LSAT-Section-2-Reading-Comprehension – Section Two : Reading Comprehension

While historians once propagated the myth that Africans who were brought to the New World as slaves contributed little of value but their labor, a recent study by Amelia Wallace Vernon helps to dispel this notion by showing that Africans introduced rice and the methods of cultivating it into what is now the United States in the early eighteenth century. She uncovered, for example, an 1876 document that details that in 1718 starving French settlers instructed the captain of a slave ship bound for Africa to trade for 400 Africans including some "who know how to cultivate rice." This discovery is especially compelling because the introduction of rice into what is now the United States had previously been attributed to French Acadians, who did not arrive until the 1760s.

Vernon interviewed elderly African Americans who helped her discover the locations where until about 1920 their forebears had cultivated rice. At the heart of Vernon's research is the question of why, in an economy dedicated to maximizing cotton production, African Americans grew rice. She proposes two intriguing answers, depending on whether the time is before or after the end of slavery. During the period of slavery, plantation owners also ate rice and therefore tolerated or demanded its "after-hours" cultivation on patches of land not suited to cotton. In addition, growing the rice gave the slaves some relief from a system of regimented labor under a field supervisor, in that they were left alone to work independently.

After the abolition of slavery, however, rice cultivation is more difficult to explain: African Americans had acquired a preference for eating corn, there was no market for the small amounts of rice they produced, and under the tenant system – in which farmers surrendered a portion of their crops to the owners of the land they farmed – owners wanted only cotton as payment. The labor required to transform unused land to productive ground would thus seem completely out of proportion to the reward – except that, according to Vernon, the transforming of the land itself was the point.

Vernon suggests that these African Americans did not transform the land as a means to an end, but rather as an end in itself. In other words, they did not transform the land in order to grow rice – for the resulting rice was scarcely worth the effort required to clear the land- – but instead transformed the land because they viewed land as an extension of self and home and so wished to nurture it and make it their own. In addition to this cultural explanation, Vernon speculates that rice cultivation might also have been a political act, a next step after the emancipation of the slaves: the symbolic claiming of plantation land that the U.S. government had promised but failed to parcel off and deed to newly freed African Americans.

The author's primary purpose in the passage is to

By the year 2030, the Earth's population is expected to increase to 10 billion; ideally, all would enjoy standards of living equivalent to those of present-day industrial democracies. However, if 10 billion people consume critical natural resources such as copper, nickel, and petroleum at the current per capita rates of industrialized countries, and if new resources are not discovered or substitutes developed, such an ideal would last a decade or less. Moreover, projections based on the current rate of waste production in many industrialized countries suggest that 10 billion people would generate enough solid waste every year to bury a large city and its surrounding suburbs 100 meters deep.

These estimates are not meant to predict a grim future. Instead they emphasize the incentives for recycling, conservation, and a switch to alternative materials. They also suggest that the traditional model of industrial activity, in which individual manufacturing processes take in raw materials and generate products to be sold plus waste to be disposed of, should be transformed into a more integrated model: an industrial ecosystem. In such a system the consumption of energy and materials is optimized, wastes and pollution are minimized, and the effluents of one process – whether they are spent catalysts from petroleum refining or discarded plastic containers from consumer products – serve as the raw material for another process.

Materials in an ideal industrial ecosystem would not be depleted any more than are materials in a biological ecosystem, in which plants synthesize nutrients that feed herbivores, some of which in turn feed a chain of carnivores whose waste products and remains eventually feed further generations of plants. A chunk of steel could potentially show up one year in a tin can, the next year in an automobile, and 10 years later in the skeleton of a building. Some manufacturers are already making use of "designed offal" in the manufacture of metals and some plastics: tailoring the production of waste from a manufacturing process so that the waste can be fed directly back into that process or a related one. Such recycling still requires the expenditure of energy and the unavoidable generation of some wastes and harmful by-products, but at much lower levels than are typical today.

The ideal industrial ecosystem, in which there is an economically viable role for every product of a manufacturing process, will not be attained soon; current technology is often inadequate to the task. However, if industrialized nations embrace major and minor changes in their current industrial practices and developing nations bypass older, less ecologically sound technologies, it should be possible to develop a more closed industrial ecosystem that would be more sustainable than current industrial practices, especially in the face of decreasing supplies of raw materials and-increasing problems of waste and pollution.

According to the passage, which one of the following is currently an obstacle to the implementation of an ideal industrial ecosystem?

By the year 2030, the Earth's population is expected to increase to 10 billion; ideally, all would enjoy standards of living equivalent to those of present-day industrial democracies. However, if 10 billion people consume critical natural resources such as copper, nickel, and petroleum at the current per capita rates of industrialized countries, and if new resources are not discovered or substitutes developed, such an ideal would last a decade or less. Moreover, projections based on the current rate of waste production in many industrialized countries suggest that 10 billion people would generate enough solid waste every year to bury a large city and its surrounding suburbs 100 meters deep.

These estimates are not meant to predict a grim future. Instead they emphasize the incentives for recycling, conservation, and a switch to alternative materials. They also suggest that the traditional model of industrial activity, in which individual manufacturing processes take in raw materials and generate products to be sold plus waste to be disposed of, should be transformed into a more integrated model: an industrial ecosystem. In such a system the consumption of energy and materials is optimized, wastes and pollution are minimized, and the effluents of one process – whether they are spent catalysts from petroleum refining or discarded plastic containers from consumer products – serve as the raw material for another process.

Materials in an ideal industrial ecosystem would not be depleted any more than are materials in a biological ecosystem, in which plants synthesize nutrients that feed herbivores, some of which in turn feed a chain of carnivores whose waste products and remains eventually feed further generations of plants. A chunk of steel could potentially show up one year in a tin can, the next year in an automobile, and 10 years later in the skeleton of a building. Some manufacturers are already making use of "designed offal" in the manufacture of metals and some plastics: tailoring the production of waste from a manufacturing process so that the waste can be fed directly back into that process or a related one. Such recycling still requires the expenditure of energy and the unavoidable generation of some wastes and harmful by-products, but at much lower levels than are typical today.

The ideal industrial ecosystem, in which there is an economically viable role for every product of a manufacturing process, will not be attained soon; current technology is often inadequate to the task. However, if industrialized nations embrace major and minor changes in their current industrial practices and developing nations bypass older, less ecologically sound technologies, it should be possible to develop a more closed industrial ecosystem that would be more sustainable than current industrial practices, especially in the face of decreasing supplies of raw materials and-increasing problems of waste and pollution.

The author of the passage would most probably agree with which one of the following statements about standards of living?