501 Critical Reading Questions

b. The value of some endeavors cannot be measured in monetary
terms.
c. It is better to give than to receive.
d. Westerners are only interested in money.
e. Traditional societies could benefit from better business sense.
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501
Critical Reading Questions
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492.
Which of the following titles would be most appropriate for both
Passage 1 or Passage 2?
a. A Gift-giving Ceremony
b. Ritual Exchange in Traditional Societies
c. Ceremonial Giving and Receiving in a Traditional Society
d. The Kindness of Strangers
e. Giving and Receiving in a Faraway Land
Questions 493–501 are based on the following passage.
The author of this passage, a professor of English literature at a major
university, argues that affirmative action is a necessary part of the college
admissions process.
When I began teaching at Big State U in the late 1960s, the students
in my American literature survey were almost uniformly of European
heritage, and most were from middle-class Protestant families.
Attending college for these students was a lesson in homogeneity.
Although a number of students were involved in the Civil Rights
Movement and some even worked “down South” on voter registra-
tion, most students considered segregation to be a Southern problem
and many did not see the discrimination that was rampant on their
own campus.
Since the 1960s there has been a sea change in university admis-
sions. Key Supreme Court decisions and federal laws made equal
opportunity the law of the land, and many institutions of higher learn-
ing adopted policies of affirmative action. The term affirmative action
was first used in the 1960s to describe the active recruitment and pro-
motion of minority candidates in both the workplace and in colleges
and universities. President Lyndon Johnson, speaking at Howard Uni-
versity in 1965, aptly explained the reasoning behind affirmative
action. As he said, “You do not take a man who, for years, has been
hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him to the starting line in
a race and then say, ‘You are free compete with all the others,’ and still
believe that you have been completely fair.” Affirmative action pro-
grams in college admissions have been guided by the principle that it
is not enough to simply remove barriers to social mobility but it is also
necessary to encourage it for minority groups.
In recent years, affirmative action programs have come under pub-
lic scrutiny, and some schools have been faced with charges of reverse
discrimination. Preferential treatment of minority applicants is seen
as discrimination against qualified applicants from the majority
501