Passage Two

Mark felt that it was time for him to take part in his community, so he went to the neighborhood meeting after work. The area city council woman was leading a discussion about how the quality of life was on the decline. The neighborhood faced many problems. Mark looked at the charts taped to the walls. There were charts for parking problems, crime, and for problems in vacant buildings. Mark read from the charts, “Police patrols cut back, illegal parking up 20%”. People were supposed to suggest solutions to the council woman. It was too much for Mark. “The problems are too big”, he thought. He turned to the man next to him and said, “I think this is a waste of my time. Nothing I can do would make a difference here.”

As he neared the bus stop on his way home, Mark saw a woman carrying a grocery bag, and a baby. As Mark got closer, her other child, a little boy, suddenly darted into the street. The woman tried to reach for him, but as she moved, her bag shifted, and groceries started to fall out. Mark ran to take the boy’s arm and led him back to his mother. “You gotta stay with mom,” he said. Then he picked up the stray groceries while and the woman smiled in relief. “Thanks,” she said, “You’ve got great timing.” “Just being neighborly,” Mark said. As he rode home, he glanced at the poster near his seat in the bus. Small acts of kindness add up. Mark smiled and thought, “Maybe that’s a good place to start.”

19. What did Mark think he should start doing?

20. What was being discussed when Mark arrived at the neighborhood meeting?

21. What did Mark think of the community’s problems?

22. Why did Mark smile on his ride home?

Passage Three

And if stress in childhood can lead to heart disease, what about current stresses? Longer work hours, threats of layoffs, collapse in pension funds. A study last year in the Lancered examined more than 11,000 heart attack sufferers from 52 countries. It found that in the year before their heart attacks, patients have been under significantly more stress than some 13,000 healthy control subjects. Those stresses came from work, family, financial trouble, depression and other causes.

Each of these factors individually was associated with increased risk, says Dr. Salim Yosef, professor of medicine at Canada’s McMaster University, and senior investigator on the study. Together they accounted for 30% of overall heart attack risk, but people respond differently to high pressure work situations. Whether it produces heart problems seems to depend on whether you have a sense of control over life, or live at the mercy of circumstances and superiors.

That was the experience of Jano Cano, a roughed Illinois laboratory manager, who suffered his first heart attack in 1996 at the age of 56. In the two years before, his mother and two of his children had suffered serious illnesses, and his job had been changed in a reorganization. “My life seemed completely out of control,” he says, “I had no idea where I would end up.” He ended up in hospital due to a block in his artery. Two months later, he had a triple bypass surgery. A second heart attack when he was 58 left his doctor shaking his head. “There’s nothing more we can do for you,” doctors told him.

23. What does the passage mainly discuss?

24. What do we learn about Jano Cano’s family?

25. What did Jano Cano’s doctors tell him when he had a second heart attack?

Spot Dictation

When most people think of the word “education”, they think of a pupil as a sort of animate sausage casing. Into this empty casting, the teachers are supposed to stuff “education.”

But genuine education, as Socrates knew more than two thousand years ago, is not inserting the stuffing of information into a person, but rather eliciting knowledge from him; it is the drawing-out of what is in the mind.

“The most important part of education,” once wrote William Ernest Hocking, the distinguished Harvard philosopher, “is this instruction of a man in what he has inside of him.”

And, as Edith Hamilton has reminded us, Socrates never said, “I know, learn from me.” He said, rather, “Look into your own selves and find the spark of the truth that God has put into every heart and that only you can kindle to a flame.”

In a dialogue, Socrates takes an ignorant slave boy, without a day of schooling, and proves to the amazed observers that the boy really “knows” geometry – because the principles of geometry are already in his mind, waiting to be called out.

So many of the discussions and controversies about the content of education are useless and inconclusive because they are concerned with what should “go into” the student rather than with what should be taken out, and how this can best be done.

The college student who once said to me, after a lecture, “I spend so much time studying that I don’t have a chance to learn anything,” was clearly expressing his dissatisfaction with the sausage casing view of education.