It's all about adjectives

Match the word to its synonym level B1 CEFR. Use the vocabulary exactly adverb precisely except that aside from exist verb to be real existing adjective real, current Example: Flying cars are not practical with existing technology. existence noun reality Example: The existence of black holes has been confirmed by indirect observation. extraordinary adjective unusual feature noun important part of something Example: The Ramon Crater is a unique feature of the Negev Desert. feedback noun reaction figure noun shape Example: I can’t tell if that figure in the shadows is a man or a woman. figure out verb understand Example: I just can’t figure out how the magician did that amazing trick. financial adjective related to money Example: Her family is having financial problems so they can’t travel overseas this year. finance verb pay for Example: If I can’t get a loan from the bank, I won’t be able to finance a new apartment. finance noun money Example: An expert in finance predicts a global recession. finding/findings noun discoveries; results of a study Example: According to the findings of the police investigation, this is the gun which fired the fatal bullet. flexibility noun willingness to change flexible adjective adjusts easily Example: I’d prefer to meet on Monday morning but I can be flexible depending upon your schedule. flood noun a lot of water flood verb to cover with too much water flu noun type of sickness focus on/upon verb pay attention to Example: You should focus on your schoolwork if you want to improve your grades. focus noun attention People with attention deficit disorder lose focus easily. frequency noun how often frequent adjective very often Example: Hanah is a frequent customer and everyone at the store knows her. fresh adjective new Example: We need some fresh ideas if we’re going to solve this problem. frighten verb scare from preposition position, starting point gain verb make an increase, profit, earn Example: I have nothing to gain by choosing sides so I shall remain neutral. gain noun profit, amount earned generate verb create, make Example: Chat GPT can generate text written in any style you choose. guidance noun help, advice hopeful adjective optimistic, having a positive outlook Example: The farmers are hopeful that we will have rain this winter. hopefully adjective with luck ideal adjective best, most preferable Example: Nuclear power may not be an ideal solution to global warming, but it’s certainly worth considering. illness noun sickness, disease illustrate verb draw pictures illustration noun picture, image Example: Children’s storybooks have colorful illustrations. image noun picture, especially on film or television Example: The mother of the pop singer cried when she first saw her daughter’s image on television. in preposition within, inside, into in terms of regarding Example: That company makes a great product but they’re lacking in terms of customer service. in actual fact in truth Example: The mayor says the city is a safe place to live, but in actual fact the violent crime rate is very high. in connection with about Example: Police arrested four men in connection with the robbery. in that case if that is true Example: Billy Bob: “Traffic could be heavy tomorrow.” Peggy Sue: “In that case, we better leave early.” in the meantime while, during Example: The new computers won’t arrive until next week, but we can keep using the old ones in the meantime. initial adjective first Example: Her initial reaction to that song was negative, but over time she’s come to like it. initially adverb at first instruction noun teaching, order Example: Most new electronic devices come with a set of instructions. intelligence noun smartness Example: Since you have a degree from a good university, I assume you have sufficient intelligence to understand this problem. intelligent adjective smart Example: Joe isn’t very intelligent, but he is a kind person with a warm heart. interest noun attraction Example: Yossi has little interest in politics, whereas his wife goes to all the protests and demonstrations. interest verb to attract Example: Sports don’t really interest me, but my brother is a big basketball fan. introduce verb to show something new Example: Today in class I will introduce the basic concepts of literary analysis. invest verb to put money into something in order to earn money Example: Joe invested in cryptocurrency and lost a lot of money. investor noun one who puts money into something in order to earn money Example: Venture capitalists are investors who put money into risky start-up businesses. investment noun putting money into something in order to earn money Example: Buying real estate in Israel is a very safe investment because the value never goes down. investigate verb research, study Example: The police collected evidence to investigate the murder. investigation noun study Example: The police don’t have a suspect for the murder as the investigation isn’t finished yet. investigator noun detective Example: Detective Schmendrick is the lead investigator for the murder case. just about almost Example: I’m just about done here so I’ll be there shortly. keep on doing verb continue Example: You’re crazy if you keep on doing the same thing and expect different results. kind of type of Example: What kind of dog is that, a poodle? knowledge noun awareness Example: John failed the test due to lack of knowledge of the material. lack verb not having, missing Example: John failed the test due to lack of knowledge of the material. landscape noun the view of the land likely adjective, adverb probably Example: When we learn from our mistakes, we’re not likely to forget. limited adjective restricted Example: We should go to the store today because the sale is for a limited time only. limitation noun restriction little adjective small, not a lot Example: She always tells the truth. I have little reason to doubt her. look at verb see Example: People used to read newspapers on the train. Nowadays they just look at their phones. low adverb to a small amount or level Example: I have to charge my phone because the battery is running low. material noun documents, information Example: We have a lot of material to cover before the end of the semester. meaning noun significance mean verb to have significance or purpose means noun form of, by the use of Example: They communicate by means of radio. measure noun step Example: The teacher took measures to prevent cheating during the test mention verb to say, point out Example: The coach said the team played very well today but didn’t mention any player specifically. miss verb (1) fail to catch (2) wishing to see somebody Examples: (1) The football player kicked the ball but missed the goal. (2) Wow, it’s good to see you! I’ve missed you so much! misunderstand verb understand incorrectly Example: I’m afraid I misunderstood the instructions. Could you repeat them please? more or less approximately, somewhat, to a varying degree Example: This is more or less a religious neighborhood, though there are a few secular families. must modal verb have to naturally adverb as expected, normally nature noun (1) open air (2) character Examples: (1) We like to go hiking in nature reserves. (2) Pit bulls are aggressive by nature.

A solution is a mixture in which one or more substances are uniformly distributed in another substance. Solutions can be mixtures of liquids, solids, or gases. For example, plasma, the liquid part of blood, is a very complex solution. It is composed of many types of ions and large molecules, as well as gases, that are dissolved in water. A solute (SAHL-YOOT) is a substance dissolved in the solvent. The particles that compose a solute may be ions, atoms, or molecules. The solvent is the substance in which the solute is dissolved. For example, when sugar, a solute, and water, a solvent, are mixed, a solution of sugar water results. Though the sugar dissolves in the water, neither the sugar molecules nor the water molecules are altered chemically. If the water is boiled away, the sugar molecules remain and are unchanged. Solutions can be composed of various proportions of a given solute in a given solvent. Thus, solutions can vary in concentra- tion. The concentration of a solution is the amount of solute dis- solved in a fixed amount of the solution. For example, a 2 percent saltwater solution contains 2 g of salt dissolved in enough water to make 100 mL of solution. The more solute dissolved, the greater is the concentration of the solution. A saturated solution is one in which no more solute can dissolve. Aqueous (AY-kwee-uhs) solutions—solutions in which water is the solvent—are universally important to living things. Marine microorganisms spend their lives immersed in the sea, an aqueous solution. Most nutrients that plants need are in aqueous solutions in moist soil. Body cells exist in an aqueous solution of intercellu- lar fluid and are themselves filled with fluid; in fact, most chemical reactions that occur in the body occur in aqueous solutions. Copyright © by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. All rights reserved. Liquid water Solid water Ice (solid water) is less dense than liquid water because of the structure of ice crystals. The water molecules in ice are bonded to each other in a way that creates large amounts of open space between the molecules, relative to liquid water. FIGURE 2-12 solvent from the Latin solvere, meaning “to loosen” Word Roots and Origins CHEMISTRY OF LIFE 43 ACIDS AND BASES One of the most important aspects of a living system is the degree of its acidity or alkalinity. What do we mean when we use the terms acid and base? Ionization of Water As water molecules move about, they bump into one another. Some of these collisions are strong enough to result in a chemical change: one water molecule loses a proton (a hydrogen nucleus), and the other gains this proton. This reaction really occurs in two steps. First, one molecule of water pulls apart another water molecule, or dissociates, into two ions of opposite charge: H2O ∏ H OH The OH ion is known as the hydroxide ion. The free H ion can react with another water molecule, as shown in the equation below. H H2O ∏ H3O The H3O ion is known as the hydronium ion. Acidity or alkalin- ity is a measure of the relative amounts of hydronium ions and hydroxide ions dissolved in a solution. If the number of hydronium ions in a solution equals the number of hydroxide ions, the solution is said to be neutral. Pure water contains equal numbers of hydro- nium ions and hydroxide ions and is therefore a neutral solution. Acids If the number of hydronium ions in a solution is greater than the number of hydroxide ions, the solution is an acid. For example, when hydrogen chloride gas, HCl, is dissolved in water, its mol- ecules dissociate to form hydrogen ions, H, and chloride ions, Cl, as is shown in the equation below. HCl ∏ H Cl These free hydrogen ions combine with water molecules to form hydronium ions, H3O. This aqueous solution contains many more hydronium ions than it does hydroxide ions, making it an acidic solution. Acids tend to have a sour taste; how- ever, never taste a substance to test it for acidity. In concentrated forms, they are highly corrosive to some materials, as you can see in Figure 2-13. Bases If sodium hydroxide, NaOH, a solid, is dissolved in water, it dissociates to form sodium ions, Na, and hydroxide ions, OH, as shown in the equation below. NaOH ∏ Na OH Copyright © by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. All rights reserved. Eco Connection onnection Acid Precipitation Acid precipitation, more commonly called acid rain, describes rain, snow, sleet, or fog that contains high levels of sulfuric and nitric acids. These acids form when sulfur dioxide gas, SO2, and nitrogen oxide gas, NO, react with water in the atmosphere to produce sulfuric acid, H2SO4, and nitric acid, HNO3. Acid precipitation makes soil and bodies of water, such as lakes, more acidic than normal. These high acid levels can harm plant and animal life directly. A high level of acid in a lake may kill mollusks, fish, and amphibians. Even in a lake that does not have a very elevated level of acid, acid precipitation may leach aluminum and magnesium from soils, poisoning water- dwelling species. Reducing fossil-fuel consump- tion, such as occurs in gasoline engines and coal-burning power plants, should reduce high acid levels in precipitation. Sulfur dioxide, SO2, which is produced when fossil fuels are burned, reacts with water in the atmosphere to produce acid precipitation. Acid precipitation, or acid rain, can make lakes and rivers too acidic to support life and can even corrode stone, such as the face of this statue. FIGURE 2-13 44 CHAPTER 2 This solution then contains more hydroxide ions than hydronium ions and is therefore defined as a base. The adjective alkaline refers to bases. Bases have a bitter taste; however, never taste a substance to test for alkalinity. They tend to feel slippery because the OH ions react with the oil on our skin to form a soap. In fact, commercial soap is the product of a reaction between a base and a fat. pH Scientists have developed a scale for comparing the relative con- centrations of hydronium ions and hydroxide ions in a solution. This scale is called the pH scale, and it ranges from 0 to 14, as shown in Figure 2-14. A solution with a pH of 0 is very acidic, a solution with a pH of 7 is neutral, and a solution with a pH of 14 is very basic. A solution’s pH is measured on a logarithmic scale. That is, the change of one pH unit reflects a 10-fold change in the acidity or alkalinity. For example, urine has 10 times the H3O ions at a pH of 6 than water does at a pH of 7. Vinegar, has 1,000 times more H3O ions at a pH of 3 than urine at a pH of 6, and 10,000 times more H3O ions than water at a pH of 7. The pH of a solution can be measured with litmus paper or with some other chemical indicator that changes color at various pH levels. Buffers The control of pH is important for living systems. Enzymes can function only within a very narrow pH range. The control of pH in organisms is often accomplished with buffers. Buffers are chemi- cal substances that neutralize small amounts of either an acid or a base added to a solution. As Figure 2-14 shows, the composition of your internal environment—in terms of acidity and alkalinity— varies greatly. Some of your body fluids, such as stomach acid and urine, are acidic. Others, such as intestinal fluid and blood, are

It's all about the Roman Empire

It's all about addition

All about Hippopotamus from birth to death and it’s facts

All About Kites Introduction. A kite is one of the oldest toys. And it's very simple to make. Kites come in many sizes, shapes, and colors. Did you know that kites can be both toys and tools? History of Kites. Kites were named after the kite bird. The kite bird has wide wings and easily floats high in the sky. No one knows who made the first kite. But one famous Chinese story about a kite was written over 2,000 years ago. The story is about a man who used a kite to attack a fort. He couldn't find a way to get inside the fort. So he tied himself to a huge kite. He flew over the wall of the fort and scared the soldiers! The inventor Ben Franklin had the idea that lightning was made of electricity. He wanted to prove his idea. One day when it was stormy, he tied a metal key to a kite string. Then he flew the kite up into the storm clouds. Lightning from the storm hit his kite. The electricity ran down the wet string to the metal key. When he reached for the key, he got a surprise. The electricity jumped from the key and gave him a shock! Do not try this yourself. It's not safe to do. When Ben Franklin tried to do it again, he was hurt badly. Many Uses for Kites. Some people have used kites for fishing. They put a fishhook and bait on the long kite tail. The kite tail dragged in the water. When a fish saw it, it bit the bait and was caught on the hook. Then the kite was pulled in. Weather kites carried scientific gauges into the sky. The gauges measured how fast the wind was blowing and how cool the air was. Years ago, some armies used kites with cameras to spy on enemy troops. Kites were also used as flying targets. The kites trained soldiers to aim better. Soldiers shot at the kites. The moving kites were hard to hit with bullets. Different shapes of kites fly in different ways. Flat, diamond-shaped kites fly easily. Box-shaped kites can hang still in the air for a long time. Stunt kites twist and twirl on many strings. Large parafoil kites act almost like parachutes. Giant dragon kites flutter. Fighting kites can be used to cut other kites' strings. On a breezy day, take your kite to a flat, open area. Be sure that there are no power lines or big trees. Look at the ground around you. Is there anything you could trip over? Hold your kite up by the bridle and run into the wind. Let go of the kite and slowly let out some string. Then let out a little more until your kite is high in the sky. Happy flying!

To understand melody in music, think about some music you’re familiar with. If you were asked to hum it, what would that sound like? The part of the music that you’d hum is the melody. It’s the main thread of sound that your brain tracks and holds onto when you’re listening to music. In vocal music, the melody is sung by the lead singer. Other vocalists can provide harmony and instruments can add accompaniment, but the melody is the star of the show.What are the characteristics of melody in music? How do you describe a melody in music? A melody needs to have two things. The first is a sequence of notes, or pitches, which range from high to low. The second is rhythm, which is the timing and duration of each note. These two simple elements can create an incredible variety of combinations. Even though a melody only consists of one note at a time, it can convey so much energy and emotion. Melodies can be fast and sparkly, like “The Flight of the Bumblebee.” They can be slow and majestic, like “Finlandia.” They might be sweeping and graceful, like a Strauss waltz. Or they can be fun and exciting, like your favorite pop tunes that you love to sing along with. Melodies often tell you a lot about where a piece of music comes from. It’s easy to recognize and identify melodies from different folk traditions such as the Japanese folk song “Sakura” or the Irish tune “Star of the County Down.” Learn how to play your favorite melodies on piano, and more! Sign up now. What is melody in music? Here are some examples. Here is the famous melody for the song “Lean on Me” written out on a staff. Notice the way that the notes move up, down, and then repeat. What is melody in music? Example of Lean On Me notes on treble staff. A melody all by itself is great, but music can be even more fun when there’s an accompaniment. Here are a few bars of “Lean on Me” with the accompaniment written out. As you listen to this song, notice how the accompaniment has a very similar rhythm and movement to the melody. Then there’s that one note in the bass line that comes along every measure with its own rhythm, which adds some extra energy and movement to the song. What makes a good melody? When you create a melody, there are four types of movement you can use: Repeat (same note) Step (up or down) Skip (up or down) Leap (up or down) Stepping and repeating are the most common types of melodic motion, and this makes a melody easier to sing. Most “hummable” tunes use steps and repeats almost exclusively. This kind of melody is called conjunct. Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” one of the most famous melodies of all time.Skips and leaps are generally more sparing in melodies, but when thoughtfully placed they can have a powerful emotional impact. Tunes with a lot of leaps are called disjunct. Listen to Sarah Brightman sing All I Ask of You from The Phantom of the Opera starting at 0:39. This is a very disjunct melody, and challenging to sing. Great melodies also incorporate patterns that blend unity, repetition, and contrast. Our ears love patterns, but they also love novelty and growth. A good melody incorporates all of these elements. For example, listen to John William’s “Princess Leia Theme.” Can you hear the repeated pattern in the melody that gradually moves higher as the theme progresses? Now listen to the way it changes and develops into something that fits with what came before but sounds new at the same time. This is some great melodic writing! Can melody exist without rhythm? There is no way for a melody to exist without rhythm. Even if your melody only has one note, that note has a duration, and that’s the rhythm. If your melody has two notes, how long those notes last and how much time passes between hearing them is also a rhythm. A melody in music can often be recognized even when it’s performed with different rhythms. This frequently happens in live performances of pop, rock, and jazz, in which singers typically improvise slight rhythmic differences with each performance. No two renditions are exactly the same, and this constant reinterpretation keeps the music fresh. How to make a melody for a song on piano Creating your own melodies on the piano is easy and fun! There are so many ways you can discover a melody all your own. Here are a few ideas. Get some inspiration from the world around you. What can you hear right now? A clock ticking? A bird song? A car passing by your house? See if you can find some notes on the piano that imitate the sounds you hear. Think of a feeling you’d like to put into a melody. What are some ways you could make a string of notes sound happy, sad, angry, or maybe just thoughtful. Choose a line from a poem you like, or write your own. Read it out loud and put some feeling into it. Did your voice rise and fall in pitch as you were reading? Now go to the piano, start on any note you like, and try to imitate what happened when you read. Go up when your voice naturally went up, go down when your voice naturally went down. How did that sound? Now you have the perfect melody to go with those words. Too many keys on the piano? The truth is, most melodies use only a limited number of different notes. Try creating a melody using only the black keys. These form what’s called a pentatonic scale. It’s used in a lot of folk music traditions around the world and can be a great place to start if you want to create your own melodies. Remember, when you create your melody, keep it simple. Use repeated notes and steps, but add a few skips to keep things interesting. One tip about leaps: when you do put in a big leap, try doubling back and filling in the empty space you leaped over. This keeps the melody self-contained and easier to sing. Also, see if you can use the same patterns of notes and rhythms to give the melody unity, but also change those patterns to give it variety. There is no right or wrong way to create your own music. Keep trying combinations of notes and rhythms until you find something that you like. How many bars and notes are in a melody? Many types of music tend to have a prescribed number of bars, or measures. This will vary widely between different genres, and creates an overall sense of musical structure. If you’re writing a pop song, a verse will usually have between eight and sixteen bars. The prechorus that follows often has just four bars, and this “foreshortening” creates a sense of acceleration, driving the listener toward the chorus. The number of notes can also vary widely. A melody in music needs at least two notes, and a long and complex one can have hundreds or even thousands of notes. What is a countermelody in music? How many melodies should a song have? A counter melody is a melodic line that interacts with the primary melody as an independent but supportive voice. A great example of this is the song “We Don’t Talk about Bruno.” Each character sings their own melody during the piece, but these melodies all combine at the end as countermelodies. This produces a musical texture known as counterpoint. The same thing happens in “One Day More” from Les Miserables. The different melodies are first sung separately, but end up being combined in a splendid, complex texture that leads the music to its thrilling conclusion. The difference between a countermelody and regular harmony is that harmony usually supports the rhythms of the melody. A countermelody will move more independently, with different rhythms from those of the melody, and will often sound “melodic” when sung or played all by itself. A melodic song should have one main melody. This is the part that the lead voice sings. It’s usually in the spotlight, and will be the most memorable part of the music. Anything else is either harmony, countermelody, or accompaniment. Does all music have to have a melody? A piece of music doesn’t have to have a melody. There are many different kinds of music without melody. For example, a lot of music played on percussion instruments won’t have a melody. Listen to this example of Tahitian drumming. This is some great music, exciting and fun to listen to, but you’d have a hard time humming it. It’s music, but it doesn’t have a melody. Rap music is another style of music where there doesn’t have to be a melody. In rap, words are chanted rather than sung. The performer will raise and lower the pitch of their voice for emphasis, but it’s the rhythm of the words that creates most of the music. Music can even lack any melody, at least in some sections. Listen to the opening chords of “Duel of the Fates.” This choral passage is all about harmony, with little rhythmic variance or sense of melody. But it makes an effective contrast with the next section, which is bustling with rapid instrumental melodies. In some pieces, there are multiple melodic lines but there is no one main melody. When music is made up of equally important countermelodies, it creates a contrapuntal texture. Baroque composer J.S. Bach was one of the greatest masters of this style, such as in his Little Fugue in G minor. It starts with a single melodic line, the subject, but then a countermelody is added, and then more and more until several melodic lines are playing together. It’s fun to listen to, but once all the countermelodies are playing together it becomes hard to decide which part to hum along with! You’ll also hear a lot of counterpoint in jazz music, in which the different instruments are all playing together and improvising their own melodies that combine to create a rich, thick musical texture. Experience the wonder of melody in music! Whether you’re humming your favorite tune, or creating a new song all your own, melody is a memorable, shareable part of music. Enrich your music experience by being aware of, listening for, and enjoying the melodies all around you.

“There’s No Such Thing as Sound Science” by By Christie Aschwanden was a lead science writer for FiveThirtyEight. FiveThirtyEight, Science, Dec. 6, 2017 Science is being turned against itself. For decades, its twin ideals of transparency and rigor have been weaponized by those who disagree with results produced by the scientific method. Under the Trump administration, that fight has ramped up again. In a move ostensibly meant to reduce conflicts of interest, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has removed a number of scientists from advisory panels and replaced some of them with representatives from industries that the agency regulates. Like many in the Trump administration, Pruitt has also cast doubt on the reliability of climate science. For instance, in an interview with CNBC, Pruitt said that “measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do.” Similarly, Trump’s pick to head NASA, an agency that oversees a large portion the nation’s climate research, has insisted that research into human influence on climate lacks certainty, and he falsely claimed that “global temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago.” Kathleen Hartnett White, Trump’s nominee to head the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a Senate hearing last month that she thinks we “need to have more precise explanations of the human role and the natural role” in climate change. The same entreaties crop up again and again: We need to root out conflicts. We need more precise evidence. What makes these arguments so powerful is that they sound quite similar to the points raised by proponents of a very different call for change that’s coming from within science. This other movement strives to produce more robust, reproducible findings. Despite having dissimilar goals, the two forces espouse principles that look surprisingly alike: Science needs to be transparent. Results and methods should be openly shared so that outside researchers can independently reproduce and validate them. The methods used to collect and analyze data should be rigorous and clear, and conclusions must be supported by evidence. These are the arguments underlying an “open science” reform movement that was created, in part, as a response to a “reproducibility crisis” that has struck some fields of science.1 But they’re also used as talking points by politicians who are working to make it more difficult for the EPA and other federal agencies to use science in their regulatory decision-making, under the guise of basing policy on “sound science.” Science’s virtues are being wielded against it. What distinguishes the two calls for transparency is intent: Whereas the “open science” movement aims to make science more reliable, reproducible and robust, proponents of “sound science” have historically worked to amplify uncertainty, create doubt and undermine scientific discoveries that threaten their interests. “Our criticisms are founded in a confidence in science,” said Steven Goodman, co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford and a proponent of open science. “That’s a fundamental difference — we’re critiquing science to make it better. Others are critiquing it to devalue the approach itself.” Calls to base public policy on “sound science” seem unassailable if you don’t know the term’s history. The phrase was adopted by the tobacco industry in the 1990s to counteract mounting evidence linking secondhand smoke to cancer. A 1992 Environmental Protection Agency report identified secondhand smoke as a human carcinogen, and Philip Morris responded by launching an initiative to promote what it called “sound science.” In an internal memo, Philip Morris vice president of corporate affairs Ellen Merlo wrote that the program was designed to “discredit the EPA report,” “prevent states and cities, as well as businesses from passing smoking bans” and “proactively” pass legislation to help their cause. The sound science tactic exploits a fundamental feature of the scientific process: Science does not produce absolute certainty. Contrary to how it’s sometimes represented to the public, science is not a magic wand that turns everything it touches to truth. Instead, it’s a process of uncertainty reduction, much like a game of 20 Questions. Any given study can rarely answer more than one question at a time, and each study usually raises a bunch of new questions in the process of answering old ones. “Science is a process rather than an answer,” said psychologist Alison Ledgerwood of the University of California, Davis. Every answer is provisional and subject to change in the face of new evidence. It’s not entirely correct to say that “this study proves this fact,” Ledgerwood said. “We should be talking instead about how science increases or decreases our confidence in something.” The tobacco industry’s brilliant tactic was to turn this baked-in uncertainty against the scientific enterprise itself. While insisting that they merely wanted to ensure that public policy was based on sound science, tobacco companies defined the term in a way that ensured that no science could ever be sound enough. The only sound science was certain science, which is an impossible standard to achieve. “Doubt is our product,” wrote one employee of the Brown & Williamson tobacco company in a 1969 internal memo. The note went on to say that doubt “is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’” and “establishing a controversy.” These strategies for undermining inconvenient science were so effective that they’ve served as a sort of playbook for industry interests ever since, said Stanford University science historian Robert Proctor. The sound science push is no longer just Philip Morris sowing doubt about the links between cigarettes and cancer. It’s also a 1998 action plan by the American Petroleum Institute, Chevron and Exxon Mobil to “install uncertainty” about the link between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. It’s industry-funded groups’ late-1990s effort to question the science the EPA was using to set fine-particle-pollution air-quality standards that the industry didn’t want. And then there was the more recent effort by Dow Chemical to insist on more scientific certainty before banning a pesticide that the EPA’s scientists had deemed risky to children. Now comes a move by the Trump administration’s EPA to repeal a 2015 rule on wetlands protection by disregarding particular studies. (To name just a few examples.) Doubt merchants aren’t pushing for knowledge, they’re practicing what Proctor has dubbed “agnogenesis” — the intentional manufacture of ignorance. This ignorance isn’t simply the absence of knowing something; it’s a lack of comprehension deliberately created by agents who don’t want you to know, Proctor said.2 In the hands of doubt-makers, transparency becomes a rhetorical move. “It’s really difficult as a scientist or policy maker to make a stand against transparency and openness, because well, who would be against it?” said Karen Levy, researcher on information science at Cornell University. But at the same time, “you can couch everything in the language of transparency and it becomes a powerful weapon.” For instance, when the EPA was preparing to set new limits on particulate pollution in the 1990s, industry groups pushed back against the research and demanded access to primary data (including records that researchers had promised participants would remain confidential) and a reanalysis of the evidence. Their calls succeeded and a new analysis was performed. The reanalysis essentially confirmed the original conclusions, but the process of conducting it delayed the implementation of regulations and cost researchers time and money. Delay is a time-tested strategy. “Gridlock is the greatest friend a global warming skeptic has,” said Marc Morano, a prominent critic of global warming research and the executive director of ClimateDepot.com, in the documentary “Merchants of Doubt” (based on the book by the same name). Morano’s site is a project of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which has received funding from the oil and gas industry. “We’re the negative force. We’re just trying to stop stuff.” Some of these ploys are getting a fresh boost from Congress. The Data Quality Act (also known as the Information Quality Act) was reportedly written by an industry lobbyist and quietly passed as part of an appropriations bill in 2000. The rule mandates that federal agencies ensure the “quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information” that they disseminate, though it does little to define what these terms mean. The law also provides a mechanism for citizens and groups to challenge information that they deem inaccurate, including science that they disagree with. “It was passed in this very quiet way with no explicit debate about it — that should tell you a lot about the real goals,” Levy said. But what’s most telling about the Data Quality Act is how it’s been used, Levy said. A 2004 Washington Post analysis found that in the 20 months following its implementation, the act was repeatedly used by industry groups to push back against proposed regulations and bog down the decision-making process. Instead of deploying transparency as a fundamental principle that applies to all science, these interests have used transparency as a weapon to attack very particular findings that they would like to eradicate. Now Congress is considering another way to legislate how science is used. The Honest Act, a bill sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas,3 is another example of what Levy calls a “Trojan horse” law that uses the language of transparency as a cover to achieve other political goals. Smith’s legislation would severely limit the kind of evidence the EPA could use for decision-making. Only studies whose raw data and computer codes were publicly available would be allowed for consideration. That might sound perfectly reasonable, and in many cases it is, Goodman said. But sometimes there are good reasons why researchers can’t conform to these rules, like when the data contains confidential or sensitive medical information.4 Critics, which include more than a dozen scientific organizations, argue that, in practice, the rules would prevent many studies from being considered in EPA reviews.5 It might seem like an easy task to sort good science from bad, but in reality it’s not so simple. “There’s a misplaced idea that we can definitively distinguish the good from the not-good science, but it’s all a matter of degree,” said Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science. “There is no perfect study.” Requiring regulators to wait until they have (nonexistent) perfect evidence is essentially “a way of saying, ‘We don’t want to use evidence for our decision-making,’” Nosek said. Most scientific controversies aren’t about science at all, and once the sides are drawn, more data is unlikely to bring opponents into agreement. Michael Carolan, who researches the sociology of technology and scientific knowledge at Colorado State University, wrote in a 2008 paper about why objective knowledge is not enough to resolve environmental controversies. “While these controversies may appear on the surface to rest on disputed questions of fact, beneath often reside differing positions of value; values that can give shape to differing understandings of what ‘the facts’ are.” What’s needed in these cases isn’t more or better science, but mechanisms to bring those hidden values to the forefront of the discussion so that they can be debated transparently. “As long as we continue down this unabashedly naive road about what science is, and what it is capable of doing, we will continue to fail to reach any sort of meaningful consensus on these matters,” Carolan writes. The dispute over tobacco was never about the science of cigarettes’ link to cancer. It was about whether companies have the right to sell dangerous products and, if so, what obligations they have to the consumers who purchased them. Similarly, the debate over climate change isn’t about whether our planet is heating, but about how much responsibility each country and person bears for stopping it. While researching her book “Merchants of Doubt,” science historian Naomi Oreskes found that some of the same people who were defending the tobacco industry as scientific experts were also receiving industry money to deny the role of human activity in global warming. What these issues had in common, she realized, was that they all involved the need for government action. “None of this is about the science. All of this is a political debate about the role of government,” she said in the documentary. These controversies are really about values, not scientific facts, and acknowledging that would allow us to have more truthful and productive debates. What would that look like in practice? Instead of cherry-picking evidence to support a particular view (and insisting that the science points to a desired action), the various sides could lay out the values they are using to assess the evidence. For instance, in Europe, many decisions are guided by the precautionary principle — a system that values caution in the face of uncertainty and says that when the risks are unclear, it should be up to industries to show that their products and processes are not harmful, rather than requiring the government to prove that they are harmful before they can be regulated. By contrast, U.S. agencies tend to wait for strong evidence of harm before issuing regulations. Both approaches have critics, but the difference between them comes down to priorities: Is it better to exercise caution at the risk of burdening companies and perhaps the economy, or is it more important to avoid potential economic downsides even if it means that sometimes a harmful product or industrial process goes unregulated? In other words, under what circumstances do we agree to act on a risk? How certain do we need to be that the risk is real, and how many people would need to be at risk, and how costly is it to reduce that risk? Those are moral questions, not scientific ones, and openly discussing and identifying these kinds of judgment calls would lead to a more honest debate. Science matters, and we need to do it as rigorously as possible. But science can’t tell us how risky is too risky to allow products like cigarettes or potentially harmful pesticides to be sold — those are value judgements that only humans can make.

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