Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Modul Pretest Main Idea 2 ILC 2023
Modul Pretest Main Idea 2 ILC 2023
Text A
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 October 24, 2005) was an American
activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus
boycott. The United States Congress has honored her as " the first lady of civil rights " and "
the mother of the freedom movement “.
On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks rejected bus driver James F.
Blake's order to vacate a row of four seats in the " colored " section in favor of a White
passenger, once the " white " section was filled. Parks was not the first person to resist bus
segregation, but the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
believed that she was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest
for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws, and she helped inspire the
Black community to boycott the Montgomery buses for over a year. The case became bogged
down in the state courts, but the federal Montgomery bus lawsuit Browder v. Gayle resulted
in a November 1956 decision that bus segregation is unconstitutional under the Equal
Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Parks's act of defiance and the Montgomery bus boycott became important symbols of
the movement. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation, and
organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Edgar Nixon and Martin
Luther King Jr. At the time, Parks was employed as a seamstress at a local department store
and was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. She had recently attended the
Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee center for training activists for workers ' rights and
racial equality. Although widely honored in later years, she also suffered for her act; she was
fired from her job, and received death threats for years afterwards. Shortly after the boycott,
she moved to Detroit, where she briefly found similar work. From 1965 to 1988, she served
as secretary and receptionist to John Conyers, an African - American US Representative. She
was also active in the Black Power movement and the support of political prisoners in the
US.
After retirement, Parks wrote her autobiography and continued to insist that there was
more work to be done in the struggle for justice. Parks received national recognition,
including the NAACP's 1979 Spingarn Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the
Congressional Gold Medal, and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol's National
Statuary Hall . Upon her death in 2005, she was the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol
Rotunda. California and Missouri commemorate Rosa Parks Day on her birthday, February
4 , while Ohio , Oregon , and Texas commemorate the anniversary of her arrest , December 1.
In the 1930s, Chester F. Carlson was working in the patents department of a large
electronics firm in New York City. One of the major problems in his work was the length of
time and expense involved in getting patent copied, patents were lengthy legal document, and
the only ways to get them copied were to take them to a typist or to take them to a
photographer. Either way of copying patents took a lot of time and cost a lot of money. He
came up with the idea for a machine that would copy documents quickly and efficiently.
He researched the idea in the library and then worked over a three-year period on
developing a machine that used a light, an electro statically charged plate, and powder to
duplicate images on paper. The result of this work was a machine that produced the first
xerographic copy on October 22, 1938. He named the process "Xerox, which means "dry
writing" Carlson felt that he had a good idea, one that would be extremely helpful in the
business world. He tried to sell his idea to a number of large corporations, but they were not
terribly interested in his machine. A few years later he sold the process to a small family-
owned company. This small company grew into the giant Xerox Corporation, and both
Carlson and Xerox became rather wealthy in the process.
Climate change is not just bad for the planet and for our bodies. According to a new
report, climate change had for our health too. The report is not the first to tackle climate
change from a health perspective. Earlier this year a Consortium on Climate and Health
issued a report detailing the many ways is its narrow to focus on mental health.
The report breaks up the mental health impacts into two broad buckets: acute impacts
such as those climate change can negatively impact human health and well-being. What
makes this new report unique discrete climate related shocks (like fires, floods, and storms)
and chronic impacts, or the more gradual ways that climate change can impact our well-
being.
It is important that we recognize that up to forty percent of people who live through a
disaster experience some kind of psychopathology. This includes anxiety, depression, mood
disorders, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
According to the report, one in six people who lived in areas affected by Hurricane
Katrina met the criteria for PTSD. Similarly, suicide and suicidal ideation more than doubled
in those regions, and 49 percent of people developed an anxiety or mood disorder like
depression.
The issue is not just disaster itself- most of us can cope with a single source of stress.
But in disaster situations, stressors multiply rapidly. You may have lost not just your home,
but your job, and perhaps even the broader community that you ordinarily relied on for
support. And under climate change scenarios, it could mean that you are extirpated from your
home permanently.
Chronic effects are harder to envision, but no less dangerous. As the climate continues
to change, for example, many locations will be warmer for longer portions of the year anyone
who has experienced this usually warm winter knows this firsthand. But if the weather gets to
sticky, we tend to retreat indoors, making it harder (even in this digital age) to build and
maintain much needed social networks. Similarly, as temperatures soar, studies suggest our
tempers do as well, which can further threaten community cohesiveness.