Does High School Determine the Rest of Your Life?

The author made a claim that high school is only one important experience among many different stages in life. In other words, high school won’t determine the rest of our lives. The article started by an observation of Kurt Vonnegut who believed life is nothing but high school. Then the author used many research to rebut this counterclaim. One is the study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research that one’s social status in high school has a “sizable effort” on their earnings as an adult, which can partly rebut that observation because the effort is not absolute. Another one is the Wisconsin program, and they got the conclusion that many of adult outcomes can be traced back in part of high school experience. The author admits that the life in high school can make an effort on the rest, but not determinative. Many factors affect this, such as popularity, friendship, intelligence and hard work. The author used different studies that “popularity is not all it’s cracked up to be” and students succeed because of dogged effort rather than innate brilliance to support this subclaim. On the whole, the author used many research and studies to support the claim, which is the ethos, adding much credibility to convincing the audience.  

http://ideas.time.com/2013/11/18/does-high-school-determine-the-rest-of-your-life/?iid=op-main-lead

Madrid garbage piles up as cleaners continue strike

According to CNN, the city of Madrid, Spain, is having a hard time because the city’s public cleaners continue their strike for more than two weeks. Since the city government suffered from serious financial shortage, the city has hired the professional cleaning companies to clean the city. Consequently, the companies that are hired eventually decided to fire more than 1000 city cleaners and cut the wage of the rest to cut costs. Therefore, about 6000 cleaners decided to be on strike to claim that the city government should step in to solve the problem. However, the city’s mayor, Ana Botella, gave his rebuttal by saying that the problem should be solved themselves. Moreover, the mayor proclaimed that she would ask for emergency workers from the federal government to reduce the chance of a compromise. However, the cleaner’s strike situation enters on a new phase because the city’s commerce committee started to speak up for the problem. The commerce committee claimed that the problem should be solved immediately to reduce the loss of tourists. Since the tourism industry has become the biggest market in Spain, the commerce committee should take action to reduce the loss of tourist. Therefore, the commerce committee started to press both sides. According to CNN, the situation in Madrid with massive amounts of garbage heaps reflects the one facet of how hard the economic crisis has hit Spain. 

Link: Madrid garbage piles up as cleaners continue strike