The Reading Section of the THEA Practice Test consists of 7 reading selections. After each reading selection, you will be asked to answer several questions related to the selection. Read each question carefully and choose the ONE best answer. You may refer back to the selection to answer the questions. There are a total of 42 multiple-choice questions in the Reading Section, numbered 1 to 42.

In the Reading Section, the order of information requested by the questions does not necessarily correspond to the order of information in a given selection. Certain words and phrases within some selections have been highlighted for testing purposes, not for reasons of emphasis by the writers.

Durkheim and the Development of Sociology

1 Sociology is defined as the study of human groups. In the broadest sense, sociology is concerned with understanding patterns of human relationships, their causes and their effects. Unlike psychology, sociology does not attempt to explain the behavior of a particular individual under certain circumstances. Rather, sociology focuses on social trends or other influences that affect whole groups or categories of people. Thus, while a psychologist might counsel an individual who feels worthless after retiring from a long and successful career, a sociologist would be more likely to examine societal attitudes that may contribute to the loss of self-esteem experienced by many retired persons in our society.

2 The emphasis that sociology places on human groups rather than individuals stems directly from the work of Emile Durkheim, a pioneering sociologist of the nineteenth century. Durkheim likened the nature of a social group to bronze, a unique metal that is formed when the metals tin, copper, and lead are melted and mixed together. Durkheim noted that bronze is much harder than any of its component metals. In the same way, he reasoned, the characteristics of a social group viewed as a whole cannot be determined simply by examining the characteristics of its individual members. Nor can individuals be understood strictly in terms of the individuals themselves; when people come together as members of a particular group, the group exerts considerable pressure on the individual to conform to what it considers acceptable ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.

3 Besides developing a theoretical foundation for the study of social groups, Durkheim also conducted research designed to corroborate his theoretical work. Using landmark research methods, Durkheim collected and analyzed data from a number of countries that kept records on suicides. He wanted to show that social environment may have a profound effect even on those behaviors we consider most personal. The results of his study showed that suicide rates do indeed vary according to specific social characteristics. For example, Durkheim found that members of religions with strong prohibitions against suicide are less likely to commit suicide than are members of religious groups with weaker prohibitions. He also found a lower incidence of suicide among married persons than among persons who were single or divorced. Taken together, the findings of Durkheim's study provided convincing evidence that social groups do indeed exert pressures that control or regulate the behavior of individuals, including deeply personal behaviors.

4 Durkheim's rigorous research methods captured the attention of sociologists around the world, and were perhaps even more important to the future development of sociology than any specific research results could be. Within a short time, his specific approach to formulating and testing social theory became a model that guided the work of nearly all sociologists. This assured Emile Durkheim a lasting place as one of the key figures in the history of sociology.

The Joy Luck Club

1 My mother started the San Francisco version of the Joy Luck Club in 1949, two years before I was born. This was the year my mother and father left China with one stiff leather trunk filled only with fancy silk dresses. There was no time to pack anything else, my mother had explained to my father after they boarded the boat. Still his hands swam frantically between the slippery silks, looking for his cotton shirts and wool pants.

2 When they arrived in San Francisco, my father made her hide those shiny clothes. She wore the same brown-checked Chinese dress until the Refugee Welcome Society gave her two hand-me-down dresses, all too large in sizes for American women. The society was composed of a group of white-haired American missionary ladies from the First Chinese Baptist Church. And because of their gifts, my parents could not refuse their invitation to join the church. Nor could they ignore the old ladies' practical advice to improve their English through Bible study class on Wednesday nights and, later, through choir practice on Saturday mornings. This was how my parents met the Hsus, the Jongs, and the St. Clairs. My mother could sense that the women of these families also had unspeakable tragedies they had left behind in China and hopes they couldn't begin to express in their fragile English. Or at least, my mother recognized the numbness in these women's faces. And she saw how quickly their eyes moved when she told them her idea for the Joy Luck Club.

3 Joy Luck was an idea my mother remembered from the days of her first marriage in Kweilin, before the Japanese came. That's why I think of Joy Luck as her Kweilin story. It was the story she would always tell me when she was bored, when there was nothing to do, when every bowl had been washed and the Formica table had been wiped down twice, when my father sat reading the newspaper and smoking one Pall Mall cigarette after another, a warning not to disturb him. This is when my mother would take out a box of old ski sweaters sent to us by unseen relatives from Vancouver. She would snip the bottom of a sweater and pull out a kinky thread of yarn, anchoring it to a piece of cardboard. And as she began to roll with one sweeping rhythm, she would start her story. Over the years, she told me the same story, except for the ending, which grew darker, casting long shadows into her life, and eventually into mine. . . .

4 "I thought up Joy Luck on a summer night that was so hot even the moths fainted to the ground, their wings were so heavy with the damp heat. Every place was so crowded there was no room for fresh air. Unbearable smells from the sewers rose up to my second-story window and the stink had nowhere else to go but into my nose. At all hours of the night and day, I heard screaming sounds. I didn't know if it was a peasant slitting the throat of a runaway pig or an officer beating a half-dead peasant for lying in his way on the sidewalk. I didn't go to the window to find out. What use would it have been? And that's when I thought I needed something to do to help me move.

5 "My idea was to have a gathering of four women, one for each corner of my mah jong table. I knew which women I wanted to ask. They were all young like me, with wishful faces. . . .

6 "Each week one of us would host a party to raise money and to raise our spirits. The hostess had to serve special dyansyin foods to bring good fortune of all kinds—dumplings shaped like silver money ingots, long rice noodles for long life, boiled peanuts for conceiving sons, and of course, many good-luck oranges for a plentiful, sweet life. . . .

7 "We decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We weren't allowed to think a bad thought. We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that's how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck."

The Production of a Television Commercial

1 Everything in today's world is going faster and faster, and television commercials are no exception. At the start of the television age the standard commercial lasted 60 seconds, but most of today's commercials are only half that length and many are even shorter. The 15-second commercial, introduced a few years ago as a way to cut skyrocketing advertising costs, may soon be the most common in the United States. (Our television-watching counterparts in Japan and Europe are already being treated to 7½-second mini-commercials!)

2 What stands behind the message that blips onto and off of our television screens before we have time to get to the kitchen and back? Months of planning; hundreds of interviews with potential users of the product; hours of writing; dozens of actors, directors, and technicians; days of filming; and hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to the television networks that will run the ad.

3 Take for example a recent commercial for a certain brand of cough drops. The manufacturer of the cough drops spent four months trying to think of a way to boost sales. After several surveys of cough drop users, the company decided to market a strawberry-flavored lozenge. Further surveys identified the typical users of the strawberry-flavored cough drop as persons between the ages of 15 and 30. This information was important in planning the content and style of the commercial (fast-paced and upbeat, with colorful graphics and lively music) and in determining when to air it (during situation comedies, prime-time dramas, and music specials).

4 The creative team at the advertising agency that handled the cough drop company's account then took over. After hours of discussion and writing, they came up with six scripts, from which the client chose two. One involved a young woman pulling a strawberry out of a box of cough drops. The outline, or storyboard, for the commercial looked deceptively simple: four sketches and a few lines of 'voice-over.' Yet these few words and images (just enough to fill 15 seconds) had been carefully selected to convey crucial information about the product: its effectiveness in suppressing coughs and soothing sore throats, the absence of sugar, and its strawberry flavor.

5 Turning this carefully calculated script into an effective commercial involved finding just the right actor: a young woman who would be attractive to the target audience and who could make her positive response to the cough drops look convincing. Forty-two actors were auditioned; one was chosen.

6 The actor wasn't the only element of the commercial that had to go through an audition. More than a hundred outfits were inspected before one was chosen for her to wear, and hundreds of strawberries had to be sorted through.

7 The filming began at 9:30 one morning. "All" the actor had to do was to open a box of cough drops, pull out a strawberry and munch on it. Yet her movements and facial expressions had to be just right, and achieving that perfection took three hours and 72 shootings, or 'takes.'

8 Even then—shooting completed—the job was far from done. Thousands of feet of film had to be reduced to a compact 45 feet of finished commercial. Using million-dollar, computerized equipment, the producer, writer, and art director selected the best two takes and mixed images and sound to produce a polished final product. The result? A simple, effortless-looking little film that shows none of the tremendous effort that went into producing it, but which should justify all of that time, creativity, and expense by boosting cough drop sales.

Children's Fears

1 Children's fears come and go, but most children experience similar types of fears at approximately the same age. For toddlers, the worst fears are often associated with separation and change. Toddlers want their own mommy, daddy, spoon, chair, and bed. They are profoundly conservative little people. The most daring toddlers feel content if they can hold onto what they already know. Yet, children's fears are a useful index of their development. Fear of strangers appears to be a consequence of their first specific attachment, and its ending is a sign that they have acquired a more inclusive schema of faces and people in general. A child who is afraid of cats but not of rabbits evidently can differentiate one small animal from another. Fear of a particular person implies recognition of that person.

2 Just as children learn to fear things, they can learn what not to fear. As long as fears do not become too intense, a child's natural impulse to explore and discover things will be of help. Parents can be of assistance, both in overcoming fears and in preventing their development. They can prepare a child through play, stories, and happy prognostications for dealing with new situations that might be overwhelming; give prompt and unstinted comfort after a frightening experience or a bad dream; provide a night-light if the child is afraid of the dark; and devise ways in which a child can be gently and gradually—not abruptly—encouraged to take another look at feared objects and situations. Avoidance of the feared object reinforces the fear, and the fear becomes increasingly intense. Children's fears should be taken seriously, never ridiculed or dismissed as silly or babyish. Often, if the caregiver can get the child to explain exactly what it is that is so frightening, the child can be reassured. The one thing not to do is force children into confronting a feared situation before they are ready to do so.

3 Almost all children are afraid of something and, as with adults, these fears are often well-grounded. If we are in an open field during a thunderstorm, we probably have good reason to be afraid of lightning.

4 But occasionally fear of something gets out of control and becomes a phobia. A phobia is an irrational fear of something. A child may be afraid of the dark and hesitate to go up the stairs alone at night. But when the child refuses to remain in a place where there is no light, such as the movies or his or her bedroom, the fear is taking too great a toll on the child's development.

5 There are many different ways that phobias are treated in children. One of these techniques, commonly referred to as contact desensitization, is a behavioral technique designed to eliminate unnatural fears. The basic premise of the technique is that any fear is learned, and that anything that is learned can be unlearned. If a child is overly sensitive to something like water, for example, the gradual introduction of the feared object coupled with a pleasant experience can help reduce the strength of the fear, making it more manageable.

6 This exact technique was used in one study with fifty snake-avoidant children ranging in age from three to nine years. To see which technique was most effective, the fifty children were divided into five groups:

A. Members of the "contact desensitization group" were told about snakes and how to approach them, were encouraged by an adult to approach a snake, were given praise when they tried, and watched one adult hold the snake.

B. The "contact desensitization without touch group" received all that group A did, but no one touched the snake.

C. The "verbal input plus modeling group" received verbal input and modeling (when the adult touched the snake).

D. The "verbal input only" received only verbal assurances from the adult.

E. Finally, one group of children received no treatment and, hence, was called the "no treatment group."

7 The researchers used something called the Behavior Avoidance Test to see if there was a reduction in avoidance of the snake. Here, an adult reads a series of instructions to each child, asking him or her to do things such as approach the snake, pet it, pick it up, and hold it. The instructions go from little contact with the snake to increasing contact. This way the researchers can see which group of children has the most contact.

8 The results showed that 82 percent of the children in the contact desensitization group reduced their fear of snakes. Children in the other groups also reduced their fear, but not as dramatically.

9 Fears are something we all have to live with. When they get out of hand, a technique like the one we described here can be very useful in assisting a child through a difficult experience.

Writing as a Native American

1 My writing in my late teens and early adulthood was fashioned after the U.S. short stories and poetry taught in the high schools of the 1940s and 1950s, but by the 1960s, after I had gone to college and dropped out and served in the military, I began to develop topics and themes from my Native American background. The experience in my village of Deetziyamah and Acoma Pueblo was readily accessible. I had grown up within the oral tradition of speech, social and religious ritual, elders' counsel and advice, countless and endless stories, everyday events, and the visual art that was symbolically representative of life all around. My mother was a potter of the well-known Acoma clayware, a traditional art form that had been passed to her from her mother and the generations of mothers before. My father carved figures from wood and did beadwork. This was not unusual, as Native American people know; there was always some kind of artistic endeavor that people set themselves to, although they did not necessarily articulate it as "Art" in the sense of Western civilization. One lived and expressed an artful life, whether it was in ceremonial singing and dancing, architecture, painting, speaking, or in the way one's social-cultural life was structured. When I turned my attention to my own heritage, I did so because this was my identity, the substance of who I was, and I wanted to write about what that meant. My desire was to write about the integrity and dignity of a Native American identity, and at the same time I wanted to look at what this was within the context of an America that had too often denied its Native American heritage.

2 To a great extent my writing has a natural political-cultural bent simply because I was nurtured intellectually and emotionally within an atmosphere of Native American resistance. . . . The Acoma Pueblo, despite losing much of their land and surrounded by a foreign civilization, have not lost sight of their native heritage. This is the factual case with most other Native American peoples, and the clear explanation for this has been the fight-back we have found it necessary to wage. At times, in the past, it was outright armed struggle . . . ; currently, it is often in the legal arena, and it is in the field of literature. In 1981, when I was invited to the White House for an event celebrating American poets and poetry, I did not immediately accept the invitation. I questioned myself about the possibility that I was merely being exploited as an Indian, and I hedged against accepting. But then I recalled the elders going among our people in the poor days of the 1950s, asking for donations—a dollar here and there, a sheep, perhaps a piece of pottery—in order to finance a trip to the nation's capital. They were to make another countless appeal on behalf of our people, to demand justice, to reclaim lost land even though there was only spare hope they would be successful. I went to the White House realizing that I was to do no less than they and those who had fought in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, and I read my poems and sang songs that were later described as "guttural" by a Washington, D.C., newspaper. I suppose it is more or less understandable why such a view of Native American literature is held by many, and it is also clear why there should be a political stand taken in my writing and those of my sister and brother Native American writers.

3 The 1960s and afterward have been an invigorating and liberating period for Native American people. It has been only a little more than twenty years since Native American writers began to write and publish extensively, but we are writing and publishing more and more; we can only go forward. We come from an ageless, continuing oral tradition that informs us of our values, concepts, and notions as native people, and it is amazing how much of this tradition is ingrained so deeply in our contemporary writing, considering the brutal efforts of cultural repression that was not long ago outright U.S. policy. We were not to speak our languages, practice our spiritual beliefs, or accept the values of our past generations; and we were discouraged from pressing for our natural rights as Native American human beings. In spite of the fact that there is to some extent the same repression today, we persist and insist in living, believing, hoping, loving, speaking, and writing as Native Americans.

Bacteria Farming

1 Most people consider bacteria dangerous. After all, these microorganisms cause a host of serious human diseases, including tuberculosis, typhoid fever, pneumonia, and food poisoning. In fact, however, only a small percentage of bacteria cause diseases, while many bacteria are actually beneficial to humans. For example, doctors use bacteria to produce vaccines and other medicines. Bacteria are also critical to many industrial processes, from fermenting wine to recycling wastes, and scientists use bacteria to study many of the biological processes common to all living things.

2 With such a wide variety of economic and scientific applications, it is no surprise that several laboratories around the United States grow and sell bacteria as a crop. These laboratories use specialized farming techniques to produce one of the nation's most valuable biological commodities.

3 Like plants, bacteria have specific growth requirements. In particular, they need a place to grow and they need a supply of nutrients. Bacteria may be cultivated in containers ranging from small test tubes to giant steel tanks. The organisms are placed in a container along with a nutritionally balanced liquid or jelly, called a culture medium, which provides vitamins, minerals, and fluids to the growing bacteria. The growth container and culture medium must be kept at a constant temperature that is appropriate for the type of bacteria being cultivated. Most bacteria used in medicine and industry grow best between 20° and 45°C.

4 In a closed container, bacteria exhibit a definite growth pattern. The figure shows a typical bacterial growth curve. All bacteria follow this pattern, a fact that is very important to anyone who wants to cultivate them in large numbers.

5 When bacteria are first placed in a growth container, they must adapt to their new environment, and growth is slow while they are making this adjustment. This period is called the "start phase" of the bacterial growth cycle. At the end of this phase, as the bacteria become accustomed to their new living conditions, they begin to grow and reproduce rapidly. During the second phase, called the "log phase," a population explosion occurs. In a large tank, millions of new bacteria may be produced every hour during this phase. Eventually, however, the bacterial population reaches the maximum size possible, given the limitations of the growth container. At this point, the bacteria enter the "stationary growth phase," during which they continue to reproduce, but at a slower rate. After a time, the bacteria use up their supply of nutrients and their wastes accumulate in the growth container. The final period in the growth cycle, called the "death phase," occurs when the bacteria begin to die faster than they reproduce.

6 People who grow bacteria for science and industry take advantage of this unique growth cycle. Bacteria are harvested during the "stationary growth phase," yielding a good crop of usable organisms. By carefully monitoring the growth pattern, bacteria farmers can also decide when to add more nutrients to the culture medium or to transfer the bacteria to new growth containers. In this way, they can prevent large losses during the "death phase." By applying a knowledge of the growth requirements and patterns of bacteria, these modern day agriculturalists are able to help everyone derive the maximum benefit from these versatile organisms.

The Road to Civil Rights

1 The period immediately following the Civil War was a time of great hope for Black Americans. It was also a time of momentous constitutional change, as the nation sought to extend those liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights to all Americans, Black and White. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed all citizens equal protection of the laws, and the Fifteenth Amendment declared that no one could be denied the right to vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." In subsequent decades, however, it became all too apparent, at least to Blacks and an unfortunately small number of concerned White Americans, that the promises contained in these amendments were not being honored. By century's end, racial segregation was still an inescapable fact of American social life, in the North as well as the South. At the same time, most southern states had adopted devices such as the poll tax, literacy test, and White primary to strip Blacks of their right to vote.

2 The struggle to close the gap between constitutional promise and social reality would pass through two important stages. In the first stage, organizations such as the NAACP worked through the courts to restore the meaning of the Reconstruction-era amendments. These efforts culminated in the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which outlawed segregation in public schools. The decision also stated that separate facilities were inherently unequal, thus providing a legal basis for subsequent suits to desegregate other kinds of public accommodations.

3 As it turned out, the principles enunciated in the Brown decision were more easily stated than enforced. Court orders to desegregate public schools often encountered massive resistance. Seeing this, Blacks and their supporters began to adopt new tactics. As they did, the struggle for Black rights entered its second stage, a stage that would be characterized by direct action rather than legal challenges, and would be played out in the streets rather than the courts. In turning to civil disobedience, leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. made it possible for all victims of racial injustice to take action in a way that was direct and forceful, but also peaceable. And through the power of their moral example, they soon won widespread support for their cause. In response to these developments, Congress took steps to restore the full meaning of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

4 The enactment of these measures by no means marked the end of the civil rights movement. There was still much to be done. Yet the passage of these acts nevertheless had far-reaching significance. The acts not only helped correct social inequities that had persisted far too long, they also showed that the Constitution means something, however long it may sometimes take to give substance to that meaning. This is no small matter in a nation of laws.