Word: basic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...show it was combatting terrorism? It's unclear whether anyone could have foreseen the twists and turns, such as Moussaoui becoming his own counsel, that began to unravel the government's case. But the case now is pivotal for another reason: it has become a showdown between the basic right of criminal defendants to prove their innocence and national-security concerns that can affect the lives of many others. Here's how this supposedly open-and-shut case turned into an unruly tangle of conflicting legal principles...
...College Board wants schools to produce better writers, so the New SAT will require an essay. The board thinks grammar is important, so the new test will ask students to fix poorly deployed gerunds and such. To encourage earlier advanced-math instruction, the New SAT will go beyond basic algebra and geometry for the first time to include Algebra II class material (remember negative exponents--q(-3), for instance?). The board, a powerful group of 4,300 educational institutions--including most of America's leading universities--has undertaken an unprecedented effort to push local school districts to alter their curriculums...
...also says that the "SAT has changed remarkably little over the years," which is true only in the most basic sense: it still examines verbal and mathematical skills. Even so, the question types have changed dramatically. The first Scholastic Aptitude Test, which was given on June 23, 1926, included "Artificial Language" and logic sections that would seem bizarre to today's SAT takers. (A practice question asked students to translate a gibberish sentence--"OK entcola kon"--based on a given lexicon.) Similarly, IQ tests look quite different from the SAT. The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the most widely used...
...Lohman analyzed test scores for 6,300 11th-graders who in 2000 took two very different tests, the Iowa Tests of Educational Development (ITED) and the Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT), a standardized exam first published in 1971 that Lohman helped revise two years ago. The ITED is your basic achievement test: it assesses how well kids have learned such class exercises as setting up science experiments, reading social studies passages, and spelling. The CogAT, by contrast, is a test that measures verbal, quantitative and figural reasoning abilities, irrespective of any one curriculum. (In the quantitative section, for instance, a question...
That reference was probably more controversial than anything you will see on Skin; it's really no more risque than several new fall shows--NBC's Coupling and Las Vegas, say--and less so than basic-cable fare like FX's Nip/Tuck. If anything, it may whitewash porn by showing only its most telegenic, soft-core side. The big risk Skin takes is with Goldman, who makes a surprisingly appealing flesh peddler. You could mistake him for the respectable entertainment mogul that he believes he is. Like Satan in Paradise Lost, he's the devil who gets all the best...