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Note: use the following fact pattern for the next four questions.   Lisa and Richard wish to acquire Acacia Corp., a C corporation. As part of their discussions with Tobias, the sole shareholder of Acacia, they examined the business’ tax accounting balance sheet. The relevant information is summarized as follows:   Fair value Adjusted basis Assets: Cash $30,000 $30,000 Equipment $70,000 $10,000 Building1 $260,000 $140,000 Land1 $410,000 $180,000 Total $770,000 $360,000 Liabilities: Payables $20,000 $20,000 Mortgage1 $150,000 $150,000 Total $170,000 $170,000   1 Mortgage is attached to the building and the land.   Tobias’ basis in the Acacia stock is $400,000. Lisa and Richard offer to pay Tobias $900,000 for his company.   [question 1 of 4] How much gain or loss must Acacia recognize if the transaction is structured as a stock sale to Lisa and Richard?

STUDENTS NEED MORE SLEEP               For the first time, the Center for Disease Control is urging education policymakers to start middle- and high-school classes later in the morning. The idea is to improve the odds of adolescents getting sufficient sleep so they can thrive physically and academically. The American Academy of Pediatrics has also urged schools to adjust start times so more kids would get the recommended 8.5 to 9.5 hours of nightly rest. Both organizations cited significant risks that come with lack of sleep, including higher rates of obesity and depression and motor-vehicle accidents among teens as well as an overall lower quality of life.             “Getting enough sleep is important for students’ health, safety, and academic performance,” Anne Wheaton, a CDC epidemiologist, said. “Early school start times, however, are preventing many adolescents from getting the sleep they need.”             In more than 40 states, at least 75 percent of public schools start earlier than 8:30 a.m., according to the CDC’s report. While later start times won’t replace other interventions—like parents making sure their children get enough rest—schools clearly play an important role in students’ daily schedules, the report concluded.             The data on the potential risks of chronically tired adolescents isn’t new information. Indeed, the research has been accumulating for years. Researchers at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement “finally put to rest the long-standing question of whether later start times correlate to increased academic performance for high-school students.” A data analysis of more than 9,000 students at eight high schools in Minnesota, Colorado, and Wyoming found that shifting the school day later in the morning resulted in a boost in attendance, test scores, and grades in math, English, science, and social studies. Schools also saw a decrease in tardiness, substance abuse, and symptoms of depression. Some even had a dramatic drop in teen car crashes.             The research shows that adolescents’ internal clocks operate differently than those of other age groups. It’s typically more difficult for adolescents to fall asleep earlier in the evening than it is for other age demographics. While teenagers are going to bed later, their school start times are often becoming earlier as they advance through middle and high school.             In a 1998 study of adolescent sleeping habits, Brown University researcher Mary Carskadon followed 10th-graders who were making the switch to a 7:20 a.m. start time, an hour earlier than their schedule as ninth-graders. Despite the new schedule, the students went to bed at about the same time as they did the year before: 10:40 p.m. on average. She found that students showed up for morning classes seriously sleep-deprived and that the 7:20 a.m. start time required them to be awake during hours that ran contrary to their internal clocks. Fewer than half of the 10th-graders averaged seven hours of sleep each night, below the recommended amount. Carskadon concluded the students bordered on “pathologically sleepy.”             If the science is so strong, what’s getting in the way of changing the policy? In some districts, start times are dictated by local transportation companies, with school boards and superintendents contending they lack the funds or authority to change things. Meanwhile, parents are reluctant to have teens start later, because they rely on having older children at home in the afternoons to take care of younger siblings or because they’re concerned that it will interfere with extracurricular opportunities.             But none of those worries override the reality that, as Carskadon put it, “everybody learns better when they’re awake.”              Terra Snider, director of the nonprofit Start School Later, says that getting school systems to change takes more than just presenting scientific evidence. “Most people don’t take adolescent sleep deprivation seriously. You talk about changing start times and people think: Teens will miss out on sports. Little kids will go to school in the dark and get run over by a car. What will happen to my child care?” Snider said. “We have to convince school systems this has to happen for the health of kids. It’s not a negotiable school budget item—it’s an absolute requirement.”      

GOING AGAINST THE CURVE                          Ask people what’s wrong in American higher education, and you’ll hear about grade inflation. Across 200 colleges and universities, over 40 percent of grades were in the A realm, a percentage that has grown over the past three decades. But the opposite problem worries me even more: grade deflation, when teachers use a forced grading curve: The top 10 percent of students receive A’s, the next 30 percent get B’s, and so on.             The forced curve arbitrarily limits the number of students who can excel. If your forced curve allows for only seven A’s, but 10 students have mastered the material, three of them will be unfairly punished. It disincentivizes studying, creating an atmosphere that pits students against one another. At best, it increases competition, and at worst, it sends students the message that the world is a zero-sum game: Your success means my failure.             Many people believe that the world is a zero-sum game, but as an organizational psychologist, I’ve found that they’re wrong. The time employees spend helping others contributes as much to their performance evaluations and promotion rates as how well they do their jobs. An analysis of 168 studies of more than 51,000 employees showed that leaders reward people who make the team and the organization more successful. My research studying the careers of “takers,” who aim to come out ahead, and “givers,” who enjoy helping others showed that in the short run, the takers were more successful. But in the long run, the givers consistently achieved better results. Takers believe in a zero-sum world, and they end up creating one where bosses, colleagues and clients don’t trust them. Givers build deeper and broader relationships — people are rooting for them instead of gunning for them.             Like most people in business schools, my students were intent on networking, but they focused their efforts outside their classes and regarded their in-class peers as competition. I decided to change that culture. I started experimenting with grading schemes that would encourage community and collaboration, while still maintaining standards and assessing students individually.             I began by writing unusually difficult exams. That was enough to motivate students to study hard. And I introduced a rule: No student will ever be hurt by another student’s grade. I promised them that I would never curve downward, only upward. If the highest mark was an 83, I would add 17 points to everyone’s score. Now one student’s excellence didn’t hurt another’s grade.             But while that removed a level of competition, it didn’t address the bigger goal, which was to make preparing for my exam a team effort. How could I get students to help one another?             I tried another approach. The most difficult section of my final exam was multiple choice. I told the students that they could pick the one question about which they were most unsure, and write down the name of a classmate who might know the answer. If the classmate got it right, they would both earn the points. Essentially, I was trying to build a collaborative culture with a reward system where one person’s success benefited someone else. It was a small offering but it made a big difference. More students started studying together in small groups, then the groups started pooling their knowledge.             The results: Their average scores were 2 percent higher than the previous year’s. We’ve long known that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it. In fact, evidence suggests that this is one of the reasons that firstborns tend to slightly outperform younger siblings on grades and IQ tests: Firstborns benefit from educating their younger siblings.             I had been trying to teach this lesson through my research on givers and takers, but it was so much more powerful for them to live it. Creating an atmosphere in which students want to help one another also allowed them to benefit from another of the defining features of personal and professional relationships: transactive memory, which is simply knowing who knows best. In a work team you don’t have to know how to perfect PowerPoint slides if your colleague is an expert.             When students take the time to find out who has expertise, they become smarter at learning. And that’s ultimately what we’re trying to teach, isn’t it? The mark of higher education isn’t the knowledge you accumulate in your head. It’s the skills you gain about how to learn.

VOLUN-TOURISM               Some do it to get into heaven, some to get into medical school. Some do it because everyone else is doing it. Whatever the motivation, the number of health care volunteers heading from developed to developing countries has soared recently. The reasons to applaud are self-evident: The old epidemics are compounded by the new ones, and the health-related fallout of wars and natural disasters never ends. If both skilled and unskilled labor can help, then surely those who provide such labor should do good, feel good and learn much.             Not necessarily, critics say. Some concur instead with a Somali blogger who in 2013 said that the developing world has become a place for young adults from developed countries to “pay” for being lucky enough to be born in a wealthy country. Indeed, as sociologist Judith Lasker watched groups of American and Canadian volunteers in matching T-shirts surging through the Port-au-Prince airport two years after Haiti’s disastrous 2010 earthquake, she was reminded of “the weekly Saturday turnover at American vacation resorts.” Dr. Lasker, a professor at Lehigh University, asks: “Do volunteers help or hurt?” she asks. “In what ways?”             It turns out these questions cannot be answered very precisely. Still, anyone thinking about a volunteer stint is likely to be interested in Dr. Lasker’s results. Tens of thousands of religious and secular institutions send hundreds of thousands of health volunteers from the United States into the world, generating close to an estimated $1 billion worth of unpaid labor. Volunteers include experienced medical professionals and individuals who can provide only manual labor; between these extremes of competence are the students in the health professions, among whom global volunteering has become immensely popular.             Dr. Lasker presents data from a few hundred programs, gleaned from several surveys, dozens of interviews, and some brief trips of her own. (She did not look at large organizations like Doctors Without Borders, which are organized differently and generally do not use unpaid volunteers.) Most of the programs she considers sponsor volunteer assignments that last just weeks rather than months, despite almost universal agreement among hosting communities that longer stays are much more helpful.             The hosts generally have fairly simple expectations: Volunteers should do as they are asked, know enough about their destination not to violate local norms (“Women in shorts!” grumbled one African social worker), and understand that dirt, dust and discomfort are part of the experience.             However, students may take advantage of the circumstances to attempt tasks well beyond their expertise. Experienced professionals may adhere to standards of practice that are irrelevant in poor countries. Unskilled volunteers who do not speak the language may monopolize local personnel with their interpreting needs while providing little value in return.             Problems may lie with the structure of a program rather than the personnel. One set of volunteers may not be told what the previous group had been doing and not be able to leave suggestions for the next group. Medications may run out. Surgery may be performed with insufficient provisions for postoperative care.             Nor are the benefits to the volunteers themselves clear. Do they learn the true meaning of charity? Do they become more educated global citizens? A few studies on the long-term effects of short-term good works are ongoing. In the meantime, “there is little evidence that short-term volunteer trips produce the kinds of transformational changes that are often promised,” Dr. Lasker finds.             She winds up cautiously endorsing short-term volunteer work, provided the volunteer chooses carefully among programs and behaves responsibly while at work. Still, she suggests that returning volunteers be “humble” when it comes to claiming they have made a difference, either for others or for themselves.

SHOULD YOU HAVE A PET?   America is experiencing a population boom — of pets. Driven by rising disposable income and urbanization and by evolving attitudes toward animals, the number of pets has grown more rapidly since the mid-1970s than the human population, to the point where there are now about as many pets as there are people. We don’t just buy pets as never before, we also treat them differently. More animals are living in our houses and are given over to a life of leisure. Animals are spoken of as family members — and not just dogs and cats, but rabbits, rats and snakes. We feed them scientifically formulated organic diets and take them to veterinary specialists. Veterinarians and psychologists describe these changing practices as evidence of a deepening “human-animal bond.” I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the very notion of “pet.” Scientists studying animal cognition and emotion are continually peeling back the mysteries of animal minds, revealing an incredible and often surprising richness in the thoughts and feelings of other creatures. For instance, the more I’ve learned about goldfish the guiltier I feel that I subjected several of these creatures to a life of endless tedium, swimming circles in a small bowl on my daughter’s dresser. When I came upon the conclusion by the University of Tennessee ethologist Gordon Burghardt that the best we can do for captive reptiles is a life of “controlled deprivation,” I wished I had never bought Lizzy, our gecko. I felt awful when I learned that Lizzy’s perpetual clawing at the glass wall of her tank was most likely a manifestation of captivity-induced stress. We had basically been torturing her, and it is not surprising that she died after only two years, despite our efforts to give proper care. The ethical problems with the small creatures we stuff into cages and tanks are relatively clear-cut. The more challenging moral questions arise in relation to our closest furry friends: dogs and cats. Unlike animals that must spend their entire life in a cage or that must struggle to adapt to a human environment, most cats and dogs have it pretty good. Many have the run of our homes, share in many of the activities of their human families, and may even have opportunities to form social relationships with others of their kind. They have lived in close contact with humans for thousands of years and are well adapted to living as our companions. They can form close bonds with us and, despite species barriers, can communicate their needs and preferences to us, and we to them. Yet the well-being of our cats and dogs is perhaps more compromised than most of us would like to admit. There are, of course, the obvious systemic problems like cruelty, neglect, abandonment, the millions wasting away in shelters waiting for a “forever home” or whose lives are snuffed out because they don’t behave the way a “good” pet should. But even the most well-meaning owner doesn’t always provide what an animal needs, and it is likely that our dogs and cats may be suffering in ways we don’t readily see or acknowledge. We can too easily forget that although we have an entire world outside our home, we are everything to our animals. How many dogs, for instance, are given lots of attention inside a home, but rarely get outside? How many spend their weekdays inside and alone, while their owners are at work, save for the one or two times a dog walker or neighbor drops by for a few minutes to feed them and take them out briefly? Is it going too far to suggest that these dogs are suffering? It may be hard to recognize the harmful aspects of pet keeping when all we hear is how beloved pets are, how happy they are to be in our company, and how beautiful and enduring the human-animal bond is. Yet if we really care about animals, we ought to look beyond the sentimental and carefully scrutinize our practices. Animals are not toys — they are living, breathing, feeling creatures. Perhaps we can try to step into their paws or claws and see what being a pet means from their perspective. We might not always like what we see.

Identify the gland pictured below. [A] Identify the hormone released from the structure in the black circle #2 that would be released in response to low blood glucose levels. [B]

Identify number 21

Which sentence demonstrates the elimination of wordiness? a. The sun rose. The birds sang. The flowers bloomed.b. As the sun rose, the birds sang and the flowers bloomed.c. The rising sun welcomed singing birds and blooming flowers.d. Rising, singing, blooming: nature awakened with the sun.

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The majority of arrests are made _____________.