200 points
1. Identify the issue (prescriptive or descriptive), conclusion, and reasons in the following passage. Then present any alternative conclusions that might be drawn from the information presented. (25 points)
Most school shooters felt bullied or threatened by someone else just before they went on a rampage, a study by the Secret Service finds, with virtually all shooters having difficulties coping with a relationship or a falling out among peers.
In a training manual to be distributed to school and law-enforcement personnel, the agency that protects the president said schools should pay more attention to students' social problems, listen to their complaints, urge classmates to report problems and watch out for depressed, suicidal teen-agers if they want to head off school shootings like the one at Columbine High School in 1999.
2. Name five logical fallacies and give an original example of each. (25 points)
3. Review the following passage and discuss the value conflicts and assumptions present. (25 points)
Americans paying $3 per gallon at the pump have it relatively cheap when compared with prices globally, say oil and gas company executives who defend their record profits as essential to maintaining supplies.
In parts of Europe and elsewhere in the West, gasoline prices are more like $5 per gallon to $7 per gallon, said the chairman of ConocoPhillips Co., James J. Mulva.
"This is a global business, and it's not only that we need to add to supply, but we need to reduce demand," Mulva said. "In the United States alone, we have about 2 percent of world oil reserves, 5 percent of the population and yet we use about 25 percent of the world's consumption of oil."
4. What information is omitted from the following passage? (25 points)
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5. Read the article below and evaluate it critically, looking carefully at the type and quality of the evidence and paying particular attention to alternate causes.
(40 points)
by Jeffrey St. Clair
Last June, Adam Jernee died from acute lymphocytic leukemia, a remorselessly fast-moving cancer of the blood. He was 8-years old and had fought the cancer for more than two years of his short life.
Adam and his father lived in Fallon, Nevada. This small ranching town of 8,000 people in the Carson Desert 50 miles east of Reno may have the highest per capita rate of childhood leukemia in the nation. The children of Fallon are more than 100 times more likely to be stricken with leukemia then children elsewhere in country.
Last week, another Fallon child was diagnosed with leukemia. That makes 17 kids from Fallon who have been contracted leukemia since 1997. Adam is the second child to have died within the past year. In September, Stephanie Sands succumbed to the cancer after battling it for two years. She was 21.
Cancer isn't the only problem. Kids and adults in Fallon and surrounding Churchill County are coming down with a myriad of other rare diseases, such as Myelodysplastic Syndrome and aplastic anemia. These diseases also relentlessly attack the bone marrow.
The kinds of cancers and other illnesses that have cropped up in the Fallon area are almost certainly caused by some kind of exposure to toxic chemicals. The source of that poison almost certainly sits a few miles outside the town of Fallon--somewhere on the 240,000-acre Fallon Naval Air Station, one of the Navy's largest bombing ranges, and home of the Top Gun fighter pilot training school.
But good luck to getting the Navy to take responsibility or even look very hard to find out what the problem might be. Years have passed and the Navy has done next to nothing, except deny culpability and try bully anyone who demands answers from naval brass. Apparently the Navy doesn't even care if the cancers are killing children of its own officers. The Navy has known about high levels of cancer among the children of Fallon workers and Navy officers since at least 1991; yet, the Pentagon has done little except try to conceal information on levels of pollution at the base and to stiff-arm investigators.
"Our frustration level is very high," says Brenda Gross, who 6-year old son has been sick with leukemia for two years. "This should have been found and stopped a long time ago. But you can't get anything out of the Navy."
Local residents think they know the answer: jet fuel spills and fuel dumping by Navy aircraft. JP-8 jet fuel, a combination of kerosene and benzene, is a known carcinogen and has been linked to leukemia and other bone marrow diseases.
The Navy has summarily ruled out jet fuel as a cause of the Fallon cancers, but records from the state of Nevada show that the Fallon air base has at least 26 toxic waste sites, 16 of them contaminated by jet fuel. Most of the Fallon area is playa, a dry lakebed over shallow groundwater. According to the Geological Survey, several distinct plumes of jet fuel have entered the water table beneath the air base.
Nearby residents charge that Navy fighter pilots routinely dump excess fuel into the desert prior to landing at Fallon. The Navy says this is a rare occurrence, with emergency fuel dumps happening about three times a year. However, Navy records show that in a single instance a few years ago more than 800 gallons was dumped into the Carson playa.
In 2000 alone, according to the Navy's own statistics, Fallon-based fighters and bombers consumed 34 million gallons of jet fuel, much of it pumped in on a jet fuel pipeline, which runs from Sparks, Nevada to Fallon. Locals and environmentalists say that the pipeline regularly leaks the poisonous gas into the desert.
Publicly, the Navy contends that the pipeline spills are minor and inconsequential, averaging less than 45 gallons a year. But two whistleblowers at the air base told Navy investigators that more than 30,000 gallons of fuel had leaked from the pipeline and from a truck in 1988 and 1989 alone. Initially, the Navy dismissed the allegations. But later admitted that there had in fact been two major spills.
While Navy officials claim that the jet fuel is not the cause of the Fallon cancers, they admit that there's been no independent monitoring of jet fuel inventories at the base, even though federal officials demanded an oversight system in 1989.
There have been persistent rumors that Navy contractors have been dumping fuel at the base in order to increase fuel purchases. Because of the lack of oversight, the Navy has almost no idea how much fuel it has on the base or where it goes. In 1990, the base commander, Cpt. Rex Rackowitz, admitted that he couldn't account for the whereabouts of more than 350,000 gallons of fuel.
Another source of jet fuel contamination of Fallon area water are the three old underground storage tanks. A report filed with Congress two years ago revealed that underground saltwater has seriously corroded the 45-year old tanks (each with a capacity of more than a half million gallons) and noted that the tanks lack any kind of overfill and leak protection.
"I lean toward the base as the cause," says John Posey, a former aircraft mechanic at Fallon, whose daughter was diagnosed with leukemia in 1990. "Jet fuel dumping, radar and electronic emissions, jet fuel spills. All that is dangerous stuff."
Despite the rising cancer rate and the deaths, the people of Fallon have gotten few answers from state and federal government. The parents of sick kids feel they are being stonewalled. "I think there's a potential cover up here," said Richard Jernee, Adam's father. "I don't have faith in any of these people. How many kids have to die before we get to the truth?"
The jet fuel spills may well be one source of the cancers. But another study suggests that there may be a more ominous explanation. A 1994 survey of groundwater in the Fallon area by the US Geological Survey showed that 31 or 73 drinking water wells showed high concentrations of radioactive minerals. It was only revealed to the public last September by a former USGS staffer who thought it might have a bearing on the Fallon illnesses.
The radiation may in part come from depleted uranium expended by bombs and missiles at the Fallon bombing ranges. Navy statistics show that more than 7 million pounds of ordinance is dropped on the Fallon bombing ranges, including the notoriously cratered B-20 site, every year.
Now the Navy wants to move some of its Vieques bombing training missions to Fallon. It recently renewed its 20-year lease on the B-20 bombing range and acquired another 50,000 acres of BLM lands for target practice. "The Cold War is over," says Kalynda Tilges of the Reno-based Citizen Alert. "The Navy is ignoring the consequences of its pollution, and the nation continues to throw money into a big, black hole."
Fallon isn't the only airbase with a leukemia cluster. Seven children have recently been diagnosed with childhood leukemia in Sierra Vista, Arizona, adjacent to the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.
"When are these people going to do something real?" says Floyd Sands, whose daughter Stephanie died of leukemia last year. I haven't seen them do anything real so far."
So much for Bush's bluster about Iraq being an international demon-state for poisoning its own people.
6. Essay -- Using what you’ve learned in Asking the Right Questions, evaluate the following article. (60 points)
Rachel Carson's classic is not aging well.
Ronald Bailey | June 12, 2002
The modern environmentalist movement was launched at the beginning of June 1962, when excerpts from what would become Rachel Carson's anti-chemical landmark Silent Spring were published in The New Yorker. "Without this book, the environmental movement might have been long delayed or never have developed at all," declared then-Vice President Albert Gore in his introduction to the 1994 edition. The foreword to the 25th anniversary edition accurately declared, "It led to environmental legislation at every level of government."
In 1999 Time named Carson one of the "100 People of the Century." Seven years earlier, a panel of distinguished Americans had selected Silent Spring as the most influential book of the previous 50 years. When I went in search of a copy recently, several bookstore owners told me they didn't have any in stock because local high schools still assign the book and students had cleaned them out.
Carson worked for years at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, eventually becoming the chief editor of that agency's publications. Carson achieved financial independence in the 1950s with the publication of her popular celebrations of marine ecosystems, The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea. Rereading Silent Spring reminds one that the book's effectiveness was due mainly to Carson's passionate, poetic language describing the alleged horrors that modern synthetic chemicals visit upon defenseless nature and hapless humanity. Carson was moved to write Silent Spring by her increasing concern about the effects of pesticides on wildlife. Her chief villain was the pesticide DDT.
The 1950s saw the advent of an array of synthetic pesticides that were hailed as modern miracles in the war against pests and weeds. First and foremost of these chemicals was DDT. DDT's insecticidal properties were discovered in the late 1930s by Paul Muller, a chemist at the Swiss chemical firm J.R. Geigy. The American military started testing it in 1942, and soon the insecticide was being sprayed in war zones to protect American troops against insect-borne diseases such as typhus and malaria. In 1943 DDT famously stopped a typhus epidemic in Naples in its tracks shortly after the Allies invaded. DDT was hailed as the "wonder insecticide of World War II."
As soon as the war ended, American consumers and farmers quickly adopted the wonder insecticide, replacing the old-fashioned arsenic-based pesticides, which were truly nasty. Testing by the U.S. Public Health Service and the Food and Drug Administration's Division of Pharmacology found no serious human toxicity problems with DDT. Muller, DDT's inventor, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948.
DDT was soon widely deployed by public health officials, who banished malaria from the southern United States with its help. The World Health Organization credits DDT with saving 50 million to 100 million lives by preventing malaria. In 1943 Venezuela had 8,171,115 cases of malaria; by 1958, after the use of DDT, the number was down to 800. India, which had over 10 million cases of malaria in 1935, had 285,962 in 1969. In Italy the number of malaria cases dropped from 411,602 in 1945 to only 37 in 1968.
The tone of a Scientific American article by Francis Joseph Weiss celebrating the advent of "Chemical Agriculture" was typical of much of the reporting in the early 1950s. "In 1820 about 72 per cent of the population worked in agriculture, the proportion in 1950 was only about 15 per cent," reported Weiss. "Chemical agriculture, still in its infancy, should eventually advance our agricultural efficiency at least as much as machines have in the past 150 years." This improvement in agricultural efficiency would happen because "farming is being revolutionized by new fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, weed killers, leaf removers, soil conditioners, plant hormones, trace minerals, antibiotics and synthetic milk for pigs."
In 1952 insects, weeds, and disease cost farmers $13 billion in crops annually. Since gross annual agricultural output at that time totaled $31 billion, it was estimated that preventing this damage by using pesticides would boost food and fiber production by 42 percent. Agricultural productivity in the United States, spurred by improvements in farming practices and technologies, has continued its exponential increase. As a result, the percentage of Americans living and working on farms has dropped from 15 percent in 1950 to under 1.8 percent today.
But DDT and other pesticides had a dark side. They not only killed the pests at which they were aimed but often killed beneficial organisms as well. Carson, the passionate defender of wildlife, was determined to spotlight these harms. Memorably, she painted a scenario in which birds had all been poisoned by insecticides, resulting in a "silent spring" in which "no birds sing."
The scientific controversy over the effects of DDT on wildlife, especially birds, still vexes researchers. In the late 1960s, some researchers concluded that exposure to DDT caused eggshell thinning in some bird species, especially raptors such as eagles and peregrine falcons. Thinner shells meant fewer hatchlings and declining numbers. But researchers also found that other bird species, such as quail, pheasants, and chickens, were unaffected even by large doses DDT.
On June 14, 1972, 30 years ago this week, the EPA banned DDT despite considerable evidence of its safety offered in seven months of agency hearings. After listening to that testimony, the EPA's own administrative law judge declared, "DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man...DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man...The use of DDT under the regulations involved here [does] not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife." Today environmental activists celebrate the EPA's DDT ban as their first great victory.
Carson argued that DDT and other pesticides were not only harming wildlife but killing people too. The1958 passage by Congress of the Delaney Clause, which forbade the addition of any amount of chemicals suspected of causing cancer to food, likely focused Carson's attention on that disease.
For the previous half-century some researchers had been trying to prove that cancer was caused by chemical contaminants in the environment. Wilhelm Hueper, chief of environmental cancer research at the National Cancer Institute and one of the leading researchers in this area, became a major source for Carson. Hueper was so convinced that trace exposures to synthetic chemicals were a major cause of cancer in humans that he totally dismissed the notion that smoking cigarettes caused cancer. The assertion that pesticides were dangerous human carcinogens was a stroke of public relations genius. Even people who do not care much about wildlife care a lot about their own health and the health of their children.
In 1955 the American Cancer Society predicted that "cancer will strike one in every four Americans rather than the present estimate of one in five." The ACS attributed the increase to "the growing number of older persons in the population." The ACS did note that the incidence of lung cancer was increasing very rapidly, rising in the previous two decades by more than 200 percent for women and by 600 percent for men. But the ACS also noted that lung cancer "is the only form of cancer which shows so definite a tendency." Seven years later, Rachel Carson would call her chapter on cancer "One in Four."
To bolster her case for the dangers of DDT, Carson improperly cited cases of acute exposures to the chemical as proof of its cancer-causing ability. For example, she told the story of a woman who sprayed DDT for spiders in her basement and died a month later of leukemia. In another case, a man sprayed his office for cockroaches and a few days later was diagnosed with aplastic anemia. Today cancer specialists would dismiss out of hand the implied claims that these patients' cancers could be traced to such specific pesticide exposures. The plain fact is that DDT has never been shown to be a human carcinogen even after four decades of intense scientific scrutiny.
Carson was also an effective popularizer of the idea that children were especially vulnerable to the carcinogenic effects of synthetic chemicals. "The situation with respect to children is even more deeply disturbing," she wrote. "A quarter century ago, cancer in children was considered a medical rarity. Today, more American school children die of cancer than from any other disease [her emphasis]." In support of this claim, Carson reported that "twelve per cent of all deaths in children between the ages of one and fourteen are caused by cancer."
Although it sounds alarming, Carson's statistic is essentially meaningless unless it's given some context, which she failed to supply. It turns out that the percentage of children dying of cancer was rising because other causes of death, such as infectious diseases, were drastically declining.
In fact, cancer rates in children have not increased, as they would have if Carson had been right that children were especially susceptible to the alleged health effects of modern chemicals. Just one rough comparison illustrates this point: In 1938 cancer killed 939 children under 14 years old out of a U.S. population of 130 million. In 1998, according to the National Cancer Institute, about 1,700 children died of cancer, out of a population of more than 280 million. In 1999 the NCI noted that "over the past 20 years, there has been relatively little change in the incidence of children diagnosed with all forms of cancer; from 13 cases per 100,000 children in 1974 to 13.2 per 100,000 children in 1995."
Clearly, if cancer incidence isn't going up, modern chemicals can't be a big factor in cancer. But this simple point is lost on Carson's heirs in the environmental movement, who base their careers on pursuing phantom risks. The truth is that both cancer mortality and incidence rates have been declining for about a decade, mostly because of a decrease in the number of cigarette smokers.
The Great Cancer Scare launched by Carson, and perpetuated by her environmentalist disciples ever since, should have been put to rest by a definitive 1996 report from the National Academy of Sciences, Carcinogens and Anticarcinogens in the Human Diet. The NAS concluded that levels of both synthetic and natural carcinogens are "so low that they are unlikely to pose an appreciable cancer risk." Worse yet from the point of view of anti-chemical crusaders, the NAS added that Mother Nature's own chemicals probably cause more cancer than anything mankind has dreamed up: "Natural components of the diet may prove to be of greater concern than synthetic components with respect to cancer risk."
Meanwhile, Carson's disciples have managed to persuade many poor countries to stop using DDT against mosquitoes. The result has been an enormous increase in the number of people dying of malaria each year. Today malaria infects between 300 million and 500 million people annually, killing as many 2.7 million of them. Anti-DDT activists who tried to have the new U.N. treaty on persistent organic pollutants totally ban DDT have stepped back recently from their ideological campaign, conceding that poor countries should be able to use DDT to control malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
So 40 years after the publication of Silent Spring, the legacy of Rachel Carson is more troubling than her admirers will acknowledge. The book did point to problems that had not been adequately addressed, such as the effects of DDT on some wildlife. And given the state of the science at the time she wrote, one might even make the case that Carson's concerns about the effects of synthetic chemicals on human health were not completely unwarranted. Along with other researchers, she was simply ignorant of the facts. But after four decades in which tens of billions of dollars have been wasted chasing imaginary risks without measurably improving American health, her intellectual descendants don't have the same excuse.