody follow this one?” Well, that’s a good question. However, about 70% of your life expectancy depends on your genes, and you get your genes from your parents. Genes control not only your hair and eye color, but much, much more. If people in your family usually live long lives, then chances are good that you will too.
It also helps to be born in Australia or Japan, and it helps to be born female. The average Australian or Japanese man can expect to see age 80, while his sister can expect to reach 85.
Japan is home to more than 61,000 people who have made it to 100, and more than 87% of them are women.
Passage 2. Placebo Effect
Harry S. wanted to quit smoking. So when he saw an ad for a study on ways to break the habit, he called and offered to be part of it.
The research was being done at a local university where Harry and the other volunteers, all people who wanted to quit smoking, were divided into three groups. The volunteers in Group A received nicotine gum. That’s chewing gum with nicotine, the drug in tobacco that gives smokers the good feeling they get from smoking. When these smokers felt the need for a cigarette, they could chew a piece of this gum instead, and it would give them the nicotine their bodies were used to. The volunteers in Group B, including Harry, got some gum too. Theirs was just plain chewing gum, but they didn’t know it had no nicotine. The people in Group C got nothing. A group like this in a study is called the control group.
After a four-hour period with no cigarettes, Harry and the other volunteers had to write answers to a series of questions. Their answers showed how badly they wanted a cigarette. Not surprisingly, the smokers in Group C, the control group, which got no gum, showed the strongest cravings. The smokers in the other two groups didn’t feel such a strong need to smoke.
What surprised the researchers was that the results for Groups A and B were exactly the same. That meant that the plain chewing gum worked just as well as the gum with the nicotine. Why? The researchers thought it was most likely the placebo effect.
A placebo is something that seems like a medical treatment, such as a pill or a medical procedure, but that doesn’t actually have any direct effect on the body. Sometimes a patient has a good response to a placebo, and when that happens, it’s called the placebo effect.
The placebo effect was long believed to result simply from a patient expecting to feel better. In 1757, Benjamin Franklin, the American scientist and inventor, described it as “the spirits given by the hope of success.”
People thought placebos tricked patients into thinking they were better when they really weren’t, and doctors who didn’t believe in tricking patients saw no role for placebos as a form of treatment. However, recent research has proven that placebos can have indirect effects on the body. They can cause changes in brain chemistry, the same kinds of changes produced by drugs. For example, when patients in pain believe that they’re getting treatment that will help control their pain, their brains produce natural painkillers. Those painkillers then help block the pain.
This means that the placebo effect isn’t a mistaken idea in the patient’s mind. It’s an actual event in the patient’s brain. As a result of this new understanding of how placebos affect us, they may come to have a useful role in treating pain and other problems by making use of the brain’s own neurotransmitters.
We still can’t be sure why the smokers in Harry’s group felt fewer cravings than expected. Maybe just the idea of getting treatment, nicotine in this case, produced changes in their brain chemistry. But maybe the people working with the volunteers had something to do with it, too. A study at Harvard University showed that when people on the medical staff were especially kind and helpful, patients had a better response to a placebo. There could be other explanations, too. Maybe the sugar in the chewing gum helped the smokers in Group B feel better.
One thing we do know about the placebo effect is that further research is needed.
Passage 3. Why do humans cry?
Tears are good for our eyes. In fact, without them, our eyes would be so dry they wouldn’t be able to move.
Some people say tears help us in other ways, too. Maybe you know someone who likes to watch sad movies in order to have a “good cry.” While it hasn’t been proven, tears may be good not only for our eyes, but for our emotional health as well.
We generally notice tears only when we cry, but we have them in our eyes all the time, and we need to. Without this liquid covering them, our eyes would be at risk of infection. We also need tears in order to see.
The cornea of the eye does not have a perfectly smooth surface and tears fill in the holes in the cornea, making it smooth so that we can see clearly. Without tears, the world would look very strange to us. These are the two basic jobs that tears do for us.
They help us see the world while at the same time protecting our eyes from it. There are three types of tears, called basal, reflex, and emotional, or psychic tears, and these three types differ not only in purpose, but also in composition.
Basal tears are the ones that we produce all the time. On average, our eyes produce these tears at the rate of 5 to 10 ounces a day. When we blink, we spread basal tears across the surface of our eyes. If we do not blink often enough, like some people who spend long hours in front of a computer, our eyes get dry.
Have you ever cut up an onion and felt tears come to your eyes? Tears of that type are called reflex tears. They are the ones that fill our eyes when a cold wind blows. These tears also protect our eyes, washing away dust and other materials that get into them.
Emotional or psychic tears flow when we feel certain emotions. When we cry tears of sadness, disappointment, or happiness, we are crying emotional tears. Emotional tears are the tears we think of most when we use the word “cry.”
Tom Lutz, the author of “Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears,” writes, “Throughout history and in every culture, everyone, everywhere cries at some time.” Even men and women who say they never cry can usually remember crying as children. Most of us probably think it’s normal for men or women to cry at certain times. For example, it’s no surprise when someone cries during a sad movie, and we often expect people to cry when a family member dies. At times such as these, we may even tell them, “go ahead and cry.”
However, we don’t always take this view of tears, and sometimes adults who cry, or even children who do, lose the respect of others. What would you think, for example, of an adult who cried over losing a card game?
Most people are aware of the social rules about when, where, and why it is and isn’t acceptable to cry. These rules generally differ for children and adults, and often for men and women. They depend on things such as family, culture, and religion, and they change over time.
Some people think it’s not just acceptable to cry, but actually healthy to let the tears flow. Over 2,500 years ago, doctors in Greece thought that tears came from the brain, and that everyone needed to let them out. Today, many people still believe in “getting tears out.” They say that through crying, we get rid of emotions we have stored up, which is good for our mental health. Some people report that they feel better after crying. This could be because of the chemicals in emotional tears, one of which is a type of endorphin, a painkiller that the body produces naturally. Emotional tears increase the amount of endorphin that gets to the brain because tears flow from the eye into the nose and pass to the brain that way. This painkiller may make a person less aware of sad or angry feelings, and that could explain why someone feels better after a “good cry.”
Passage 4. The Power of Touch
Most people today know that babies need to be held. It’s through the loving touch of the people who take care of them that babies learn to feel safe in the world. Touch is the first language they understand, and they depend on it for their physical, mental, and emotional development. What most people don’t know is how touch is a key to good health for adults, too.
A baby’s need for touch was not always as well understood as it is today. Back in 1928, a leading psychologist, John B. Watson, wrote that parents should avoid touching their children. “Never hug and kiss them. Never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job on a difficult task.” Watson’s goal was for parents to raise their children to become confident and independent adults. We now know that to reach that goal, he should have given the opposite advice.
In the 1980s, researchers in the United States started to study the effects of touch on newborn babies. In one study, a group of babies born prematurely received three 15-minute massages in a week. To give a massage, someone gently pressed on the baby’s body in a way that helped the baby to relax.
A second group of babies received only the usual medical care for premature babies, which generally included very little touching. The researchers then recorded the babies’ weight gains, an important sign of good health in newborns. They found that the babies who had received the massages gained 47% more weight than the control group.
Over time, similar results in other studies resulted in major changes in how newborns are cared for in U.S. hospitals. Tiffany Field, one of the researchers who worked on that particular study, later had a baby born prematurely. This life-changing experience and a growing understanding of the benefits of touch led Dr. Field’s career in a new direction.
In 1992, she founded the Touch Research Institute, the TRI, at the University of Miami School of Medicine, where researchers have done over 100 studies on ways that touch affects health. In further studies on massage, TRI researchers have seen it reduce pain and improve the health of people with serious medical conditions, such as cancer.
Massage is not the only kind of touch that’s good for people. Studies have shown that when doctors give patients a friendly pat on the back, the patients do better. Hugs from family and friends have health benefits, too.
In a study at Carnegie Mellon University, every day for two weeks, researchers asked 400 adult volunteers a set of questions. They asked about the time the volunteers spent with other people and the number of hugs they got. Then, all 400 were exposed to the virus that causes the common cold, after which most of them—78%—caught a cold. However, the people who had received more hugs were less likely to get sick. When they did get sick, their colds were not as bad.
Researchers believe that many of the good effects of touch result from the way it can reduce stress. In response to a welcome touch, the human brain experiences an increase in oxytocin, a hormone tied to feelings of love and trust, and a drop in cortisol, a stress hormone.
Everyone is different in how they feel about hugs, massage, pats on the back, and similar kinds of touch. How comfortable you are with these kinds of touch depends in part on your culture.
Consider some research done by psychologist Sidney Girard in the 1960s. He traveled to various countries and studied the conversations of pairs of friends as they sat together in a café. In each place, he watched people for the same amount of time. In England, he saw that friends never touched each other. In the United States, friends touched an average of twice an hour. In France, the picture was very different. Friends touched almost every 30 seconds for an average of 110 times an hour. In Puerto Rico, the number of touches per hour hit 180. In his research, Girard was looking at the role of touch in people’s social lives. We now know from further research that touch has a role in people’s health, too, and that it can make a difference for people of all ages.
Lesson 7. Business
Passage 1. Young Entrepreneurs
The world has always had entrepreneurs, people who come up with an idea and turn it into a business. Today, however, these people seem to be everywhere. They also seem to be getting younger and younger.
Some very well-known businesses, such as Facebook and Microsoft, were started by college students, and other businesses have been started by students who were even younger.
At age 9, Ashley Qualls learned how to set up a website. At 14, she created a website where girls could get free help to set up websites for themselves. Before long, her site was getting more than 100,000 page views a day. Then Ashley got a call from a business that wanted to put ads on her site and would pay her to do that. She agreed, and from those ads, she earned enough while still in high school to buy her family a house.
Cameron Johnson was also 9 when he started his first business. He began with printing party invitations for his parents’ friends. By the time he graduated from high school, he had started three more businesses and made his first million.
What drives young entrepreneurs like these? Ashley Qualls would say that she was just having fun. She might call herself an accidental CEO, someone who ends up at the head of a company without really planning on it. Pierre Omidyar might say the same thing. He created the world-famous eBay, but he says he did not mean to start a business. He was just trying to look good for his girlfriend. Cameron Johnson, on the other hand, knew exactly what he wanted. He grew up reading books about famous businessmen, and he dreamed of making millions. Other young entrepreneurs, like Costanza Antoneta, dream of making the world a better place. At age 18, while visiting Peru, she met some people who were highly skilled at making clothes but could not make a living at it. Instead, they supported themselves washing dishes or cleaning rooms. Costanza came up with a plan. She would hire them at a fair wage to make clothes that she would design, and she would sell the clothes in the United States. After she opened her store, the Peruvians started earning more in a few weeks at work they enjoyed than they used to make in a year.
Young people who start their own businesses may face problems that older people do not. Matt Spain is one example. He started a computer service company at age 15. That was old enough for him to be good at fixing computers but not old enough for him to drive, so his clients had to pick him up at his house and take him to their offices.
Young CEOs may also face a question that older ones do not. Should they hire their parents? Ashley Qualls hired her mother, and Daniel Negari did too. He started working in real estate at age 18, and at 22 he had 14 people working for him. He got his mother to leave her high-paying job to work for him by showing her that with his company she would earn even more. He was happy to hire someone he knew so well and trusted completely.
Young or old, most entrepreneurs are alike in some ways. For example, they’re willing to take risks, and they believe they’ll succeed. If you would like to know more about starting your own business, you can pick up a book about it. Cameron Johnson wrote his first at age 15.
Passage 2. International Language of Business
Felice Yilmaz works for a company in Istanbul and usually speaks Turkish at work. When she travels to England on business, she deals with people there in English. But when she goes to Germany or Brazil, she doesn’t use German or Portuguese. Again, she uses English. “I use English in Japan and Thailand, too,” she says. “It’s the language of international business.”
How did English get to be so widely used? It’s not the oldest living language or the most beautiful to the ear. It has sounds that are hard to pronounce and words that are hard to spell. So why has this particular language spread so far? Some people would answer by pointing to the influence of movies and music. However, films made in English often appear dubbed into other languages, and many people enjoy songs in English without understanding the words. So the question remains.
Part of the answer can be found in the nature of the language. English has certain qualities that make it especially useful. For one thing, its grammar is quite simple, making it easier to learn. For example, learners of English don’t have to worry about whether a noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter, while learners of many other languages do. In German, for example, “der Mond,” the word for the moon, is masculine, but “die Sonne,” the sun, is feminine.
Anyone would expect the words for girl and woman, “das Mädchen” and “das Weib,” to be feminine, but they are neuter. English also has a huge vocabulary. Early English developed from Germanic languages, which gave it its most common words, such as “the,” “is,” “of,” “go,” “you,” “man,” and “woman.”
English has always taken words from other European languages too, including Latin (“attract,” “design,” and “invent”) and Greek (“alphabet,” “mathematics,” and “theatre”). After 1066, when invaders from France came to power in England, English gained many French words, such as “officer,” “crime,” and “service.” Since that time, English has welcomed words from many other languages, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Urdu, Chinese, and Japanese, to name just a few.
To understand the spread of English, we also have to look at political and economic history. During the 1600s and 1700s, people from England traveled all over the world, taking their language to North America, Africa, India, and Australia. New nations were born, and their governments used English.
Then in the 1800s, England led the Industrial Revolution, and London became the world’s great financial center. That made English the language of money. In the 1900s, it also became the language of science and air travel.
Then came the Internet. As Felice Yilmaz remembers it, “people at my company realized that the Internet could be quite useful to us. But at first, everything online was in English.” It gave us another reason to know this language. Soon business people in many countries were going online and using English more and more. Today there are business schools teaching all their courses in English, even in countries where English is a foreign language. These schools want their students to be ready to do business in international markets.
Companies around the world are investing in English classes for their employees. They believe English will be the language of the future. Today there are about 400 million native speakers of English.
While many more people speak Mandarin Chinese, about 900 million, few of them are outside China. People who speak English, on the other hand, live and work all over the world. There are more than 1.5 billion people who speak it as a second, third, or fourth language.
Yilmaz says, “With so many people using English, I can’t imagine any other language taking its place. I think English for business is here to stay.”
Passage 3. Worker-Owned Businesses
King Arthur Flour is the oldest flour company in the United States. Its flour is of very high quality. Just ask the people who use it. All across North America, people who care about making fine bread buy King Arthur Flour, and the company even has customers in Switzerland, Japan, China, and Saudi Arabia.
King Arthur Flour began in 1790 as the Sands, Taylor, and Wood Company, and members of the Sands family have stayed with the company all these years. Frank Sands was the fifth member of the Sands family to lead the company. He started working there in 1963, when his father was in charge of the business, and eventually Frank’s wife Brynna joined him there.
When Frank and Brynna decided to retire, none of their children wanted to take control of the family business, which meant that the future of King Arthur Flour was uncertain. Then one evening, Brynna asked Frank, “who besides our kids is most like family?” The answer was clear, the people who worked at the company. Frank and Brynna trusted them to continue the family tradition, so they began to let the employees take charge of the business. Today, the 160 employees of King Arthur own and run the company.
Worker-owned businesses don’t all start the same way. In some cases, workers at a successful company find a way to buy the business. In other cases, a company fails, but the employees react by working as a team to start it up again. Often, a group of people decide to set up a new business together.
What makes them want to do this? Some want to be part of the decision-making at their workplace. Others want a chance to share in a company’s profits. There are various types of worker-owned businesses. Some of them make a product, like flour, and others provide a service, such as health care or cleaning offices. There are also various ways to organize these businesses.
However, most worker-owned businesses share certain important ideas. One idea is that all the workers, not just the people in charge, should have the chance to be owners. A second is that all financial information about the company should be shared openly with the workers. A third is that the workers should have the right to vote on business decisions. Then they have real control. The worker-owners at King Arthur believe in these ideas. They are proud to call King Arthur an “employee-owned, open-book, team-managed” company.
Here are the stories of how two more such companies began. Eight employees at a photocopy shop in Massachusetts, USA, were unhappy with their jobs. “Working conditions were terrible and the pay was low,” says one of the eight. “Plus, we had no job security. The manager could get rid of any one of us at any time for any reason. We ran the shop for the owners, and we started to ask, ‘Why can’t we do it for ourselves?’” So they went into business together and started Collective Copies. Thirty-three years later, they have two shops. One afternoon a month, they close their doors to meet and make business decisions.
In Como, Puerto Rico, there weren’t many jobs for young people. Miriam Rodriguez, who lived in Como, wanted to do something about it. She organized a committee to work on the problem, and the result of their efforts was a furniture business, Las Flores Metalarte. The business now has more than 150 worker-owners producing tables, chairs, kitchen cabinets, and so on. The success of the company has led to other new businesses in the town, including a sandwich shop and a child care center.
Worker-owned businesses are not unique to the United States, and their effects are not limited to the worker-owners themselves. According to a study in Italy, worker-owned businesses are good for their communities. They lead to a higher quality of life. The researchers who did the study looked at things like health care, education, and social activities in many Italian towns. They also considered problems in the towns, such as crime. They found that towns with more worker-owned businesses were better places to live in almost every way.
Passage 4. Word-of-mouth advertising
Whether you want to or not, you probably see and hear ads every day.
Ads are all around us and have been for a very long time. They have even been found painted on walls in the ruins of Pompeii and ancient Egypt. Advertising has come a long way since then, but it’s still all about getting people’s attention. Back when few people could read, ads usually took the form of pictures. A sign for a shoemaker might have a picture of a boot, and a sign for a baker might show a loaf of bread. Street callers were a common form of advertising, too. They were hired to announce in a loud voice what was for sale, where to find it, and how good it was. As in, “get your fresh fish right here, right now, the best in town.” In developing countries, some businesses still use street callers, and this form of advertising probably doesn’t cost them very much.
In other parts of the world, advertising has become much more sophisticated, and it costs a great deal. If you add up all the money spent on advertising around the world, it comes to the equivalent of hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars a year. Business owners will consider it money well spent, as long as enough consumers pay attention and buy the product or use the service.
But much of the time, consumers do not pay attention. When an ad comes on the TV or radio, they change the station. They turn the pages of magazines without really seeing the ads. If an ad appears on their computer screen, they get rid of it or just look away.
Dave Balter worked in advertising, and he knew that most people don’t like ads. They avoid watching them, reading them, or listening to them. He also knew that people do pay attention when they hear about goods and services from people they know. So he said to himself, “if no one pays attention to advertising, but they do pay attention to the opinions of their friends and family, let’s focus our attention there. Let’s figure out a better way."
What Balter came up with was a website where consumers could sign up to receive free products. In return, they promised that if they liked the products, they would tell their friends. In most cases, the volunteers also got coupons to give to their friends. All Balter asked was that they report back on two questions.
”What did you think of the product, and who did you talk to about it?"
Balter then reported back to his clients, the companies who had hired him. After four years, Balter had 65,000 volunteers trying products and telling people about the ones they liked. Then a reporter heard about Balter’s idea and wrote a story on it for a major magazine. Free advertising. Within a year after that story appeared, Balter had 130,000 volunteers. Today, the company he started has over 1 million people spreading the word about a wide variety of products.
They are doing word-of-mouth advertising, perhaps the best kind of advertising there is. There may be a risk to advertising by word of mouth, however. According to George Silverman, author of The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing. What’s the danger? Studies have shown that a customer who likes a product or service will tell an average of three people about it. But when a customer doesn’t like one, on average, they’ll tell 11. This means that while good word of mouth can help, bad word of mouth can really hurt.
Lesson 8. The Environment
Passage 1. Pollution from Two-Stroke Engines
Mary Jane Ortega, the mayor of San Fernando City in the Philippines, knew that her city was choking.
The cause? Air pollution, especially pollution from two- and three-wheeled vehicles like scooters, motorcycles, and tuk-tuks.
The World Health Organization estimates that air pollution kills 2 million people a year. While big vehicles often get the blame for it, much of the blame in Asia really belongs to the little guys.
Small vehicles with two-stroke engines put out huge amounts of dangerous gases and oily black smoke. Cars with their bigger four-stroke engines are actually cleaner and do less harm to the environment. In fact, one two-stroke engine vehicle can produce as much pollution as fifty cars.
Mayor Ortega thought that the solution was to get rid of the two-strokes. She offered interest-free loans to help people pay for new vehicles with four-stroke engines. Within three years, there were 400 of them on the streets of San Fernando.
But there were still more than 800 of the two-strokes. Even with a loan, the change to a four-stroke was just too expensive for many people. Two-stroke engines are lighter and simpler, so they are less expensive to buy and maintain.
Another problem was that the people who did change to a four-stroke were selling their old two-stroke to someone else in the city. The loans had led to no decrease in either the number of two-strokes or the amount of pollution. San Fernando needed another solution, and it had to be cheap.
Meanwhile, in Colorado, USA, a team of college students were trying to win a competition. They were developing a clean two-stroke engine snowmobile for use in Yellowstone National Park. The team built a winning snowmobile that led to the startup of a non-profit business, Envirofit.
Using technology developed for the snowmobile, Envirofit came up with a way to retrofit two-stroke engines. “Retrofit” means to improve a machine by putting new and better parts in it, after it is already made. The company designed a retrofit kit, a set of parts and tools for people to use on their own two-stroke engines.
Using the kit could both reduce the pollutants in the exhaust and help the engine make better use of fuel. The company sent kits to the Philippines to be tested by 13 taxi drivers. Each driver had a three-wheeled motorbike with a sidecar for passengers.
After eight months, the results were great. Using the kits had cut both pollution by more than 70% and the waste of gas and oil. Saving money on fuel turned the taxi drivers into believers.
They found that using the kit could mean increasing their income by as much as a third. Right away, they started to spread the word among other drivers. Rolando Santiago, president of a taxi driver’s organization, was one of the first drivers to retrofit his engine.
He says, “After six months of using the kit, my extra income helped me save for a matching house grant. I rebuilt my home and my neighbor’s home, which provided better housing for six families.” Santiago’s story gives one example of how better air can lead to a lot of other better things.
Few two-stroke engine vehicles are in use in the United States. However, the United States has good reason to care about the harm these vehicles do. Pollution pays no attention to borders between countries or continents.
For that reason, the U.S. government has spent thousands of dollars on kits for cities in India and other parts of Asia that have major air pollution problems. Pollution in India or the Philippines is not just their national problem, and pollution in Asia is not just Asia’s problem.
Passage 2. A Renewable Resource
Trees can be very beautiful, but they do much more than just look nice and give us shade for picnics.
In fact, trees are so valuable that it’s hard to see how we could exist without them. First, trees supply us with oxygen. When we breathe in air, our bodies use the oxygen from it, and then we breathe out carbon dioxide. Trees do the opposite. They take in carbon dioxide and put oxygen into the air, making them wonderful partners for us. They use the carbon to produce wood and leaves.
Keeping that carbon out of the air is a good thing, because carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gases keep heat from escaping into space and may cause Earth to get too hot.
Second, trees help clean up the environment. For example, they take pollutants out of the air, both dangerous gases like carbon monoxide and dust we don’t want to breathe in. According to the International Society of Arboriculture, ISA, in one year the average tree takes four to five kilograms of pollution from the air.
Trees clean the soil as well. Sometimes they pull pollutants out of the soil and store them, and sometimes they actually change pollutants so that they do less harm. Trees can also help with urban noise pollution, blocking noise that comes from city traffic, airports, and so on.
The list of benefits from trees goes on and on, but let’s return to our first one, the effect of trees on our oxygen supply. ISA estimates that one acre of forest puts out four tons of oxygen a year. That, they say, is enough to meet the needs of 18 people. So if one acre of forest is enough for 18 of us, how many acres does it take to meet the oxygen needs of the whole world? And is the number of trees keeping up with the population as it grows each year?
Ecology professor Nalini Nadkarni wondered about this, so she looked into how many trees there are in the world. She knew that scientists had estimated the number of trees by looking at photos of Earth taken by satellites. As of 2005, that estimate was about 400 billion trees.
Nadkarni then wondered how many trees that meant per person. To get an answer, she divided the number of trees by the world’s population at that time, and she found that there were 61 trees per person. Was that good news or bad?
Nadkarni started thinking about how many trees she herself would consume in her lifetime. One of her students reported that each year the average American uses the amount of wood in a 100-foot-tall tree that is 18 inches in diameter. Nadkarni thought about all the things she uses that are made from wood or from other tree-based products such as rubber, like newspapers, magazines, movie tickets, birthday cards, pencils, ink, rubber boots, furniture, wooden chopsticks.
Chopsticks? Nadkarni herself probably does not use a great number of those. However, she learned that every year, the Japanese throw away over 20 billion pairs of them.These chopsticks, called “werabashi,” little quick ones, are made of wood that comes from Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, the United States, and Canada. The Chinese throw away even more of them, 450 billion pair a year. That equals about 25 million trees.Every year.
Nadkarni does not tell this story to make chopstick users or anyone else feel bad. She says, “I don’t want people to feel guilty about their relationships with trees and say, ‘Oh, I can never touch another tree-created product again.’”She does want people to feel grateful that trees are such a wonderful resource and to understand that trees are a renewable resource.
We can plant more. In 2007, a nine-year-old boy in Germany decided to do that. Felix Finkbeiner wanted to follow the example of Wangari Maathai of Kenya. She was responsible for getting 30 million trees planted in Africa over 30 years. So he started Plant for the Planet. Since then, children around the world have gotten involved with this organization and planted billions of trees. According to a study completed in 2015, people are planting about 5 billion trees a year. The same study also provided a more accurate tree count. We actually have more than 3 trillion trees on Earth, more than seven times as many as the earlier estimate.
Both facts are very encouraging, aren’t they? However, the same study provided some troubling facts. There used to be twice as many trees on Earth as we have now, and each year 15 billion are being cut down. At that rate, in 300 years, there won’t be any trees left.
### Passage 3. The Environmental Benefits of Eating Insects
Do you find it hard to imagine eating an insect? Perhaps you are saying to yourself, “never in a million years would I eat bugs.” Or perhaps you are one of the many people who like to snack on chocolate-covered grasshoppers.
Human beings have eaten insects for thousands of years, and not just when they were forced to. The Romans ate them, and many modern cultures also consider them food. According to the United Nations, UN, people today eat over 1,400 species of insects. They eat them in 29 countries in Asia, 36 countries in Africa, and 23 in the Americas.
No doubt some of these people eat insects because they will go hungry unless they do, but many of them eat insects because they like the taste. Now there is another good reason to eat insects—to help the environment.
David Graecer eats insects, and he thinks you should too. He has set out to educate people in the United States about eating them, especially in place of beef, chicken, and pork.
He says the major reason to eat less of those foods is that current methods of raising livestock, animals such as cows, chickens, and pigs, use 30% of all the land on earth and have a terrible effect on the environment. According to Graecer, a 2006 UN report made clear just how bad the situation is. Raising livestock is causing much of our water pollution, destroying large areas of land, and adding to global warming. This is true for both huge factory farms and places where farmers can afford only a few animals. According to the report, raising cattle produces more greenhouse gases than cars and all other forms of transportation.
Raising insects, on the other hand, would cause far fewer environmental problems. At present, most edible insects are not raised but rather harvested. That is, people go out into the forest to find them. All anyone needs to do is collect them and cook them. However, increased demand has led some farmers to start raising them, as in Thailand, where many types of insects are popular snacks.
David Graecer also points out some of the benefits that insects offer as food. For example, if you are trying to lose weight, you might like to know that grasshoppers contain only one-third the fat found in beef. Insects are also a good source of protein. Dried insects often have twice the protein of fresh fish. In terms of protein, insects again compare well with beef. For every pound of grain that insects eat, they create far more protein than cattle do. Cattle have to eat several pounds of grain to produce just one pound of beef. In other words, cattle are not adding to the world’s food supply, they are subtracting from it. Cattle also require huge amounts of another valuable resource, water. It takes 1,847 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef. That will get you only three or four hamburgers.
The idea of insects as food has the support of experts such as Robert Koch, who teaches bio-resource engineering at McGill University in Montréal. Professor Koch sees insects as a great source of protein. He has long spoken in favor of farming them, although he’s not sure many Canadians are open to the idea. Nutrition professor Marion Nestle of New York University would agree with him about the benefits of insects as food. However, she also thinks that before most North Americans would eat them, they would have to be very, very hungry.
For now, David Graecer will continue to speak out, at schools and on TV and radio, on why people should eat insects. He realizes change will come slowly, if at all, but he hopes one day to import and sell edible insects, like the Mexican grasshoppers called chapulines. He won’t try to make a living at it, however. He says, “If I did this for a living, my family and I would be eating bugs all the time.”
Passage 4. How do people depend on bees?
Have you ever watched a bee at work on a flower? It wastes no time as it packs pollen onto its back legs to carry off to the hive. On their travels, bees carry pollen from flower to flower, pollinating the plants, a process which allows the plants to produce fruit.
The bee and the plant are partners in this process, each essential to the other, and to us. One-third of the food we eat comes from plants that need animals to pollinate them. Birds do some of this work, but insects do most of it, and most of those insects are bees. In the United States, bees pollinate 75% of all the fruits, vegetables, and nuts that growers produce. Without the services of bees, we would have no tomatoes, soybeans, apples, or pears, to name just a few bee-pollinated plants. If anything happened to the world’s bee populations, that would be bad news for anyone who eats fruits or vegetables anywhere. If that includes you, then you need to know that bees today in North America, Europe, and Asia are facing many threats.
Jeff Anderson knows a great deal about those threats. He has been a beekeeper for 30 years, ever since he married a beekeeper’s daughter and went into the family business. Each year he travels the United States with his honeybees, spending the spring among California fruit trees, and summers in the fields of Minnesota. He’s continuing a long tradition of beekeepers who move their hives with the seasons so their bees can hunt for new sources of pollen.
In ancient Egypt, beekeepers would transport their bees down the Nile River to find flowering crops. In North America, beekeepers over the years have traveled by covered wagon, riverboat, and train. Transporting hives long distances became much easier with the development of major highways in the 1940s.
Around that same time, another change occurred. Traveling beekeepers in North America were used to paying farmers to let them place hives on their land. However, wild bees started disappearing. Until finally, there were no longer enough wild bees left to pollinate the farmers’ crops. That meant the farmers had to call on the beekeepers’ bees to do the job instead. Then the farmers started paying the beekeepers.
The wild bees were disappearing because of changes in land use and methods of farming. As more and more land was developed for housing, there were fewer and fewer flowering plants to feed wild bees. Agriculture was changing too, with the introduction of new pesticides. Wild bees were carrying pollen with pesticides home to their hives and killing off entire populations.
North America is home to at least 4,500 different kinds of bees. The bees that Jeff Anderson and other beekeepers work with are European honeybees, which were brought over from Europe about 400 years ago. Their numbers have been dropping too, and Anderson says it keeps getting harder to raise healthy honeybees.
In the 1980s, honeybees came under attack from two types of parasites that were new to North America. Honeybees have been hurt by pesticides and diseases too. In the spring of 2005, U.S. beekeepers found that one-third of their honeybees had died during the winter, much more than is normal. From 2015 to 2016, in spite of ever-increasing efforts to protect honeybee populations, U.S. beekeepers lost over 40% of their bees. The reasons are still not fully understood.
Saving wild bees may be the best hope for the long-term health of crops that depend on bees. However, wild bees face a problem that has to do with the way that farmland is managed. For example, one of the most productive farm regions in North America is California’s Central Valley. Yet, this area is not at all welcoming to wild bees. Too little of the land is in its natural state. Farmers and homeowners there have put the land to their own uses and gotten rid of weeds (wild plants growing where they aren’t wanted), which are rich sources of pollen for wild bees.
Bee experts know that wild bees do best when farmers avoid chemical pesticides and leave some land in its natural state. Farmers and other big landowners, and anyone with a garden, must do whatever they can to protect wild bees.
The disappearing bee is only one of the many environmental crises in the news today. But while there are serious problems with our environment, there are also many good people working hard to solve them. Douglas Barish, editor of the environmental magazine On Earth, knows that news about the environment often sounds bad, and it can make people anxious. Yet, he is not anxious.
Why not? Experience tells him that within each problem lies its solution. He is always meeting people who, when they see something broken, immediately see an opportunity. They see a chance to fix something and make it better, whether it’s a motor to be improved or a forest to be restored. In the case of the honeybee, perhaps there are laws that need to be changed. One thing is clear. We’ll have to figure out how to save the bee’s way of life if we want to save our own.
Lesson 9. Technology
Passage 1. Telling Time
No one knows when people first thought about measuring time. We do know that they measured it by the sun, moon, and stars, and that they first divided time into months, seasons, and years. Later, they began dividing the day into parts, like hours and minutes, and they developed simple technology to help them do this.
Today, we have much more advanced ways to tell time, and we can measure even tiny parts of a second. A great many things have changed in how people tell time, but not everything.
The Sumerians who lived in the area of present-day Iraq were the first to divide the day into parts. Then, five or six thousand years ago, people in North Africa and the Middle East developed ways to tell the time of day. They needed some kind of clock because by then they had organized religious and social activities to attend. That meant people needed to plan their days and set times for these events.
Among the first clocks were Egyptian obelisks. The Egyptians used the movement of an obelisk’s shadow to divide the day into morning and afternoon. Later, they placed stones on the ground around the obelisk to mark equal periods of time during the day, the way that numbers do on the face of a clock. That worked fairly well, but people could not carry obelisks with them. They needed something portable.
So, the Egyptians invented a kind of sundial that is now called a shadow clock. It came into use about 3,500 years ago, around 1500 BCE. There were many types of sundials in Egypt and in other areas around the Mediterranean Sea. All of them, of course, depended on the sun, which was no help in telling time at night.
Among the first clocks that did not depend on the sun were water clocks. There were various types of these, too. Some were designed so that drops of water would fall at a constant rate, an unchanging speed, from a tiny hole in the bottom of a container. Others were designed to have a container slowly fill with water, again at a constant rate. It took a certain amount of time for the container to fill up or empty out.
However, the flow of water was hard to control so these clocks were not very accurate, and people still did not have a clock they could put in their pocket. Hourglasses filled with sand had similar problems.
In the early 1300s, the first mechanical clocks, machines that measured and told the time, appeared in public buildings in Italy. Around 1500, a German inventor, Peter Henlein, invented a mechanical clock that was powered by a spring. Now clocks were getting smaller and easier to carry, but they still were not very accurate.
Then, in 1656, the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens invented a clock that was a big step forward. This was the first pendulum clock. A pendulum moves from side to side, again and again, at a constant rate. Counting the movements of a pendulum was a better way to keep time. Huygens’ first pendulum clock was accurate to within one minute a day.
Developments in clock technology continued as the demand for clocks increased. Clocks were needed for factories, banking, communications, and transportation. Today, much of modern life happens at high speed and depends on having the exact time. We must also have international agreement on what the exact time is.
Now we have atomic clocks, the best of which are accurate to about one tenth of a nanosecond a day. But even with these high-tech clocks, we still measure a year by the time it takes the Earth to go around the Sun, just as people did long, long ago. We say that it takes the Earth 365 days for a trip around the Sun, but that is not exactly true. A year is actually a little longer, 365.242 days, or 365 days and almost 6 hours. So we generally add a day, February 29th, every fourth year, and we call those years leap years. However, this creates another problem. The extra hours in four years actually add up to less than one day, so adding a day every fourth year would give us too many days. So when a year ends in double zero, like 1800, 1900, or 2000, for example, we don’t always make it a leap year. We do it only when we can evenly divide the year by 400, as in 1600 and 2000. Remember that when you set your watch for the year 2100.
Passage 2. Reading on Screen vs. Reading on Paper
We do a lot of reading on screens these days, on computers, smartphones, and other kinds of electronic devices. Is reading on a screen a different experience from reading on a printed page? Most people would say yes, but is it different in a way that matters? In particular, are there differences for someone who’s reading not just for fun, but to learn?
Most college students today, at least in the United States, are reading some, if not all, of their course materials on a screen because electronic resources have begun to replace printed texts. So these students need to know, is one kind of reading better than the other when it comes to understanding and remembering what you read?
Since the 1980s, over a hundred studies have been carried out to see if the technology you use changes how you read. Scientists have tried to find whether the brain responds differently to on-screen text than to words on paper. So far, the research has had mixed results.
However, people generally seem to do a little better when they read a text, especially a long one, on a printed page rather than on a screen. That is, they do a little better on tests of how well they have understood and can remember what they read.
One reason for this may be the physical properties of books. When you open a book, you see a page on the left and a page on the right. The four corners on each page give you a sense of where you are as you read. It’s also easy to see where you’re going, because at all times you can see how long the book is and where you are in it. That helps you make a mental map of the text. Every piece of information in the book has its “home address,” so to speak. And when readers want to return to a particular piece of information, they often remember where in the book it appeared.
With an electronic text, on the other hand, you can’t see the entire text, and you can’t make the same kind of mental map. You can use the search function to find a particular phrase, but it’s hard to see any section of the text in the context of the whole. This may help explain why people reading electronic texts have to use more mental energy, get tired more quickly, and don’t remember as much.
There also seems to be a difference in the attitude that readers bring to reading on a screen. Without knowing it, many people seem not to take it as seriously as reading on paper. They spend more time scanning rather than reading, and they are more likely to read a text only once. They are also more likely to get distracted. They’re less likely to set goals for their reading, and less likely to reread the hard parts. These behaviors won’t help readers understand or remember what they’ve read. Many students seem to know without being told that reading a printed page gives them something that reading on a screen does not.
Studies have shown that many students print out electronic texts when they really need to understand them well. This practice may change as technology improves. The experience of reading on a screen may become less tiring, and it may become easier for students to mark up an electronic text the way they mark up a printed page.
However, you don’t need to wait for technology to improve. You can go ahead and change the things that are within your control—your attitudes and behaviors. Start by giving on-screen text the attention it deserves if you are reading to learn. To better understand and remember what you read, plan to reread the text, especially the difficult parts. Avoid getting distracted while you’re reading, and don’t multitask—do more than one thing at the same time. As you read, ask yourself questions about what you’re learning. Take notes while you read and after you finish. These are tips that apply to any kind of reading, on paper as well as on a screen, whenever you’re reading to learn.
Passage 3. Appropriate Technologies
You are probably reading this book in a developed country. So when you hear the word “technology,” you are likely to think of computers, high-tech phones, cars, and so on. People who live in such countries can look forward to new and better models of all these products each year. Modern technology has made life in developed countries much easier. Technology can make life easier in developing countries too, but it has to be technology of another kind because the needs in those countries are very different.
About 1.2 billion people, almost one-fifth of the people on Earth, don’t even have electricity. What they need is technology that is appropriate for their situations. That is, they need technology that will help them meet basic needs for food, water, clothes, housing, health services, and ways to make a living. The phrase appropriate technologies means types of technology that
1) use materials available in the local area,
2) can be understood, built, and repaired by the people who use them,
3) bring communities together to solve local problems.
Some appropriate technologies are beautifully simple. For example, a project in Sri Lanka is using sunlight to make drinking water safe. Clear bottles are filled with water and placed in the sun for six hours. That is usually enough time for the sun to heat the water and kill germs. If the weather is cool or cloudy, it takes two days. This method has been proven to help people stay healthier.
Amy Smith is a U.S. inventor with a passion for designing appropriate technologies. Smith studied engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, and then spent four years in Botswana. She taught math, science, and English there, and she trained farmers to take care of bees so they could get honey from them. In Africa, she realized that she could help people more by using her skills as an engineer. Smith said, “The longer I was there, the more I realized there were plenty of inventions that could improve the quality of life.” So Smith went back to MIT and started working on low-tech inventions.
Her first great invention was a screenless hammer mill. A hammer mill is a machine that grinds grain into flour. Usually, a hammer mill needs a metal screen to separate the flour from the unwanted parts of the grain. But screens often break, and they are hard to replace, so regular hammer mills are not much use in rural Africa. Women there often end up grinding grain by hand and spending hours each day doing it. Smith’s invention does not need a screen. It is cheap to build, simple to use, easy to repair, and it does not need electricity. With this machine, a woman can grind as much grain in a minute as she used to do in an hour. Smith’s invention has been a great success in Africa, but some other ideas that people have tried have not done so well.
In northern Ghana, another project designed to help women failed partly for cultural reasons. The women in that area do most of the farming, and they spend a lot of time and energy walking to and from their farms. Most of the time, they carry heavy loads on their heads. They are very much in need of a better way to transport farm products, tools, water, and so on. Because bicycles are popular in the region, a bicycle trailer seemed to be a good solution to the problem. The trailer was like a shopping cart but had two wheels and was attached to the back of a bike. However, the idea didn’t work. For one thing, it’s the men in northern Ghana, not the women, who own and ride bicycles. In addition, the type of bicycle offered to the women was a bicycle with a crossbar. A woman wearing a dress, as is traditional there, cannot ride such a bicycle. For these reasons, the idea of using a bicycle trailer failed.
Amy Smith and others continue to work on new technologies that are appropriate for developing countries. However, they must try to develop technologies that don’t depend on electricity, since so many of these countries don’t have it. Everyone would be better off if they had not only good low-tech technologies but also electricity. That would open the door to advances in education and communication, and it would let doctors store medicines that must stay cold.
It’s true that the production of electricity sometimes causes pollution, but creative engineers could solve that problem. They could find ways to produce it without hurting the environment, perhaps by using energy from the sun, wind, or water.
Of course, the problems of developing nations cannot all be solved by thinkers like Amy Smith, but many can. As she says, “technology isn’t the only solution, but it can certainly be part of the solution.”
Passage 4. Technologies in Science Fiction
Facts are pieces of information we can show to be true. When we read history, we want to know the facts, what really happened.
Fiction is the opposite. Writers of fiction make up stories. These stories tell about people and events that come from the writer’s imagination.
Science fiction writers imagine not only people and events, but perhaps most importantly, technology. They often write about the effects of that technology on a person, a group, or society. These writers usually set their stories in the future. Some of them have predicted technology that seemed impossible at the time, but really does exist today.
An Englishwoman named Mary Shelley was one of the first writers of science fiction. In 1818, she wrote the book Frankenstein, which tells the story of a young scientist, Dr. Frankenstein, who wants to create a human life. He puts together parts of dead people’s bodies and then uses electricity to bring the creature to life. However, he cannot control the creature, and it kills him. Since then, the idea of a “mad scientist,” someone who tries to use science and technology to gain power, has been very popular in science fiction, especially in science fiction movies.
In 1863, the French writer Jules Verne finished his first novel, Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon), one of his many great science fiction adventure stories. It tells of three men traveling across Africa by hot air balloon. Readers loved it, but many were confused.
Was it fact or fiction? The story sounded unlikely, but the writer’s style and the scientific details made it seem true. Later that same year, Jules Verne wrote Paris au XXe siècle (Paris in the Twentieth Century), a story he set in the 1960s, almost 100 years into the future.
This story has descriptions of high-speed trains, gas-powered cars, electronic devices, skyscrapers, and modern methods of communication. Verne imagined all these things at a time when neither he nor anyone else in Paris had even a radio. In another book, De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon), 1865, he predicted that people would travel into outer space and walk on the moon, a prediction that came true on July 20, 1969. Verne even got some of the details right. Both in his book and in real life, there were three astronauts making the flight to the moon. Their spaceship took off from Florida, and they came down in the Pacific Ocean on their return.
Space travel continued to be a popular subject for science fiction in the 20th century. The best writers based the science and technology in their stories on a real understanding of the science and technology of their time. Computers, robots, and genetic engineering all appeared in the pages of science fiction long before they appeared in the news.
The following quotation comes from a story by the great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. He wrote these words in 1954. When you read them, remember that at that time there were no home computers. In fact, the few computers that existed were as big as some people’s homes. In this story called The Fun They Had, Asimov describes a child of the future using a personal computer to learn math:
“Margie went into the schoolroom. It was right next to her bedroom, and the mechanical teacher was on and waiting for her.
The screen was lit up, and it said, ‘Today’s arithmetic lesson is on the addition of proper fractions. Please insert yesterday’s homework in the proper slot.’ Margie did so with a sigh.
She was thinking about the old schools they had when her grandfather’s grandfather was a little boy. All the kids from the whole neighborhood came, laughing and shouting in the schoolyard, sitting together in the schoolroom. And the teachers were people.”
Back in 1954, readers probably found Asimov’s story hard to believe. Today, his ideas do not seem so strange, do they? Asimov, Jules Verne, and others made some accurate predictions.
Does that suggest that we should pay more attention to what sci-fi writers are saying today about the world of tomorrow? Perhaps, but we should also remember that such predictions have been wrong more often than right. Here we are in the 21st century without flying cars or vacations on the moon, and in spite of computers, the Internet, and online courses, people still do go to school.
Lesson 10. Economics
Passage 1. Basics of Economics
What do you think of when you hear the word “economics”? Perhaps the front page of a newspaper where you might see stories about employment or interest rates or a national debt on the rise. Many people find that such stories use terms they don’t understand. They find economics confusing, yet they feel they need to know something about it. We all do. After all, economics is about us.
In the words of Canadian economist Jim Stanford, economics is about “who does what, who gets what, and what they do with it.” When we talk about economics, we are talking about ourselves as workers, consumers, savers, and investors. The results of our individual and collective decisions in those roles make up the economy.
Our individual decisions include such things as what products to buy, what work to do, and how much to invest in our education. To get the things we need and want, we need to use our resources. Our money, time, and skills, and those resources are limited. That forces us to make choices.
Economist Pearl Claunch explains, “The economist’s special way of looking at the world involves looking at the costs and benefits of making any decision or choice. Economics says that since everything interesting in life is scarce, choices have to be made. And choices involve costs as well as benefits. So if you want to make wise choices, you should use a benefit-cost approach.”
This method of decision-making, also called cost-benefit analysis, is often used by governments in deciding how to use their financial resources. Take the case of a decision about whether to build a highway. Officials would estimate the costs of the project, in taxpayer money, for example, and compare them with the benefits, to highway users, for example. We can use the same approach in deciding how we spend our own money or our time.
However, the costs of buying or doing something includes more than just the price we pay in dollars or euros or yen. When we choose one thing over another thing we also want, because we can’t have both, then we lose the opportunity to get that other thing. Economists have a term for this loss: opportunity cost.
When you have a limited amount of money and you choose to spend it on a pizza instead of a movie, you have lost the chance to see the film. The opportunity cost of getting the pizza is not getting to see the movie.
To return to the example of the highway, when the government considers the cost to taxpayers, it must consider more than the price of labor and materials. Tax money is a scarce resource and the government could use that money elsewhere. In other words, what is the opportunity cost of building the highway? In addition, there are environmental costs to consider, such as the loss of fields or forests. There may also be costs to people whose property lies in the way of the highway.
Spending decisions are only part of the government’s role in the economy. One of its most basic responsibilities is creating currency, the economists’ term for money, which lets us make trades for goods and services.
Imagine if we had to exchange goods and services without the use of money, the way people did before money was invented. How would you pay your school for your classes? You could offer to trade the school some of your belongings or do a job for them, but you might not have anything the school needed.
Even if you did, you would waste a lot of time negotiating the trade. Money, on the other hand, lets us buy and sell goods and services quickly and easily. Most people agree that the government plays an essential role in creating and regulating money.
However, other parts of its role in the economy lead to much disagreement. Our individual values make us judge government actions differently, just as our values lead us to different choices in our own lives. We study the costs and benefits of government actions. We debate what is and is not necessary. We all have opinions about who should do what, who should get what, and what they should do with it, and that is what economics is all about.
Passage 2. Supply and Demand
Introduction
The most basic laws in economics are the laws of supply and demand. Demand means how much of a product or service people want to buy. Supply means how much of that product or service is available for sale or can be produced. Understanding these laws is essential to understanding how markets work. That’s because almost every transaction between a buyer and a seller is the result of how these two laws affect each other.
Setting Prices
The laws of supply and demand explain how prices for goods and services are set. When demand is high, producers see an opportunity for profit. They can charge high prices as they’re producing goods to meet a demand.
So, if many consumers want fresh strawberries, for example, growers have reason to increase the supply. That’s the law of supply at work. However, the law of demand says that when the price of something goes too high, fewer consumers will buy it.
So, if strawberries get too expensive, some shoppers will buy another fruit instead, and the demand for strawberries will drop. When the demand for strawberries is low, or when people aren’t willing to pay a good price for them, growers reduce production. The goal of producers is to set a price low enough to bring in the number of sales they need, but high enough to make a profit.
That price, the point where the quantity that consumers want to buy equals the quantity that sellers want to produce, is called the equilibrium price. It’s the point where there’s a balance between supply and demand. Notice in the diagram that as the cost of a box of strawberries rises, the supply goes up. But the demand for strawberries increases only as the cost drops. The point where the two lines cross is the equilibrium price.
Imbalances between Supply and Demand
Two other important terms are surplus and shortage. When the supply is higher than the demand, producers have more of a good or service than consumers want. In that case, the difference between the supply and the demand is called a surplus. A surplus can mean anything from extra strawberries that no one is buying to extra workers that no one is hiring.
When the opposite happens, the difference between supply and demand is called a shortage. A shortage means there isn’t enough of something to meet the demand. For example, imagine a company producing a new toy, one that quickly becomes more popular than expected. It flies off the shelf. The company can’t produce enough to keep up with the demand, and stores run out. The result is a shortage of the toy and some unhappy children.
Other Factors Affecting Demand
The example of the popular toy brings up another point about demand. Many factors other than price can play a role in how much of a demand there is for a product or service. How did this particular toy get to be so popular?
Perhaps there was an especially effective ad on TV that sparked demand, or word of mouth might have done the trick. Then, as demand increased, the toy became scarce. When something is scarce, it often seems more attractive, which further drives up demand.
We know that a change in price can affect demand, but other factors influence how much effect it will have. In the case of fresh strawberries, shoppers might easily change their minds about buying them if the price goes up a dollar. After all, there are close substitutes for strawberries. Other kinds of fruit are available, too.
On the other hand, we can assume that a $1 increase in the price of gas will make little difference in demand, as people will still need to drive to work or school or the doctor’s office, and there’s no close substitute for gas. Some drivers could use public transportation instead, but many could not or would not.
Here we see another significant factor in how much a change in price will affect demand. Is the demand for a necessity, something people must have, or a luxury, something expensive you buy for pleasure? For most drivers, gas is a necessity. The demand for a necessity is less likely to rise or fall in response to a change in price than the demand for a luxury, like fresh strawberries or expensive toys.
Conclusion
To sum up, the law of demand says that if the price for a good or service goes down, people will buy more, and if it goes up, people will buy less. The law of supply says that if the price goes up, producers will produce more, and if it goes down, they’ll produce less. However, these two laws don’t tell the whole story. Nothing about economics is that simple.
Passage 3. Behavioral Economics
An economist set up a table in a public place. Then he offered people walking by a choice of two chocolates. One was a gourmet chocolate that he had priced at 15 cents, while the other was a smaller, more ordinary chocolate priced at just a penny. More than 70% of the people who stopped at the table preferred the higher-quality chocolate. Even though it cost 14 cents more, they were willing to pay the extra money for it.
Then the economist dropped both prices by a penny, so the gourmet chocolate cost 14 cents and the other one was free. All of a sudden, the numbers were reversed. Only 31% of the people who stopped would pay the 14 cents for the better-quality chocolate. The other 69% went for the smaller, more ordinary one, the free one.
Question:
Why does the thought of getting something for free have such a strong effect on people’s choices?
The same economist secretly visited some dormitories at the U.S. university where he teaches, leaving a six-pack of soda in each of several shared refrigerators. In most cases, the sodas were gone within three days. The students had helped themselves. Then the economist returned, but this time, instead of a six-pack of sodas, he left a plate with six one-dollar bills. Three days later, all the money was still there.
Question:
What made students decide it was fine to take a one-dollar soda, but not a one-dollar bill?
The economist and a team of researchers carried out a test that involved giving volunteers electric shocks. After one set of shocks, the volunteers got a pill that was supposed to make them feel less pain. They also got one of two brochures about the pill. Some of the volunteers read in their brochure that the pill they got was expensive, while others read that their pill had been marked down to only ten cents. There was no actual pain reliever in any of the pills. Nevertheless, after taking the pills, when the volunteers went through another set of shocks, most of them reported feeling less pain.Of the people who got the high-priced medicine, almost everyone said that it helped. Of the people who got the cheap medicine, only half said that it did.
Question:
Why do people believe that a higher-priced pain reliever works better?
For answers to these questions, read the work of Dan Ariely, the economist who handed out the chocolates and fake pills and made the secret visits to those college dorms. Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics, a fairly new area of economics that has to do with economic decisions. He studies the behavior of consumers, borrowers, and investors.
According to the teachings of traditional economics, when people make economic decisions, they act in their own best interests. That is, most economists assume that people are sensible and will make the choices that do them the most good.
What behavioral economists are finding, however, is that this is frequently not true. People often make poor economic choices. Emotions get in the way of calculations. And people often repeat the same mistakes.
Ariely calls people predictably irrational because their decisions often don’t make sense and because he can predict the mistakes they will make. One thing that influences people’s decision-making is the way that a choice is presented to them. According to Ariely, most people “don’t know what they want until they see it in context.”
When faced with certain choices presented in certain ways, for example, by smart salespeople, people don’t see the choices as they really are, and they’re likely to make poor decisions. Ariely hopes that as people learn more about when, where, and why they make poor decisions, they will understand themselves better. Maybe consumers will learn to think differently and make better choices when shopping.
Nevertheless, he admits to buying a $30,000 car, which was not the kind of car he truly needed, after learning that it came with three years of free oil changes, even though compared to the cost of a new car, the cost of an oil change, or even three years of them, is insignificant.
Question:
Is Professor Ariely as predictably irrational as the rest of us?
Passage 4. The Economics of Happiness
People often think of economists as focusing on money, production, and the cold, hard facts of what happens in the marketplace. It may, therefore, come as a surprise to think of an economist asking, “How happy are you?” However, some economists very much want to know.
Richard Easterlin is an economist who has studied national happiness for years. In 1974, he presented a new theory. He said that a nation’s economic growth doesn’t always lead to its people becoming happier.
Poor people do become happier when they get enough money for basic needs. But beyond that, he said, more money does not mean more happiness. Easterlin pointed to Japan as an example.
In the years following World War II, Japan experienced an economic boom, one of the biggest in the history of the world. Between 1950 and 1970, its economic production grew by more than 600 percent. Japan grew from a country torn apart by war into one of the richest nations in the world.
Surprisingly, however, the people of Japan didn’t seem to grow any happier. According to one poll, they actually felt less satisfied with their lives in the early 1970s than they had 15 years before. They were richer, yes, but happier, no.
For years, economists accepted Easterlin’s theory. The public accepted it, too. It fit in with the popular idea that “money can’t buy happiness.” Perhaps we want to believe in this idea because we all hope that happiness is within our reach, even when wealth is not.
Easterlin’s theory has been back in the news in recent years. The discussion began when two young economists, Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, argued against it in a 2008 paper that other economists found very interesting. Their position was that money is, in fact, likely to bring happiness.
They based their argument on information that further polls had revealed over the 34 years since Easterlin’s paper. They said, “our key finding is that income appears to be closely related to happiness. Most countries get happier as they get wealthier, and wealthy countries have citizens with greater happiness than poor countries."
Some of their information came from the Gallup organization, a well-known and respected polling organization, which found that people in the richest countries are happiest with their lives. At least one-third of the people in those countries give themselves a score of 8, 9, or 10 on a happiness scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest possible level of life satisfaction. The very rich and happy nation at the top of the list is Denmark.
Denmark also sits at the top of lists created by other economists who do similar research. Who is at the bottom? Poor African nations, among them Tanzania, Togo, and Benin.
As for the case of post-war Japan, Stevenson and Wolfers also looked back at the research done there. It turns out that the question in the poll changed over time. If you look only at the years in which the question stayed the same, then the percentage of people who rated themselves as satisfied or completely satisfied actually did rise.
The central idea, then, is that the economic growth of a nation does generally lead to more happiness for its citizens. In poor countries, it can lead to better food and housing and more choices in life. In rich countries, it can pay for research and medical care that help people enjoy longer, healthier lives.
Easterlin, however, remains unconvinced. He notes that China and the United States both grew richer in recent years without growing any happier. Easterlin, Stevenson, and Wolfers would all agree on at least one thing—money isn’t the only factor that influences happiness. Stevenson and Wolfers report that Latin American countries are happier than income alone would predict, and East European countries are less happy.
When Stevenson and Wolfers speak about income and its influence, they’re saying that what matters is absolute income—how much you make in dollars, pesos, euros, yen, etc. Easterlin, on the other hand, believes that relative income matters more—how much you make in comparison with other people. After your basic needs are met, you compare yourself with the people around you. How happy you are depends not on how much you have, but on how you think you compare with those others, and on how much more you want.
Such comparisons may be human nature, or are they? Psychology professor Sonia Lubomirsky doesn’t believe that happy people think this way. In her research, she has asked people who they compared themselves with. Less happy people, she reports, went on and on. How did happier people respond? She says, “the happy people didn’t know what we were talking about.”
Notes 
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