SAT COURSE NOTES

The thing that worries me most about the SAT is…

Your amigdala and you.

I. CRITICAL READING SECTION:


Critical Reading Section
The critical reading section (formerly known as the verbal section) has been slightly altered. Analogies have been replaced by short reading passages. These reading passages measure the kind of reasoning formerly measured by analogies. The reading passages are taken from different fields, including natural sciences, humanities, social science, and literary fiction. This section measures a student's knowledge of genre, cause and effect, rhetorical devices, and comparative arguments.


"Incidentally, I despise everything which merely instructs me without increasing or immediately enlivening my activity." Goethe

Our own practice test:

Moscow Mayor Promises a Winter Without Snow
By SIMON SHUSTER / MOSCOW Simon Shuster / Moscow
Sat Oct 17, 9:15 am ET

Pigs still can't fly, but this winter, the mayor of Moscow promises to keep it from snowing. For just a few million dollars, the mayor's office will hire the Russian Air Force to spray a fine chemical mist over the clouds before they reach the capital, forcing them to dump their snow outside the city. Authorities say this will be a boon for Moscow, which is typically covered with a blanket of snow from November to March. Road crews won't need to constantly clear the streets, and traffic - and quality of life - will undoubtedly improve.

The idea came from Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who is no stranger to playing God. In 2002, he spearheaded a project to reverse the flow of the vast River Ob through Siberia to help irrigate the country's parched Central Asian neighbors. Although that idea hasn't exactly turned out as planned - scientists have said it's not feasible - this time, Luzhkov says, there's no way he can fail. (See TIME's photo-essay "Vladimir Putin: Action Figure.")

Controlling the weather in Moscow is nothing new, he says. Ahead of the two main holidays celebrated in the city each year - Victory Day in May and City Day in September - the often cash-strapped air force is paid to make sure that it doesn't, well, rain on the parades. With a city budget of $40 billion a year (larger than New York City's budget), Moscow can easily afford the $2-3 million price tag to keep the skies blue as spectators watch the tanks and rocket launchers roll along Red Square. Now there's a new challenge for the air force: Moscow's notorious blizzards.

"You know how every year on City Day and Victory Day we create the weather?" Luzhkov asked a group of farmers outside Moscow in September, according to Russian media reports. "Well, we should do the same with the snow! Then outside Moscow there will be more moisture, a bigger harvest, while for us it won't snow as much. It will make financial sense." (See pictures of Russia celebrating Victory Day.)

The plan was unsurprisingly rubber-stamped this week by the Moscow City Council, which is dominated by Luzhkov's supporters. Then the city's Department of Housing and Public Works described how it would work. The air force will use cement powder, dry ice or silver iodide to spray the clouds from Nov. 15 to March 15 - and only to prevent "very big and serious snow" from falling on the city, said Andrei Tsybin, the head of the department. This could mean that a few flakes will manage to slip through the cracks. Tsybin estimated that the total cost of keeping the storms at bay would be $6 million this winter, roughly half the amount Moscow normally spends to clear the streets of snow.

So far the main objection to the plan has come from Moscow's suburbs, which will likely be inundated with snow if the plan goes forward. Alla Kachan, the Moscow region's ecology minister, said the proposal still needs to be assessed by environmental experts and discussed with the people living in the area before Luzhkov can enact it. "The citizens of the region have some concerns. We have received lots of messages," she told the RIA news agency. (Read TIME's 1991 article "The End of the U.S.S.R.")

With only a few weeks left before winter comes, environmentalists will have to work fast to keep Luzhkov from implementing his zaniest plan to date - and to stop the first snowflakes from wafting down to the city streets.


In paragraph 1, how is the mayor going to stop the snow?

In paragraph 2, the word “feasible” most nearly means
A. expensive
B. inexpensive
C. pleasant
D. probable

The author seems to think the mayor of Moscow is
a. a nut.
b. a visionary.
c. handsome.
d. used to the cold weather.


What is necessary to skim?
1. FOCUS!!!
Reading is panacea.
11 experiences
2. Physicality
--touch the text

...FROM THE LATIMES
Min Byoung-chul, a professor at Konkuk University, was recently having lunch with some Chinese students. This time, it was the teacher who was taking notes.
The students were citing differences between Chinese and South Korean culture. Why, they asked, do Koreans look at them strangely when they lift their rice bowls to eat, or smoke in front of the elderly?
And why do Korean teachers get insulted when they hand in their papers using one hand instead of two? And hasn't anyone told teachers that students from China would never bow like their Korean counterparts?


Japanese students voiced similar differences with Koreans. Why, for example, do South Koreans talk loudly on their cellphones in trains and buses, a practice that's a social taboo back home?

Min has made an avocation out of cataloging such differences. He's a cross-cultural interpreter whose terrain is the delicate, often undefined line where cultural mannerisms clash.


Over the years, the 59-year-old educator and his team of researchers have queried people at airports, coffeehouses and classrooms in the U.S. and Asia about cultural faux pas committed by visiting foreigners.

Min has written three guides that, country by country, highlight the differences between American culture and the social customs in South Korea, China and Japan. He is researching a new book that will examine the differences among Asian cultures.

The time has come for such a book, he says, because the improved political and economic climate throughout northeast Asia has translated into more regional tourism and business travel.

South Koreans need to be ready, Min says.

"South Korea is becoming more diverse with more interracial marriages," he said. "All cultures have their differences. And if Koreans can't grasp those differences, they're going to be in a lot of trouble."


In 1993, Min published "Ugly Koreans, Ugly Americans," examining customs that are often lost in translation across the Pacific Ocean. He co-wrote follow-ups, "Ugly Japanese, Ugly Americans" and "Ugly Chinese, Ugly Americans," which further detail clashes between East and West.

His research, which has included studying and teaching in the U.S. and offering English-language classes on South Korean TV and radio, led Min to conclude that the language barrier is but one hurdle between cultures.

"A 70-year-old Korean man once reached over to rub my inner thigh as we talked in my office," he said. "His gesture was meant to show, ‘I know you. I'm friendly. I've seen you on TV.'

"But I explained that as South Korea becomes more globalized, foreign visitors won't understand. I advised him to stop doing that."

The 2002 World Cup and the influx of English-language teachers here have brought more Westerners to South Korea, introducing additional opportunities for tension.

In South Korea, the hands-on culture condones body contact as an acceptable form of communication. Middle-aged women sometimes affectionately pick up and hug toddlers they encounter in public places.

Yet what Koreans will not customarily do, Min says, is apologize for slamming into someone or hold open a door for a person in a crowd. Rarely will they even acknowledge strangers in public.

Koreans, in turn, are baffled by the behavior of Americans and other Westerners. Why do many stick their hands in their pockets while talking, blast their car radios or refuse to stand when a boss approaches? they ask.

"The point of the books isn't to blame one side or the other," Min said, "but to help both sides view the other in a more open manner."

Min, a bespectacled Seoul native whose father was an elementary school principal, took an early interest in the rough-hewn intersection of language and culture.


Is Google Making Us Stupid? July/August 2008 ATLANTIC MAGAZINE
What the Internet is doing to our brains (excerpt from the article)
By Nicholas Carr


"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’ reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.