March 2013 2nd grade exam

23.

Mike Michalowicz, the author of The Pumpkin Plan, argues that comedians are the ultimate public speakers. For example, comedians have to hold an audience’s attention for an hour or more, they don’t get a break during their presentation, and they can’t rely on the audience for a Q&A. They are also expected to make the audience laugh constantly. And they don’t even get to use presentation software programs, because they want the audience looking at them, not trying to read a screen. These facts don’t mean you need to be a comedian on stage to perform well. You aren’t even required to tell jokes. To enhance your own presentations, however, start to observe the techniques comedians use, and employ them in your own speech.

24.

Ironically, it’s usually when we try to do everything right that we wind up doing something wrong. That’s because the more balls you try to juggle, the more likely you are to drop one. You hope many extracurricular activities will get you into your first choice college, so you spend hours working out with the football club, run for student government, and volunteer for hours on free afternoons. Meanwhile, you make time to try to keep your grades up. With that kind of pressure, you can misread an assignment, double book your schedule, or otherwise let people down―but it’s not your parents’ fault or your friends’. They aren’t expecting too much of you by asking for one spot in your hectic schedule. It’s up to you to recognize your limits, not sign up for too many extracurricular activities, and admit when you’ve dropped the ball.

25.

Surfing is often thought of as a male sport, but in fact women have been surfing in California since the early 1920s and today there are women surfers in every surfing country in the world. Like men, they range from amateurs to professionals. Though women may not have been taken seriously in surf contests, these days they compete because they have truly earned that right. One of the earliest women surfers was Mary Hawkins, who showed very graceful form in the surf. She was the first in a long line which stretched down in the 1960s, to Marge Calhoun and her daughters, and Linda Benson, followed by some of the top professional surfers today.

26.

Octavius went to Albania to complete his academic and military training. While there, he learned of the assassination of Julius Caesar. Octavius returned to Rome and found that Caesar’s will would make him Caesar’s adopted son and heir to his political and personal fortune. He was advised not to accept Caesar’s request because he was only 18 and unprepared to deal with the hazards of Roman power politics. Nevertheless, he did accept. Caesar’s will called for games for the entertainment of the public. Such things required funds. Octavius borrowed funds and his efforts to comply with Caesar’s will got considerable support among the troops of Caesar and the public.

27.

How you address your professors depends on many factors such as age, college culture, and their own preference. Some teachers will ask you to call them by their first names, especially if they’re relatively young. They enjoy the informal atmosphere generated by having everyone in the class on the same level. Some colleges, in fact, pride themselves on having all their faculty and students on a first­name basis. But beware: one of the surest ways to upset professors is to call them by their first names against their wishes. Most professors see themselves in a position of professional authority over their students which they earned by many years of study. They no more want to be called John or Maria than does your average physician.

28.

Teeth are covered in enamel, the hardest substance found in the body. It is, however, weak against acids. Acids from food can attack the enamel. These are found not only in sweet foods like ice cream and candy, but also in healthy vegetable and fruit juices. Particularly dangerous, however, are sticky foods that cling to the teeth. These encourage the formation of plaque, which is a mixture of the remains of food and bacteria. These bacteria turn simple carbohydrates, such as those in sugar, white flour, or potatoes, into acid that damages the tooth enamel. The more frequently these bacteria get new resources, the more acid they produce. In other words, it is more harmful to your teeth to repeatedly drink lemonade than it is to eat several chocolate bars at one sitting.

30.

Phyllium giganteum, which is called the “walking leaf,” disguises itself so that enemies often aren’t able to distinguish this insect from real leaves. It can get up to 5 inches long and 3 inches wide. The males have rear wings extending to the end of the abdomen. The females don’t have rear wings, and their front wings are narrower and shorter than the abdomen. They lay between 100 and 300 eggs which have very thick shells. They eat plants like oak, eucalyptus, raspberry, and rose. They live mainly in tropical areas of Asia. Since they have a very limited mobility, they only move the necessary distances to eat, remaining stable in very small areas and passing their lives almost motionless most of the time.

31.

It’s not a real vacation if you’re reading email or calling in for messages. When Jai and I went on our honeymoon, we wanted to be left alone. My boss, however, felt I needed to provide a way for people to contact me. So, I came up with the perfect phone message: “Hi, this is Randy. My wife and I are going away for a month. I hope you don’t have a problem with that, but my boss does.” I then gave the names of Jai’s parents and their address. “If you look them up in the phone book, you can get their number. And then, if you can convince my new in­laws that your emergency merits interrupting their only daughter’s honeymoon, they have our number.” We didn’t get any calls.

32.

Walter Debner ran an old­style grocery store in Minnesota, and he was looking for a way to give his business a boost. He once remarked that people who came into the shop without a bag took a lot less food than those who came with their bags. Why? Because they simply couldn’t carry the groceries. So he set about devising a way to help them purchase more at one time. It took him four years to develop the right solution: a package which was inexpensive, easy to use, and strong enough to hold a lot of groceries. The package consisted of a paper bag with cord running through it for strength and increased customers’ carrying capacity. He patented his product and sold over a million shopping bags a year.

33.

Educating consumers is important because people can have great power over how goods are made and sold, depending on what they choose to buy. This power is sometimes shown through campaigns and boycotts, when people refuse to buy certain food products. For instance, thousands of dolphins used to be killed in tuna fishing nets, but consumer pressure helped to change this practice. Tuna that was caught without harming dolphins was labeled “dolphin friendly” so consumers wouldn’t buy other tuna products. This forced many companies to change their method of fishing. As a result, dolphin deaths decreased by over 80 percent between 1990 and 2000.

34.

When I was a child, I loved to go for car rides with my father. During such rides, I was always full of questions: What does this button do? Can I press this one? I vividly remember turning on the light inside the car, making our vehicle a motorized firefly, and flying down the night’s path. In one such instance, my father told me, “Don’t turn on the light! It makes the car a fishbowl; everyone can see inside.” It seems as though the average person has these same reservations about being revealed or exposed―emotionally, physically, or both. Most people have a certain wish to maintain privacy, which perhaps explains my father’s resistance to having the car’s inside light on while driving at night.

35.

When the going gets tough, tough people ought to thank their fathers. New research from Brigham Young University shows that dads are in a unique position to help their children develop persistence. According to the study, when children felt warmth and love from their father, were told the reasons behind rules, and were granted an appropriate level of autonomy, they were able to set a foundation to flourish and cope with the stress and pressures of life. Over time, kids with fathers involved in their lives were more likely to become persistent, which led to higher engagement in school and lower rates of delinquency. After following 325 families over several years, two professors, Laura Walker and Randal Day, concluded that dads play a big role in helping their kids set goals and complete them.

36.

Originally, a Dutch auction referred to a type of auction that starts with a high price that keeps going down until the item sells. This is the opposite process from regular auctions, where an item starts at a minimum price and bidders wrestle over it by increasing their offers. In a Dutch auction, however, the auctioneer offers the item at a certain price and waits for somebody to agree. If nobody does, then he lowers the price and asks again. This continues until a participant says “yes” and thus wins the item. There are no battles over items in a Dutch auction; the first person to accept the offered price wins the item, resulting in saving a lot of time.

37.

A paradigm is the way you see something, your point of view, or belief. Our paradigms are often way off the mark, and they create limitations. Paradigms are like glasses. When you have incomplete paradigms about yourself or life in general, it’s like wearing glasses with the wrong prescription. That lens affects how you see everything else. In other words, what you see is what you get. If you believe you’re dumb, that very belief will make you dumb. If you believe your sister is dumb, you’ll look for evidence to support your belief, find it, and she’ll remain dumb in your eyes. On the other hand, if you believe you’re smart, that belief will cast a rosy hue on everything you do.

38.

On entering the house, I examined the framework of the hall window with my lens. I could at once see that someone had gone through it.

It was because I could distinguish the outline of a step where the wet foot had been placed while coming in. I was then beginning to be able to form an opinion as to what had occurred.

A man had waited outside the window. Someone had brought the jewels to him. The deed had been overseen by another man. He had pursued the thief and had struggled with him.

They had each pulled at the crown, their united strength causing injuries which one alone could not have made. He had returned with the prize, but had left a fragment in the grasp of the thief.

39.

A fascinating experiment once took place in a small Australian village. For the past two years, the village had witnessed that the number of street crimes was rapidly increasing. Local residents, alarmed by the increase in street crime, got together and decided that the best way to confront the problem was to remove the offenders from the main street after nightfall. (Instead of putting more armed police in the street, they chose to play classical music.) Every single block began piping out the sounds of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. In less than a week, the town reported a dramatic decrease in crime. The experiment was so successful that the main train station in Copenhagen, Denmark adopted the same approach―with similar results, too.

40.

Order effect is the prejudicial impact that the presentation order of a question, idea, answer, or product has on a respondent. Whether the item is located in the first, last, or middle position sometimes affects the selection of or response to that item. There have been several studies that have noticed an order effect when an early stimulus acts as a frame of reference for later stimuli. Robert Ferber from Illinois University had respondents rate a list of occupations and found that the maximum or minimum ratings occurred on the one presented first, regardless of the ordering of the occupations. In another study, the subjects were asked to rate a beverage on intention to buy on a scale ranging from “definitely would not buy” to “definitely would buy.” The first beverage tasted was rated significantly higher.

The items presented in the initial position tend to get extreme ratings by people.