Understand & Analyze unit test

Argument vs assertion

Backing

Warrant

Composition and division fallacies

Representativeness

Statistical significance vs importance

Analyzing visual and quantitative sources

Cherry-picking

Evidence types and their weight

Charitable reading

Qualifier in an argument

Analyzing tone in a source

END-OF-COURSE EXAM, PART A (30 minutes, 15 points). Read the passage, summarized below, then respond to prompts A1–A3. The passage is drawn from Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", The Atlantic, July/August 2008. Carr opens with a personal observation: he finds that he can no longer sustain attention through a long book, and that his mind now expects information the way the web delivers it — in a swift stream of particles. He reports that acquaintances describe the same change, and concedes immediately that these are anecdotes rather than evidence. He turns to what evidence exists. He cites a University College London study of research behavior on two scholarly sites, which found that users skimmed, jumped between sources, and rarely returned to anything they had already visited — behavior the researchers characterized as a new form of reading that may not be reading in the traditional sense. He draws on Maryanne Wolf's work on the reading brain to argue that reading is not an instinct but a learned circuit, assembled differently depending on the medium, and therefore alterable by what one reads on. He supports the plasticity claim with research indicating that adult neural circuits reorganize in response to sustained practice. Carr then argues by historical analogy. He describes Nietzsche's adoption of a typewriter as his eyesight failed, and a friend's observation that the machine changed the character of his prose. He recounts the mechanical clock's role in reorganizing human activity around measured intervals rather than bodily sensation, and Frederick Winslow Taylor's stopwatch studies at Bethlehem Steel, which imposed a single efficient procedure on work that had previously been left to the craftsman's judgment. Each example is offered as a case in which a tool changed not only what people did but how they thought. He applies that pattern to Google, quoting the company's own stated ambition to organize information and its founders' remarks about search as artificial intelligence, and argues that Google's business model depends on moving users rapidly among many pages — so the company has a commercial interest in exactly the reading behavior he is worried about. Carr closes by acknowledging the objection to his own argument. He notes that Socrates warned that writing would destroy memory, and that fifteenth-century critics feared the printing press would spread error and erode learning, and he concedes that these fears proved substantially wrong. He states that the skeptics may be right about him too. But he argues that the earlier revolutions expanded what humans could do, while the current one may be substituting a shallower kind of cognition for a deeper one, and he ends with his fear that in an economy of easily accessible information we may lose the capacity for the slow, difficult, contemplative thought that deep reading produced.