Free MCAT Test Exam Braindumps (page: 42)

...Until last year many people ­ but not most economists ­ thought that the economic data told a simple tale. On one side, productivity ­ the average output of an average worker ­ was rising. And although the rate of productivity increase was very slow during the 1970's and early 1980's, the official numbers said that it had accelerated significantly in the 1990's. By 1994 an average worker was producing about 20 percent more than his or her counterpart in 1978.
On the other hand, other statistics said that real, inflation- adjusted wages had not been rising at anything like the same rate. In fact, some of the most commonly cited numbers showed real wages actually falling over the last 25 years. Those who did their homework knew that the gloomiest numbers overstated the case... Still, even the most optimistic measure, the total hourly compensation of the average worker, rose only 3 percent between 1978 and 1994...
...But now the experts are telling us that the whole thing may have been a figment of our statistical imaginations... a blue-ribbon panel of economists headed by Michael Boskin of Stanford declared that the Consumer Price Index [C.P.I.] had been systematically overstating inflation, probably by more than 1 percent per year for the last two decades, mainly failing to take account of changes in the patterns of consumption and improvements in product quality...
...The Boskin report, in particular, is not an official document ­ it will be quite a while before the Government actually issues a revised C.P.I., and the eventual revision may be smaller than Boskin and his colleagues propose. Still, the general outline of the resolution is pretty clear. When all the revisions are taken into account, productivity growth will probably look somewhat higher than it did before, because some of the revisions being proposed to the way we measure consumer prices will also affect the way we calculate growth. But the rate of growth of real wages will look much higher ­ and so it will now be roughly in line with productivity, which will therefore reconcile numbers on productivity and wages with data that show a roughly unchanged distribution of income between capital and labor. In other words, the whole story about workers not sharing in productivity gains will turn out to have been based on a statistical illusion.
It is important not to go overboard on this point. There are real problems in America, and our previous concerns were by no means pure hypochondriA. For one thing, it remains true that the rate of economic progress over the past 25 years has been much slower than it was in the previous 25. Even if Boskin's numbers are right, the income of the median family ­ which officially has experienced virtually no gain since 1973 ­ has risen by only about 35 percent over the past 25 years, compared with 100 percent over the previous 25. Furthermore, it is quite likely that if we "Boskinized" the old data ­ that is, if we tried to adjust the C.P.I). for the 50's and 60's to take account of changing consumption patterns and rising product quality ­ we would find that official numbers understated the rate of progress just as much if not more than they did in recent decades...
...Moreover, while workers as a group have shared fully in national productivity gains, they have not done so equally. The overwhelming evidence of a huge increase in income inequality in America has nothing to do with price indexes and is therefore unaffected by recent statistical revelations. It is still true that families in the bottom fifth, who had 5.4 percent of total income in 1970, had only 4.2 percent in 1994; and that over the same period the share of the top 5 percent went from 15.6 to 20.1. And it is still true that corporate C.E.O.'s, who used to make about 35 times as much as their employees, now make 120 times as much or more...
...While these are real and serious problems, however, one thing is now clear: the truth about what is happening in America is more subtle than the simplistic morality play about greedy capitalists and oppressed workers that so many would-be sophisticates accepted only a few months ago. There was little excuse for buying into that simplistic view then; there is no excuse now...
The author mentions the figures in paragraph six (lines 67-72) in order to show that:

For the last two decades many earth scientists have supported the notion that the Mediterranean was once a huge, dry desert, lying 3,000 meters below sea level. This "death valley" was thought to have existed at the end of Miocene time, about 6 to 5.5 million years ago...
...From a geological point of view, the Mediterranean is a tectonically mobile land-enclosed depression ­ small (about 3,000,000 square kilometers) in comparison to the major world oceans...Immediately obvious on all charts is the highly variable topography and relief of both the seafloor and adjacent borderland. The coastline is highly irregular and continental shelves, though generally narrow, are well developed off the major river deltas (Nile, Rhone, Po, and Ebro). Moreover, the deep-sea basins and trenches have distinctive relief, with basin plains ranging in depth from less than 1,000 meters to more than 4,000...Observation that rocks dredged offshore are similar to those on land raised a fundamental concept ­ the key to understanding Mediterranean history lies in the adjacent emerged land masses, and vice-versa...
...Early paleographic reconstructions showed that the once-open communication with the Atlantic deteriorated during the upper Miocene. Water-mass exchange continued for a while in the Rif Strait, but then ceased completely prior to the beginning of the Pliocene...
...High relief near what is now the Strait of Gibraltar served as a barrier to the exchange of waters with the Atlantic. Exposed to a hot and dry climate, water evaporated and the then-dry basin elicited comparison with a gigantic Death Valley...Microfossil studies suggested that the depth of the Mediterranean basin at these times had been "deep." Estimates suggested a dry seafloor as far as 2,000 meters below ocean level... As a response to suddenly lowered sea level, rivers feeding the Mediterranean and canyons on the now-dry seafloor began a geologically dramatic phase of erosion. Deep, Grand Canyon-like gorges of the Nile and Rhone rivers, presently buried on land, were apparently cut during a great drawdown of water ­ when the Mediterranean floor lay exposed 1,000 meters or more below its present level...The sudden flooding through a gigantic waterfall at Gibraltar drowned the exposed basin floor. These falls would have been 1,000 times bigger than Niagara Falls...This flooding event is recorded by the Miocene Pliocene boundary, a time when open marine faunal assemblages were suddenly reintroduced from the Atlantic...
...Geological theories usually fall at a glacial pace into a sea of controversy, and this one is no exception. Today ­ charging that proof for the theory is lacking ­ many scientists believe that the Med always contained saltwater, with only the depth of the seafloor and the water being in question... Some of the tenets on which the theory was formulated are, if not defective, very seriously in question. To interpret their findings, a respectable number of geologists studying the surrounding emerged borderland as well as subsea sections indicate that alternative, more comprehensive concepts must be envisioned...
...It is not realistic to envision the Mediterranean seafloor of about 5 million years ago as a desert at 3,000 meters below present ocean level. Several years ago...the Mediterranean [was compared] to a complex picture-puzzle that comprises numerous intricate pieces, many of which are already in place. A general image is emerging, although gaps in some areas of the picture remain fuzzy and indistinct.

All of the following are features of the "desert theory" EXCEPT:

For the last two decades many earth scientists have supported the notion that the Mediterranean was once a huge, dry desert, lying 3,000 meters below sea level. This "death valley" was thought to have existed at the end of Miocene time, about 6 to 5.5 million years ago...
...From a geological point of view, the Mediterranean is a tectonically mobile land-enclosed depression ­ small (about 3,000,000 square kilometers) in comparison to the major world oceans...Immediately obvious on all charts is the highly variable topography and relief of both the seafloor and adjacent borderland. The coastline is highly irregular and continental shelves, though generally narrow, are well developed off the major river deltas (Nile, Rhone, Po, and Ebro). Moreover, the deep-sea basins and trenches have distinctive relief, with basin plains ranging in depth from less than 1,000 meters to more than 4,000...Observation that rocks dredged offshore are similar to those on land raised a fundamental concept ­ the key to understanding Mediterranean history lies in the adjacent emerged land masses, and vice-versa...
...Early paleographic reconstructions showed that the once-open communication with the Atlantic deteriorated during the upper Miocene. Water-mass exchange continued for a while in the Rif Strait, but then ceased completely prior to the beginning of the Pliocene...
...High relief near what is now the Strait of Gibraltar served as a barrier to the exchange of waters with the Atlantic. Exposed to a hot and dry climate, water evaporated and the then-dry basin elicited comparison with a gigantic Death Valley...Microfossil studies suggested that the depth of the Mediterranean basin at these times had been "deep." Estimates suggested a dry seafloor as far as 2,000 meters below ocean level... As a response to suddenly lowered sea level, rivers feeding the Mediterranean and canyons on the now-dry seafloor began a geologically dramatic phase of erosion. Deep, Grand Canyon-like gorges of the Nile and Rhone rivers, presently buried on land, were apparently cut during a great drawdown of water ­ when the Mediterranean floor lay exposed 1,000 meters or more below its present level...The sudden flooding through a gigantic waterfall at Gibraltar drowned the exposed basin floor. These falls would have been 1,000 times bigger than Niagara Falls...This flooding event is recorded by the Miocene Pliocene boundary, a time when open marine faunal assemblages were suddenly reintroduced from the Atlantic...
...Geological theories usually fall at a glacial pace into a sea of controversy, and this one is no exception. Today ­ charging that proof for the theory is lacking ­ many scientists believe that the Med always contained saltwater, with only the depth of the seafloor and the water being in question... Some of the tenets on which the theory was formulated are, if not defective, very seriously in question. To interpret their findings, a respectable number of geologists studying the surrounding emerged borderland as well as subsea sections indicate that alternative, more comprehensive concepts must be envisioned...
...It is not realistic to envision the Mediterranean seafloor of about 5 million years ago as a desert at 3,000 meters below present ocean level. Several years ago...the Mediterranean [was compared] to a complex picture-puzzle that comprises numerous intricate pieces, many of which are already in place. A general image is emerging, although gaps in some areas of the picture remain fuzzy and indistinct.
It can be inferred from the passage that geological theories tend to:

For the last two decades many earth scientists have supported the notion that the Mediterranean was once a huge, dry desert, lying 3,000 meters below sea level. This "death valley" was thought to have existed at the end of Miocene time, about 6 to 5.5 million years ago...
...From a geological point of view, the Mediterranean is a tectonically mobile land-enclosed depression ­ small (about 3,000,000 square kilometers) in comparison to the major world oceans...Immediately obvious on all charts is the highly variable topography and relief of both the seafloor and adjacent borderland. The coastline is highly irregular and continental shelves, though generally narrow, are well developed off the major river deltas (Nile, Rhone, Po, and Ebro). Moreover, the deep-sea basins and trenches have distinctive relief, with basin plains ranging in depth from less than 1,000 meters to more than 4,000...Observation that rocks dredged offshore are similar to those on land raised a fundamental concept ­ the key to understanding Mediterranean history lies in the adjacent emerged land masses, and vice-versa...
...Early paleographic reconstructions showed that the once-open communication with the Atlantic deteriorated during the upper Miocene. Water-mass exchange continued for a while in the Rif Strait, but then ceased completely prior to the beginning of the Pliocene...
...High relief near what is now the Strait of Gibraltar served as a barrier to the exchange of waters with the Atlantic. Exposed to a hot and dry climate, water evaporated and the then-dry basin elicited comparison with a gigantic Death Valley...Microfossil studies suggested that the depth of the Mediterranean basin at these times had been "deep." Estimates suggested a dry seafloor as far as 2,000 meters below ocean level... As a response to suddenly lowered sea level, rivers feeding the Mediterranean and canyons on the now-dry seafloor began a geologically dramatic phase of erosion. Deep, Grand Canyon-like gorges of the Nile and Rhone rivers, presently buried on land, were apparently cut during a great drawdown of water ­ when the Mediterranean floor lay exposed 1,000 meters or more below its present level...The sudden flooding through a gigantic waterfall at Gibraltar drowned the exposed basin floor. These falls would have been 1,000 times bigger than Niagara Falls...This flooding event is recorded by the Miocene Pliocene boundary, a time when open marine faunal assemblages were suddenly reintroduced from the Atlantic...
...Geological theories usually fall at a glacial pace into a sea of controversy, and this one is no exception. Today ­ charging that proof for the theory is lacking ­ many scientists believe that the Med always contained saltwater, with only the depth of the seafloor and the water being in question... Some of the tenets on which the theory was formulated are, if not defective, very seriously in question. To interpret their findings, a respectable number of geologists studying the surrounding emerged borderland as well as subsea sections indicate that alternative, more comprehensive concepts must be envisioned...
...It is not realistic to envision the Mediterranean seafloor of about 5 million years ago as a desert at 3,000 meters below present ocean level. Several years ago...the Mediterranean [was compared] to a complex picture-puzzle that comprises numerous intricate pieces, many of which are already in place. A general image is emerging, although gaps in some areas of the picture remain fuzzy and indistinct.
In the context of the passage, the term "emerged land masses" (lines 19-20) refers to: