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Medical College Admission Test: Verbal Reasoning, Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, Writing Sample (Page 30 )

...[TV Guide's] immediate concern was the television quiz show scandal, which had reached its climax two weeks earlier when Charles Van Doren, the appealing young man who'd taught viewers the value of learning while winning big on MCA's Twenty-one, stood before a House committee and admitted he was a fraud. But the issue went well beyond rigged quiz shows. The charge was that through their stranglehold on talent, MCA and William Morris monopolized the medium to the detriment of their clients, the industry, and the public at large. This was why the Justice Department had launched a secret investigation of both agencies more than two years before.
The Morris Agency had started the quiz show vogue in 1955, when it packaged The $64,000 Question for Revlon and sold it to CBS. While the show won praise for its "educational" nature, the real source of its appeal was in its crapshoot format ­ the idea that once contestants' winnings hit the $32,000 mark, they had to decide whether to go double or nothing on the final, $64,000 question, or play it safe and go home. The response was tremendous. Within weeks, the show knocked I Love Lucy out of the number-one slot in the ratings. Casinos in Vegas emptied out when it went on the air. Bookies took odds on whether the first contestant to go for the big one ­ a marine captain whose specialty was cooking ­ would get the answer right. (He did.) Revlon sold so much Living Lipstick that its factory was unable to meet the demand.
The $64,000 Question quickly inspired imitators, among them an MCA package called Twenty-one. Based on the card game, more or less, Twenty-one was a dismal failure at first. "Do whatever you have to do," the sponsor ordered angrily, so the producers put the fix in. In December 1956, when Charles Van Doren, a boyishly attractive English instructor at Columbia University, beat Herb Stempel, a short, squat, nerdy grad at City College, Van Doren became the first intellectual hero of the television age. Honors and acclaim poured in ­ the covers of Time, letters by the hundreds, offers of movie roles and tenured professorships and a regular guest spot on The Today Show. But Herb Stempel didn't like being told to lose, especially to some Ivy League snot. He went to the press. The DA's office started to investigate. The walls began to close in.
Meanwhile, the show's producers agreed to sell the rights to NBC for $2 million. One of them started to feel queasy about selling the show without letting the network know the score, so he went to Sonny Werblin, MCA's top man in New York, and asked his advice. Werblin, the man behind such hits as The Ed Sullivan Show and The Jackie Gleason Show, ran the television department as if it were a football team coached by Attila the Hun. "Dan," he asked the producer, "have I ever asked you whether the show was rigged?" No, he hadn't. "And has NBC ever asked you whether the show is rigged?" No, they hadn't either. "Well," Werblin concluded, "the reason that none of us has asked is because we don't want to know."
And with good reason. Not only was Twenty-one an MCA package and Van Doren himself an MCA client; Werblin had a special relationship with NBC's president, Robert Kintner. Kintner had been president of ABC until...ABC's chairman forced him out in his determination to move the network out of third place. MCA used its influence to place him at NBC, where he proved an extremely pliant customer. In the spring of 1957, when the networks were putting together their schedules for the next season, Werblin went to a meeting of NBC programming executives led by Kintner and his boss, RCA chairman Robert Sarnoff. "Sonny, look at the schedule for next season," Kintner said when he walked in, "here are the empty slots, you fill them."
According to the passage, which of the following are true statements?

I). A correlation between successful contestants and successful sponsors exists in the television industry.
II). Most game shows in the 1950s were rigged.
III). Van Doren's quiz-show success provided him with further opportunity in his academic career.

...Squeaking sand produces sounds with very high frequencies ­ between 500 and 2,500 hertz, lasting less than a quarter of a second. The peals are musically pure, often containing four or five harmonic overtones. Booming sand makes louder, low-frequency sounds of 50 to 300 hertz, which may last as long as 15 minutes in larger dunes (although typically they last for seconds or less). In addition, they are rather noisy, containing a multitude of nearby frequencies. Booms have never been observed to contain more than one harmonic of the fundamental tone.
These dramatic differences once led to a consensus that although both types of sand produce acoustic emissions, the ways in which they do so must be substantially different... In the late 1970s, however, Peter K. Haff, then at the California Institute of Technology, produced squeaks in booming sand, suggesting a closer connection between the two.
Both kinds of sand must be displaced to make sounds. Walking on some sand, for example, forces the sand underfoot to move down and out, producing squeaks. In the case of booming sand, displacement occurs during avalanches. It is within the avalanche that sound begins and where the answers must be hiding.
Before an avalanche can occur, winds must build a dune up to a certain angle, usually about 35 degrees for dry desert sand. Once an angle is achieved, the sand on the leeward side of the dune begins to slump. Intact layers of sand slip over the layers below, like a sheared deck of cards. At the same time, the individual grains in the upper layers tumble over the grains underneath, momentarily falling into the spaces between them and bouncing out again to continue their downward journey. Their concerted up-and-down motion is believed to be the secret source of sound. Fully developed avalanches, in which sliding plates of sand remain intact for most of their motion, have the greatest acoustic output. In some places, where large amounts of sand are involved, booming can be heard up to 10 kilometers away.
Because it is caused by large volumes of shearing sand, the roaring is also loud. In fact, sounds made by booming sand can be nearly deafening, and the vibrations causing them can be so intense that standing in their midst is nearly impossible.
A good place to start in exploring the vibrational properties of sand is with the grains themselves. The mean diameter of most sand grains, whether acoustically active or not, is about 300 microns. Usually the grains in a booming dune are very similar in size, especially near the leeward crest, where the sound most often originates; such uniformity allows for more efficient shearing. Otherwise, the smaller grains impede the smooth motion of the larger ones.
Similar sizes do not alone allow sand to boom. On the contrary, the booming sands of Korizo and Gelf Kebib, also in Libya, feature an uncharacteristically broad range of particle sizes. Moreover, silent dune sand often contains grains somewhat similar to nearby booming sand.
Grains of booming sand also tend to have uncommonly smooth surfaces, with protrusions on the scale of mere microns. Booming dunes are often found at the downwind end of large sand sources; having bounced and rolled across the desert for long distances, the sand grains in these dunes are usually highly polished. Over time a grain can also be polished by repeated shifts within a moving dune. And squeaking sand as well tends to be exceptionally smooth...
...Another important factor is humidity, because moisture can modify the friction between grains or cause sand to clump together, thus precluding shearing. Sounds occur in those parts of the dune that dry the fastest. Precipitation may be rare in the desert, but dunes retain water with remarkable efficiency. Sand near the surface dries quickly, however, and sand around a dune's crest tends to dry the fastest.
Which of the following characteristics is most helpful in differentiating booming sand from squeaking sand?

...Squeaking sand produces sounds with very high frequencies ­ between 500 and 2,500 hertz, lasting less than a quarter of a second. The peals are musically pure, often containing four or five harmonic overtones. Booming sand makes louder, low-frequency sounds of 50 to 300 hertz, which may last as long as 15 minutes in larger dunes (although typically they last for seconds or less). In addition, they are rather noisy, containing a multitude of nearby frequencies. Booms have never been observed to contain more than one harmonic of the fundamental tone.
These dramatic differences once led to a consensus that although both types of sand produce acoustic emissions, the ways in which they do so must be substantially different... In the late 1970s, however, Peter K. Haff, then at the California Institute of Technology, produced squeaks in booming sand, suggesting a closer connection between the two.
Both kinds of sand must be displaced to make sounds. Walking on some sand, for example, forces the sand underfoot to move down and out, producing squeaks. In the case of booming sand, displacement occurs during avalanches. It is within the avalanche that sound begins and where the answers must be hiding.
Before an avalanche can occur, winds must build a dune up to a certain angle, usually about 35 degrees for dry desert sand. Once an angle is achieved, the sand on the leeward side of the dune begins to slump. Intact layers of sand slip over the layers below, like a sheared deck of cards. At the same time, the individual grains in the upper layers tumble over the grains underneath, momentarily falling into the spaces between them and bouncing out again to continue their downward journey. Their concerted up-and-down motion is believed to be the secret source of sound. Fully developed avalanches, in which sliding plates of sand remain intact for most of their motion, have the greatest acoustic output. In some places, where large amounts of sand are involved, booming can be heard up to 10 kilometers away.
Because it is caused by large volumes of shearing sand, the roaring is also loud. In fact, sounds made by booming sand can be nearly deafening, and the vibrations causing them can be so intense that standing in their midst is nearly impossible.
A good place to start in exploring the vibrational properties of sand is with the grains themselves. The mean diameter of most sand grains, whether acoustically active or not, is about 300 microns. Usually the grains in a booming dune are very similar in size, especially near the leeward crest, where the sound most often originates; such uniformity allows for more efficient shearing. Otherwise, the smaller grains impede the smooth motion of the larger ones.
Similar sizes do not alone allow sand to boom. On the contrary, the booming sands of Korizo and Gelf Kebib, also in Libya, feature an uncharacteristically broad range of particle sizes. Moreover, silent dune sand often contains grains somewhat similar to nearby booming sand.
Grains of booming sand also tend to have uncommonly smooth surfaces, with protrusions on the scale of mere microns. Booming dunes are often found at the downwind end of large sand sources; having bounced and rolled across the desert for long distances, the sand grains in these dunes are usually highly polished. Over time a grain can also be polished by repeated shifts within a moving dune. And squeaking sand as well tends to be exceptionally smooth...
...Another important factor is humidity, because moisture can modify the friction between grains or cause sand to clump together, thus precluding shearing. Sounds occur in those parts of the dune that dry the fastest. Precipitation may be rare in the desert, but dunes retain water with remarkable efficiency. Sand near the surface dries quickly, however, and sand around a dune's crest tends to dry the fastest.

Booming occurs mostly in big dunes deep in the desert. All of the following, if true, are factors that may plausibly account for this EXCEPT:

...Squeaking sand produces sounds with very high frequencies ­ between 500 and 2,500 hertz, lasting less than a quarter of a second. The peals are musically pure, often containing four or five harmonic overtones. Booming sand makes louder, low-frequency sounds of 50 to 300 hertz, which may last as long as 15 minutes in larger dunes (although typically they last for seconds or less). In addition, they are rather noisy, containing a multitude of nearby frequencies. Booms have never been observed to contain more than one harmonic of the fundamental tone.
These dramatic differences once led to a consensus that although both types of sand produce acoustic emissions, the ways in which they do so must be substantially different... In the late 1970s, however, Peter K. Haff, then at the California Institute of Technology, produced squeaks in booming sand, suggesting a closer connection between the two.
Both kinds of sand must be displaced to make sounds. Walking on some sand, for example, forces the sand underfoot to move down and out, producing squeaks. In the case of booming sand, displacement occurs during avalanches. It is within the avalanche that sound begins and where the answers must be hiding.
Before an avalanche can occur, winds must build a dune up to a certain angle, usually about 35 degrees for dry desert sand. Once an angle is achieved, the sand on the leeward side of the dune begins to slump. Intact layers of sand slip over the layers below, like a sheared deck of cards. At the same time, the individual grains in the upper layers tumble over the grains underneath, momentarily falling into the spaces between them and bouncing out again to continue their downward journey. Their concerted up-and-down motion is believed to be the secret source of sound. Fully developed avalanches, in which sliding plates of sand remain intact for most of their motion, have the greatest acoustic output. In some places, where large amounts of sand are involved, booming can be heard up to 10 kilometers away.
Because it is caused by large volumes of shearing sand, the roaring is also loud. In fact, sounds made by booming sand can be nearly deafening, and the vibrations causing them can be so intense that standing in their midst is nearly impossible.
A good place to start in exploring the vibrational properties of sand is with the grains themselves. The mean diameter of most sand grains, whether acoustically active or not, is about 300 microns. Usually the grains in a booming dune are very similar in size, especially near the leeward crest, where the sound most often originates; such uniformity allows for more efficient shearing. Otherwise, the smaller grains impede the smooth motion of the larger ones.
Similar sizes do not alone allow sand to boom. On the contrary, the booming sands of Korizo and Gelf Kebib, also in Libya, feature an uncharacteristically broad range of particle sizes. Moreover, silent dune sand often contains grains somewhat similar to nearby booming sand.
Grains of booming sand also tend to have uncommonly smooth surfaces, with protrusions on the scale of mere microns. Booming dunes are often found at the downwind end of large sand sources; having bounced and rolled across the desert for long distances, the sand grains in these dunes are usually highly polished. Over time a grain can also be polished by repeated shifts within a moving dune. And squeaking sand as well tends to be exceptionally smooth...
...Another important factor is humidity, because moisture can modify the friction between grains or cause sand to clump together, thus precluding shearing. Sounds occur in those parts of the dune that dry the fastest. Precipitation may be rare in the desert, but dunes retain water with remarkable efficiency. Sand near the surface dries quickly, however, and sand around a dune's crest tends to dry the fastest.
According to information presented in the passage, which of the following is true of all booming dunes?

...Squeaking sand produces sounds with very high frequencies ­ between 500 and 2,500 hertz, lasting less than a quarter of a second. The peals are musically pure, often containing four or five harmonic overtones. Booming sand makes louder, low-frequency sounds of 50 to 300 hertz, which may last as long as 15 minutes in larger dunes (although typically they last for seconds or less). In addition, they are rather noisy, containing a multitude of nearby frequencies. Booms have never been observed to contain more than one harmonic of the fundamental tone.
These dramatic differences once led to a consensus that although both types of sand produce acoustic emissions, the ways in which they do so must be substantially different... In the late 1970s, however, Peter K. Haff, then at the California Institute of Technology, produced squeaks in booming sand, suggesting a closer connection between the two.
Both kinds of sand must be displaced to make sounds. Walking on some sand, for example, forces the sand underfoot to move down and out, producing squeaks. In the case of booming sand, displacement occurs during avalanches. It is within the avalanche that sound begins and where the answers must be hiding.
Before an avalanche can occur, winds must build a dune up to a certain angle, usually about 35 degrees for dry desert sand. Once an angle is achieved, the sand on the leeward side of the dune begins to slump. Intact layers of sand slip over the layers below, like a sheared deck of cards. At the same time, the individual grains in the upper layers tumble over the grains underneath, momentarily falling into the spaces between them and bouncing out again to continue their downward journey. Their concerted up-and-down motion is believed to be the secret source of sound. Fully developed avalanches, in which sliding plates of sand remain intact for most of their motion, have the greatest acoustic output. In some places, where large amounts of sand are involved, booming can be heard up to 10 kilometers away.
Because it is caused by large volumes of shearing sand, the roaring is also loud. In fact, sounds made by booming sand can be nearly deafening, and the vibrations causing them can be so intense that standing in their midst is nearly impossible.
A good place to start in exploring the vibrational properties of sand is with the grains themselves. The mean diameter of most sand grains, whether acoustically active or not, is about 300 microns. Usually the grains in a booming dune are very similar in size, especially near the leeward crest, where the sound most often originates; such uniformity allows for more efficient shearing. Otherwise, the smaller grains impede the smooth motion of the larger ones.
Similar sizes do not alone allow sand to boom. On the contrary, the booming sands of Korizo and Gelf Kebib, also in Libya, feature an uncharacteristically broad range of particle sizes. Moreover, silent dune sand often contains grains somewhat similar to nearby booming sand.
Grains of booming sand also tend to have uncommonly smooth surfaces, with protrusions on the scale of mere microns. Booming dunes are often found at the downwind end of large sand sources; having bounced and rolled across the desert for long distances, the sand grains in these dunes are usually highly polished. Over time a grain can also be polished by repeated shifts within a moving dune. And squeaking sand as well tends to be exceptionally smooth...
...Another important factor is humidity, because moisture can modify the friction between grains or cause sand to clump together, thus precluding shearing. Sounds occur in those parts of the dune that dry the fastest. Precipitation may be rare in the desert, but dunes retain water with remarkable efficiency. Sand near the surface dries quickly, however, and sand around a dune's crest tends to dry the fastest.
A dune is found to be comprised of smooth grains and produces sounds that last less than a second. What further information, if any, would enable one to unambiguously characterize the sand as squeaking sand?