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By now the image of California in decline looms as large in the conventional media wisdom as the Golden State -- triumphant clich閟 of a generation ago -- "this El Dorado", as Time magazine had put it in 1969, that was to be "the mirror of America as it will become." Hardly anyone mentions the sunshine these days, or the beaches, or the beautiful young families around the pool, or the new lifestyles that all Americans will soon emulate, or how the University of California is wall-to-wall with cyclotrons and Nobel laureates, or how the state's higher-education system is accommodating absolutely all comers at little or no cost.

Today, California classrooms are among the most crowded in the country; many schools operate without libraries, without counselors, without nurses, without art or music, with greatly diminished curricular offerings. And what's true for the schools is true for the other services that have no powerful constituencies: children's protective services, probation, public health. Many cities have shut down swimming and wading pools because they cannot be safely maintained, and fenced playgrounds have been shut because of the danger presented by cracked and splintered structures. The list could be extended indefinitely. As thousands of professors receive golden handshakes from the University of California and California State University, among them some of the stars recruited in the go- go Fifties, the crowding in the lecture halls has increased and the lines at the classroom door have gotten longer and longer ("Don't panic," says the T-shirt on a student waiting to enroll at a Sacramento junior college, but many have been in line since four in the morning). U.C. tuition, which was roughly $800 a year in the early 1980s, is now over $4,000, a figure not out of line with tuitions at public colleges in other states but a far cry from the cost of a California state education in the golden days -- and it is almost certain to increase again next year. More than 200,000 students -- roughly 10 percent -- have vanished from the rolls of the state's colleges and universities in the past two years. While per capita tax revenues have been effectively frozen, and while they have declined relative to other states, client rolls for state services -- schools, prisons, Medicaid, welfare -- have been rising faster than population, leaving a structural gap that no one has yet confronted, much less closed. Again this year, the governor and legislature borrowed $7 billion from the banks and rolled over a $5 billion budget deficit, for which few politicians have proposed any remedies. Thanks to the deficit, California, which a decade ago, had one of the highest bond ratings in the country, has one of the lowest. "Were California a corporation," said John Vasconcellos, the chairman of the State Assembly Ways and Means Committee, "it would have little option but to initiate some sort of bankruptcy proceeding." The new image of California is familiar enough: a state suffering from earthquakes, fires, drought, floods, urban riots, dirty air, schools as overcrowded as the freeways; a legislature -- once said to be the nation's most professional and progressive -- oozing with corruption and stuck in the budgetary gridlock; and of course, recession, unemployment, chronic budget deficits, and financial calamity. For those who know their Nathaniel West, their Raymond Chandler, and their Joan Didion, the California apocalypse imagery is hardly new; it was always there on the dark side of the dream. This was the place, as Didion wrote back in the 1960s, "in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent." os Angeles has burnt before. If you believe people like Governor Wilson, most of the state's problems were created somewhere else, usually in Washington, where the Clinton Administration has, on the one hand, cost California hundreds of thousands of jobs through excessive defense cuts and, on the other, allowed a horde of illegal immigrants to overrun the state's schools and health facilities without paying them for the immense costs that come with them...much has been changed in California since the days of West and Chandler, but the capacity for denial and self-deception is undiminished. In fact, California's trouble is at once more prosaic and more complex than the political rhetoric claims or the apocalyptic imagery suggests. It began before the recent recession, the big 1991 fire in the Oakland hills or the San Francisco earthquake of 1989 (itself a rerun of a classic), before those L.A. cops beat up Rodney King or the riot and the fire that followed their acquittal in the first trial, before the eight-year drought that still may not be over. And contrary to what a lot of Californians believe, a lot of the damage didn't just happen to us: we inflicted it on ourselves.

The central purpose of this passage is to:

A. ascribe California's economic and social problems to a set of measurable factors

B. sketch the myriad difficulties facing California today

C. contrast California's economic and social problems with those of other states

D. to dispute the contention that California's problems were caused by the federal government

Saul Hoffman's scientific journal paper published in 2015 in Societies explores the relationship between two topics that at the surface are very distant from each other. As he goes on to state, "It is relatively easy, at least for an economist, to see why economists would be attracted to issues like teen pregnancy and teen childbearing, despite their apparent distance from the core topics of economics. First, economics ?especially microeconomics ?is fundamentally the study of choices that individuals make, traditionally and most often in formal markets with monetary prices, but now more and more frequently outside that sphere. Viewed from that perspective, choices involving sexual and fertility behavior among teens are an incredibly challenging, but inviting, target. Is it possible to identify the role of economic incentives, including government policy, on these behaviors? Is it sensible to apply traditional models of rational choice decision-making to teens?

Second, the traditional concern about teen fertility was predicated on the notion that it was an economically catastrophic act. In a famous and oft-quoted 1968 article, Arthur Campbell wrote that 'The girl who has an illegitimate child at the age of 16 suddenly has 90 percent of her life's script written for her,' including reduced opportunities for schooling, the labor market, and marriage. But it doesn't take too much reflection to appreciate that more may be going on in leading to these poor outcomes than just a teen birth. Disentangling the causal effect of teen childbearing on subsequent socio-economic outcomes from its correlational effect is another deliciously inviting and challenging target, this time well-suited for the applied economist or econometrician.

Just to make all this yet more inviting, the two research strands are closely related. Suppose it could be demonstrated that for some teens the socio-economic impact of a teen birth was negligible. For example, maybe future prospects for some teens were equally poor with or without a birth or perhaps government programs provided substantial benefits, so that the net impact on socio-economic well-being was consequently small or even positive. Then, it might well be 'rational' in an economic sense to have a teen birth in the first place, thereby linking the research on the causal impact of a teen birth with the research on the choice determinants of a teen birth. So what came to be known as the teen birth `causes' literature and the teen birth `consequences' literature were clearly interrelated.

And then, to add yet another layer of challenge, the teen fertility rate in the U.S. has fallen at a rate that is totally unprecedented. Teen fertility was once widespread, with most of it occurring within early and sometimes not entirely voluntary marriage. In 1960, the teen fertility rate was approximately 90 births per 1000, which implied that more than 40% of women ever had a teen birth. When I published my first article on teen births 25 years ago, the teen fertility rate was 60 births per 1000, down one-third from 1960, but it had increased six years in a row in what turned out to be a deviation from the downward trend. Since then the rate has declined every single year, except for a short but puzzling uptick between 2005 and 2007. In 2014, the teen fertility rate was 24.2 births per 1000, the lowest teen fertility rate ever recorded in the U.S., though still shockingly high by European standards. Thus, the rate fell by more than 50% during my professional association with the topic and by 70% since 1960. Of course, at the same time teen marital births largely disappeared, falling from 85% of teen births to 12%.

This adds yet another focus for economic research. Why did the rate fall? Did it have anything to do with changes in the costs of teen childbearing or changes in policy? Is it a good thing or not?

In this article I try to make sense out of these various research strands by providing a personal narrative through the economics literature on teen childbearing, with a special emphasis on the three issues discussed above. My goal is to make the literature, including some reasonably technical content, accessible and valuable to a non-economist."

Hoffman, S. (2015). Teen Childbearing and Economics: A Short History of a 25-Year Research Love Affair. Societies, 5(3), 646-663. doi:10.3390/soc5030646

What is the most likely reason for the author's use of quotation marks around "rational" in paragraph 3?

A. The author disagrees with the idea that teen birth is rational and wishes to distance himself from it.

B. The author disagrees with the way the term "rational" is used to indicate that economists might perceive teen birth as financially beneficial.

C. The possible benefits of a teen birth are so small that it is not necessarily meaningful to describe them as "rational."

D. The choice of having a teen birth might not have been thought out methodically, but makes sense according to a monetary cost/benefit analysis.

Several techniques have been developed to determine the order of a reaction. The rate of a reaction cannot be predicted on the basis of the overall equation, but can be predicted on the basis of the rate-determining step. For instance, the following reaction can be broken down into three steps.

Step 1

(Slow) Step 2

(fast) Step 3

(fast)

Reaction 1 In this case, the first step in the reaction pathway is the rate-determining step. Therefore, the overall rate of the reaction must equal the rate of the first step, k1 [A] where k1 is the rate constant for the first step. (Rate constants of the different steps are denoted by kx , where x is the step number.)

In some cases, it is desirable to measure the rate of a reaction in relation to only one species. In a second-order reaction, for instance, a large excess of one species is included in the reaction vessel. Since a relatively small amount of this large concentration is reacted, we assume that the concentration essentially remains unchanged. Such a reaction is called a pseudo first-order reaction. A new rate constant, k', is established, equal to the product of the rate constant of the original reaction, k, and the concentration of the species in excess. This approach is often used to analyze enzyme activity.

In some cases, the reaction rate may be dependent on the concentration of a short-lived intermediate. This can happen if the rate-determining step is not the first step. In this case, the concentration of the intermediate must be derived from the equilibrium constant of the preceding step. For redox reactions, the equilibrium can be correlated with the voltage produced by two half-cells by means of the Nernst equation. This equation states that at any given moment:

Equation 1 When

Reaction 2

Note: R = 8.314 J/K•mol; F = 9.6485 x 104 C/mol.)

Catalysts are effective in increasing the rate of a reaction because they:

A. increase the energy of the activated complex.

B. increase the value of the equilibrium constant.

C. decrease the number of collisions between reactant molecules.

D. lower the activation energy