Word: basics
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...answers all too well, but most high school students have no idea. So says a survey released last week by the New York-based Joint Council on Economic Education, which found that only one out of three high school students in its 41-state poll could define such basic concepts as profit and the law of supply and demand. The 8,205 eleventh- and twelfth-graders who took the 40-minute multiple-choice test correctly answered less than 40% of the 46 questions. Declared William Walstad, a co-author of the study: "Our schools are producing a nation of economic...
...survive its critical clobbering depends on what kind of experience theatergoers expect for $50. Genial and inoffensive at worst, occasionally energetic and raucously funny, always lavish and cheerful and eager to please, Legs is an amiable enough way to spend 2 1/2 hours. But it is altogether unmemorable. Its basic problems could not have been altered by a year of previews: the concept and the star. Legs traces the rise of a big-time gang leader in the machine-gun era of Al Capone. No matter how much the script sweetens and fictionalizes its depiction of the short and brutal...
...years at Harvard and M.I.T., Shapiro has been struck by the difficulty even well-educated adults have with basic scientific concepts. Last year he and some colleagues produced a half-hour film titled A Private Universe in which half a dozen Harvard seniors were asked on graduation day to explain why there are seasons. All blithely described how the earth is closer to the sun in summer and farther away in winter. Wrong. The seasons result from the tilt of the earth's axis relative to its orbit. When the sun is highest in the sky, we have summer...
Through Project STAR, which received $833,000 in seed money from the National Science Foundation in 1985, Shapiro hopes to correct such misunderstandings. The goal of the program is not merely to teach astronomy to high school students but also to use astronomical examples to instill basic concepts of math and science. Thus students may master the inverse-square law of physics by seeing that when a star doubles its distance from a certain point, it becomes one-quarter as bright. Why choose astronomy for this purpose? "It's not as abstract as chemistry and physics," says Shapiro...
What makes the failure all the more disturbing is that it was unnecessary. Engineers have the know-how to build reactors that are demonstrably safer than those now in operation. Moreover, that basic technology has been available for more than 20 years. It was largely ignored in favor of a technology -- the water-cooled reactor -- that had already been proved in nuclear submarines. But water-cooled reactors are particularly susceptible to the rapid loss of coolant, which led to the accidents at both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island...