September 2012 2nd grade exam (2nd version)

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

[41 to 42]

One of the greatest annoyances in today’s gadget­filled world is that we continuously manage to misplace them. Finding a misplaced remote control, smartphone or even our car keys is not only an annoyance, but also a time consuming endeavor, right? A brilliant new invention called Stick­N­Find will change the way forgetful people live their lives.

Stick­N­Finds are about the size of a US quarter, with each one containing a circuit board, replaceable battery, buzzer and LED light. The tags can be stuck to items that are frequently lost, such as car keys or the TV remote, and a custom app allows the tags to be assigned to specific objects. When the object is lost, accessing the app on the smartphone will display how far away the object is (up to 100 feet). Then the users can find the missing item by moving in different directions to identify its location. The tag will also sound a buzzer or illuminate its LED lights, aiding in the search. For luggage, pets, and maybe your kids if you want to make sure they don’t wander off too far from home, this thing is absolutely perfect.