“Capital: 1. Man-made material resource used or available for use in production, for example machinery. This is also referred to as physical capital. See also HUMAN CAPITAL. 2. Material or financial wealth, accumulated by an individual or a company, that can be used to generate income. See also HUMAN CAPITAL.”
Excerpted from: Black, John, Nigar Hashimzade, and Gareth Miles. Oxford Dictionary of Economics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the SAT. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of four sentences and four comprehension questions. This document may be a bit crowded in this half-page formatting. But since this document (as just about everything here on Mark’s Text Terminal) is in Microsoft Word, you can adjust it to your students’ needs.
And, editorially, I must say once again that the editors of The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy have done a nice job with their modest but effective critique of the SAT in this reading. And I like their use of purportedly in the first sentence.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
The Weekly Text for 5 September 2025, for some reason, is this reading on coeducation and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I have only the faintest idea of why I developed this material; I vaguely recall a class that didn’t believe me when I told them that men and women were–and are (e.g. Smith, Mount Holyoke, both part of the Five College Consortium, which includes my alma mater, Hampshire College)–educated separately in many colleges and universities in the United States.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on reparations. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of four sentences and three comprehension questions. If discussing reparations for the the horrors of chattel slavery in the United States is now forbidden as thought crime (have you seen the index of forbidden words in the Trump administration?), you’re safe with this document. It focuses on war reparations.
Which isn’t to say that one couldn’t dilate on the reading to include reparations for crimes against human rights or the sin and crime of enslavement, no matter how far in the past. I’m just saying.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
This week’s Text is a reading on Charles Ponzi accompanied but its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
In the fall of 2008, when the United States economy crashed and nearly took the rest of the world down with it, I had just accepted a job at an economics-and-finance-themed high school in the Financial District in Manhattan. I rode the 2 or the 5 train from the North Bronx to the Wall Street Station. My school was on Trinity Place, right across the street from Zuccotti Park. In other words, I worked right in the middle of the Financial District while the place was–metaphorically–going up in flames. It was a weird time: the streets were weirdly quiet, and the restaurants and bars, usually full of boisterous traders, were dead.
Then came Bernie Madoff. My students couldn’t understand what he’d done, but several of them sure were interested. These documents are some of the fruits of my labor that sought to educate these kids about, well, rip-off artists.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“self esteem: A particularly positive way of experiencing the self that involves emotional, evaluation, and thinking components.
Self-esteem is the ability to experience oneself as being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life, and of being worthy of happiness. By extension, it is confidence in the ability to learn, to make appropriate choices and decisions, and respond effectively to change, It also involves the experience that success, achievement, fulfillment, and happiness are right and natural.
While many things can make a person feel good temporarily, if self-esteem is not grounded in reality, it is not self-esteem.
If a teacher treats students with respect, avoids ridicule, deals fairly, and projects a benevolent conviction about every student’s potential, then that teacher is supporting both self-esteem and the process of learning and mastering challenges. On the other hand, if a teacher tries to nurture self-esteem by empty praise that bears no relationship to the students’ actual accomplishments, then self-esteem is undermined and so is academic achievement.
Research indicates that there is a significant relationship between self-esteem and academic achievement, and that if a student’s self-esteem can be improved, academic achievement tends to follow. Many factors influence self-esteem, including parents, teachers, and other adults, and biology and life experiences.
Many students with a learning disability experience low self-esteem due to years of academic failure. This is why it is especially important to build positive self-esteem by creating opportunities for success, giving sincere praise, and cultivating talents and strengths in individuals with learning disabilities.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of taboo. This is half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences and three comprehension questions. At the risk of pontificating, I think students, by the time they are in high school, really ought to understand the concept of taboo.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“absurdity: The experience of absurdity is a common theme in the work of novelists such as Dostoevsky and Kafka, as well as in the many varieties of existentialism. The early essays of Albert Camus and his first novel The Outsider are classic modern expressions of this experience. The realization that existence is absurd arises from the sense of futility and meaninglessness provoked by the perception that there is a divorce between the human aspiration towards infinity and the finite nature of actual human experience, or between the intellectual desire for rationality and the irrationality of the physical world. The world is experienced as something unintelligible, and as the product of random combinations of events and circumstances. Although the experience of the absurd can induce s suicidal despair, the realization that there is no God and that human beings are not immortal can also produce an exhilarating sense of freedom and inspire a revolt against the human condition. There is a somewhat tenuous connection between the literary-philosophical notion of the absurd and the themes of the Theater of the Absurd.”
Excerpted from: Macey, David. The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. New York: Penguin, 2001.
If memory serves, I wrote the documents in this week’s Text, to wit a reading on Alan Turing and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet early on in my career for a computer-obsessed young fellow. Alan Turing certainly remains an fascinating figure. And if the 2014 motion picture The Imitation Game indicates anything, it is that there is still popular as well as historical interest in Turing.
It’s probably worth mentioning that the T in the acronym CAPTCHA stands for “Turing.” The full name is “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.”
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“trade war: A situation in which two or more nations restrict one another’s exports. Trade wars are ancient and modern. Until Adam Smith and the contemporary physiocrats. No thinkers believed in free trade. All economists believed that the best policy was to maximize one’s own exports; many added that it was good to restrict others’ imports. If pursued worldwide, such policies were obviously self-defeating, but that does not lessen their attraction to individual national policy makers. The Napoleonic Wars were largely a trade war between France and her allies and the UK, which caused serious damage to third parties, such as the USA.
The nineteenth century saw the heyday of the bilateral trade treaty and the invention of the most favored nation clause. Between them, these devices restricted the scope for trade wars. However, the revival of protection in the 1920s and 1930s revived trade wars. Since the 1960s, world trade politics has become multilateral rather than bilateral (GATT, World Trade Organization). This has not eliminated trade wars, but has made them multinational also. If the EU declares war on US hormone-fortified beef and export subsidies, then the USA may declare war on EU luxury goods and Caribbean bananas.”
Excerpted from: McLean, Iain, and Alistair McMillan, editors. Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
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