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Spears: Developing Critical Reading Skills
Developing Critical Reading Skills, 6/e
Deanne Spears, City College of San Francisco
Exercises

Online Exercises

  1. 1. Is it really true that no two snowflakes are identical? On pages 79 - 80, Collen Murphy disputes this claim, which most of us have undoubtedly believed since we were in elementary school. Yet the evidence he cites dates from photographs published in 1885 by Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley. What scientific investigations have been done more recently to prove or disprove this claim? Here are four websites on the subject. Which provides the most up-to-date and complete information? (Note: The first one includes some photographs taken by Bentley, which are interesting to compare to recent photographs taken with more sophisticated equipment.)

    http://students.sunysuffolk.edu/~giacm11/index5.htm
    www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/photos/photos.htm
    www.earthsky.com/2001/es010114.html
    www.bogle-dw.freeserve.co.uk/mtmy01.htm

  2. Jan Yoors, author of The Gypsies, had a fascinating life. (See the excerpt from his book on page 84.) Yoors developed an early fascination with the Belgian Lowara band of Gypsies with whom he lived as a teenager for several months each year. Later, during World War II, he helped save many Gypsies from being sent to the Nazi extermination camps. The following website examines Yoors' unusual life after he moved to the United States: www.metropolismag.com/html/content_0601/yoo/.
  3. On page 86, Diane Ackerman describes the tingly sensations diners experience eating fugu, or Japanese puffer fish. Experienced chefs prepare fugu by leaving in the tiniest sliver of poisonous flesh, thus providing the diner with what Ackerman calls a "brush with mortality." The following website includes photographs, discusses various dishes made from the puffer fish, provides related links, and has a discussion board devoted to "Dangerous Japanese Food." The address is
    http://japanesefood.about.com/library/weekly/aa020501a.htm. Explore some of these related links. Based on your findings, what are some reasons dangerous foods appeal to people? Would you try fugu if given the chance?
  4. For a slightly more ambitious project in making inferences, go to three well-known search engines. Some examples are yahoo.com, altavista.com, google.com, netscape.com, or directhit.com. Type in a common ailment of your choosing, for example, insomnia or migraine or acne. Study the first ten listings each site brings up. What inferences can you draw about the criteria each search engine uses to identify the ten most usable sites? How many of these first sites are commercial? How many appear to offer more reliable or objective medical information?








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