Falcon, Inc., has sales of $91,500, costs of $47,200, deprec…
Questions
Fаlcоn, Inc., hаs sаles оf $91,500, cоsts of $47,200, depreciation expense of $5,300, and a tax rate of 21 percent. What is the company’s operating cash flow?
Whо аre the peоple the аuthоr mostly cites to support ideаs and statistics?
DIRECTIONS: Reаd the аrticle аnd answer the questiоns that fоllоw. Take note of the headings in the article. Use them as the major points in your summary. Extreme Weather A The weekend forecast for Nashville, Tennessee, called for two to four inches of rain. But by the afternoon of Saturday, May 1, 2010, parts of the city had seen more than six inches, and the rain was still coming down in sheets1. B Mayor Karl Dean was in the city’s Emergency Communications Center monitoring the first reports of flash flooding when something on a TV screen caught his eye. It was a live shot of cars and trucks on a flooded highway. Floating past them in the slow lane was a 40-foot-long portable building from the Lighthouse Christian School. “We’ve got a building running into cars,” the TV anchorman was saying. Dean had been in the “war room”2 for hours. But when he saw the building floating down the highway, he says, “it became very clear to me what an extreme situation we had on our hands.” Eleven people died in the city that weekend. Weather Gone Wild C There’s been a change in the weather. Extreme events like the Nashville flood—described by officials as a once-in-a-millennium occurrence—are happening more frequently than they used to. A month before Nashville, torrential downpours dumped 11 inches of rain on Rio de Janeiro in 24 hours, triggering mud slides that buried hundreds. About three months after Nashville, record rains in Pakistan caused flooding that affected more than 20 million people. In late 2011, floods in Thailand submerged hundreds of factories near Bangkok, creating a worldwide shortage of computer hard drives. D And it’s not just heavy rains that are making headlines. During the past decade we’ve also seen severe droughts in places like Texas, Australia, and Russia, as well as in East Africa, where tens of thousands have taken refuge in camps. Deadly heat waves have hit Europe, and record numbers of tornadoes have ripped across the United States. Losses from such events helped push the cost of weather disasters in 2011 to an estimated $150 billion worldwide, a roughly 25 percent jump from the previous year. Who’s To Blame? E What’s going on? Are these extreme events signals of a dangerous, human-made shift in Earth’s climate? Or are we just going through a natural stretch of bad luck? F The short answer is: probably both. The primary forces driving recent disasters have been natural climate cycles, especially El Niño and La Niña. Scientists have learned a lot during the past few decades about how these cycles in the equatorial Pacific affects weather worldwide. During an El Niño, a giant pool of warm water that normally sits in the central Pacific surges east all the way to South America; during a La Niña it shrinks and retreats into the western Pacific. Heat and water vapor coming off the warm pool generate thunderstorms so powerful and towering that their influence extends out of the tropics to the jet streams that blow across the middle latitudes. An El Niño tends to push drenching storms over the southern U.S. and Peru while visiting drought and fire on Australia. In a La Niña the rains flood Australia and fall in the American Southwest and Texas. G But natural cycles can’t by themselves explain the recent streak of record-breaking disasters. Something else is happening too: The Earth is steadily getting warmer, with significantly more moisture in the atmosphere. Decades of observations from the summit of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, as well as from thousands of other weather stations, satellites, ships, buoys, deep-ocean probes, and balloons, show that a long-term buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is trapping heat and warming up the land, oceans, and atmosphere. Although some places, notably the Arctic, are warming faster than others, the average surface temperature worldwide has risen nearly one degree Fahrenheit in the past four decades. In 2010 it reached 58.12°F, tying the record set in 2005. H As the oceans warm, they’re giving off more water vapor. “Everybody knows that if you turn up the fire on your stove, you evaporate the water in a pot more rapidly,” says Jay Gulledge, senior scientist at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES), a think tank3 in Arlington, Virginia. During the past 25 years satellites have measured a 4 percent average rise in water vapor in the air. The more water vapor, the greater the potential for intense rainfalls. The amount of rain falling in intense downpours—the heaviest one percent of rain events—has increased by nearly 20 percent during the past century in the U.S. “You’re getting more rain from a given storm now than you would have 30 or 40 years ago,” says Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Global warming, he says, has changed the odds for extreme weather. Facing the Future I The rising cost and frequency of natural disasters can be blamed only partly on the weather. Disasters are also on the rise because more people are located in harm’s way. Coastal development in states like Florida, North Carolina, and Maryland has exposed expensive beach houses and hotels to hurricanes and other storms. At the same time, the rapid growth of megacities in developing countries in Asia and Africa has made millions more vulnerable to heat waves and floods. Instead of defending themselves against climate change, many communities appear to be leading with their chin. “Something has gone wrong,” says climatologist Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University. “To put it bluntly, we’re doing a lousy job keeping up with disasters.” J Meanwhile some governments have taken small but important steps to better prepare for extreme weather. An exceptional heat wave in Europe in 2003 took at least 35,000 lives; a later analysis found that climate change had doubled the odds of such a disaster. Afterward French cities set up air-conditioned shelters and identified older people who would need transportation to the shelters. When another heat wave hit France in 2006, the death rate was two-thirds lower. K Similarly, after a tropical storm killed as many as 500,000 people in Bangladesh in 1970, the government there developed an early warning system and built basic concrete shelters for evacuated families. When cyclones hit today, the death count stays in the thousands. L Weather disasters are like heart attacks, says Jay Gulledge. “When your doctor advises you about how to avoid a heart attack, he doesn’t say, ‘Well, you need to exercise, but it’s OK to keep smoking,’” he says. The smart approach to extreme weather is to attack all the risk factors, by designing crops that can survive drought, buildings that can resist floods and high winds, policies that discourage people from building in dangerous places—and of course, by cutting greenhouse gas emissions. M “We know that warming of the Earth’s surface is putting more moisture in the atmosphere. We’ve measured it. The satellites see it,” Gulledge says. So the chances for extreme weather are going nowhere but up. “We need to face that reality, Oppenheimer says, and do the things we know can save lives and money. “We don’t have to just stand there and take it.” 1 If rain or snow is coming down in sheets, it is doing so very heavily. 2 A war room is a room from which war is directed or where business or political strategy is planned. 3 A think tank is a group of experts who try to solve problems for an organization or government. Click YES and answer the questions that follow.