Choose the main pattern of organization of the passage. The Affordable Care Act of 2010 enabled more than 20 million previously uninsured Americans to gain access to healthcare. Yet costs have continued to rise—making healthcare unaffordable for many everyday people. So how can our country control costs while providing healthcare for all? A single-payer system would allow the government to negotiate prices and use tax revenues to pay for universal coverage. Virtually every other industrialized country uses a single-payer system—providing better care at less than half the cost. And in comparison with private, for-profit insurance companies, our own single-payer system, Medicare, provides greater access with much lower administrative costs. In fact, the Kaiser Family Foundation has found that Medicare spends less per person on care and controls spending more effectively than private insurers. So instead of subsidizing insurance companies, why don’t we skip the “middlemen” and spend our money directly on healthcare for all Americans?

Choose the main pattern of organization of the passage. Heavy use of groundwater causes a regional water table to drop. In parts of western Texas and eastern New Mexico, the pumping of groundwater from the main underground water source has caused the water table to drop 30 meters over the past few decades. The lowering of the water table means that wells must be deepened and more electricity must be used to pump the water to the surface. Moreover, as the water is withdrawn, the ground surface may settle because the water no longer supports the rock and sediment. Mexico City has subsided more than 7 meters and portions of California’s Central Valley 9 meters because of extraction of groundwater. Such subsidence can crack building foundations, roads, and pipelines. Overpumping of groundwater also causes compaction and porosity loss in rock and soil, and can permanently ruin good aquifers.

Choose the main pattern of organization of the passage. The biological significance of a single sperm is very different from that of a single egg. For healthy men, sperm is a “renewable resource” produced by the testes throughout most of the life course. A man releases hundreds of millions of sperm in a single ejaculation, technically enough to fertilize every woman in North America. However, a newborn girl’s ovaries contain her entire lifetime allotment of immature eggs. A woman releases a single egg from the ovaries every month. Whereas men are biologically capable of fathering thousands of offspring, a woman is able to bear a much smaller number of children.

Choose the main pattern of organization of the passage. After years of emphasizing harshly competitive practices, some companies are finding that — a kinder, gentler workplace benefits the bottom line. Slogans such as “greed is good” and books like The Art of War were prevalent in the corporate world of the 1980s and 1990s. In the new millennium, however, many of the corporate success stories are related to the creation of workplaces that are open and friendly. When the bosses are tyrannical and the employees are afraid to speak up, it’s a recipe for disasters, such as the ones that happened at corporate- scandal-ridden Enron and Tyco in 2001 and 2002. On the other hand, when people feel free to speak their minds, it allows more creativity and productivity to emerge. Employees feel they are part of a team and want to contribute. It is no accident that companies that have an excellent reputation for service, such as Starbucks and Zappos, also foster dignity and respect in the workplace.

Choose the main pattern of organization of the passage. For years, various sociologists have struggled to determine the causes of poverty in America. One approach holds that the poor are primarily responsible for their own poverty. Throughout our history, people in the United States have valued self-reliance, convinced that social standing is mostly a matter of individual talent and effort. This view sees society as offering plenty of opportunity to anyone able and willing to take advantage of it. From this point of view, the poor are those who cannot or will not work, women and men with fewer skills, less schooling, and little motivation. An alternative position holds that society is primarily responsible for poverty. Sociologists who hold this view point to the loss of jobs in our inner cities as the primary cause of poverty, claiming there is simply not enough work to support families. Thus, it is a lack of opportunity—not a lack of effort—that causes poverty.

Choose the main pattern of organization of the passage. In a democracy, it is important for a free press to assume a watchdog role, meaning that it accepts responsibility for protecting the public from deceitful, careless, incompetent, and corrupt officials. In this role, the press stands ready to expose any official who violates accepted legal, ethical, and performance standards. The most notable example of the watchdog role in recent history took place during the Watergate scandal. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post spent months uncovering evidence that high- ranking officials in the Nixon White House were lying about their role in the burglary of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters and in their subsequent cover-up. Virtually all the nation’s media picked up on the Post’s revelations. Nixon was forced to resign, as was his attorney general, John Mitchell. The Watergate episode is a dramatic reminder that a vigilant press is one of society’s best safeguards against abuses of political power.

When treating edema due to lack of motion, what waveform is preferred?

You are applying an IFC current to your patient’s low back for pain. At the 5 minute skin check, your patient states that the current does not feel as strong as it initially did. What is your patient experiencing?

Refined white table sugar is usually derived from either sugar cane or sugar beets. Irrespective of the source of table sugar, after refining it always has the same composition of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Sugar is best classified as which one of the following?

The number of protons in a chloride ion, Cl-, is