Do you currently use biometric security? Investigate the problems associated with biometric approaches to Internet security. What are some of the potential drawbacks as well as advantages? Formulate a thesis sentence stating an argument about the future of biometric computer security and then write an essay supporting your position.
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Anxiety: Challenge by Another Name
James Lincoln Collier
James Lincoln Collier is a freelance writer with more than six hundred articles to his credit. He was born in New York in
1928 and graduated from Hamilton College in 1950. An accomplished jazz musician, Collier has often focused his
nonfiction writing on American music. His best-known book is The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History (1978). With
his brother Christopher, he has written a number of history books, including A Century of Immigration: 1820–1924
(2000),The Civil War (2000), The Changing Face of American Society: 1945–2000 (2001), and a series of biographies for
young readers covering major figures in American history. Collier has also written a number of children’s books, one of
which, My Brother Sam Is Dead (1974), received a Newbery Honor award and was named a Notable Children’s Book.
As you read the following essay, which first appeared in Reader’s Digest in 1986, pay attention to where Collier places
his thesis. Note also how his thesis statement identifies the topic (anxiety) and makes an assertion about it (that it can have
a positive effect on our lives).
Reflecting on What You Know
Many people associate anxiety with stress and think of it as a negative thing. Are there good kinds of anxiety, too? Provide
an example of anxiety that has been beneficial to you or to someone you know.
Between my sophomore and junior years at college, a chance came up for me to spend the summer vacation working on a ranch in Argentina. My roommate’s father was in the cattle business, and he wanted Ted to see something of it. Ted said he would go if he could take a friend, and he chose me.
The idea of spending two months on the fabled Argentine Pampas10 was exciting. Then I began having second thoughts. I had never been very far from New England, and I had been homesick my first few weeks at college. What would it be like in a strange country? What about the language? And besides, I had promised to teach my younger brother to sail
that summer. The more I thought about it, the more the prospect daunted11 me. I began
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waking up nights in a sweat.
In the end I turned down the proposition. As soon as Ted asked somebody else to go, I began kicking myself. A couple of weeks later I went home to my old summer job, unpacking cartons at the local supermarket, feeling very low. I had turned down something I wanted to do because I was scared, and had ended up feeling depressed. I stayed that way for a long time. And it didn’t help when I went back to college in the fall to discover that Ted and his friend had had a terrific time.
In the long run that unhappy summer taught me a valuable lesson out of which I developed a rule for myself: do what makes you anxious; don’t do what makes you depressed.
I am not, of course, talking about severe states of anxiety or depression, which require medical attention. What I mean is that kind of anxiety we call stage fright, butterflies in the stomach, a case of nerves — the feelings we have at a job interview, when we’re giving a big party, when we have to make an important presentation at the office. And the kind of depression I am referring to is that downhearted feeling of the blues, when we don’t seem to be interested in anything, when we can’t get going and seem to have no energy.
I was confronted by this sort of situation toward the end of my senior year. As graduation approached, I began to think about taking a crack at making my living as a writer. But one of my professors was urging me to apply to graduate school and aim at a teaching career.
I wavered. The idea of trying to live by writing was scary — a lot more scary than spending a summer on the Pampas, I thought. Back and forth I went, making my decision, unmaking it. Suddenly, I realized that every time I gave up the idea of writing, that sinking feeling went through me; it gave me the blues.