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Main Idea: Exercise 2 - Identifying the main idea of a reading passage |
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Instructions: Read the passage and answer the question that follows by clicking on
the correct choice. Click on the KEY PHRASES button to see important phrases.
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This passage was adapted from While U.S. Backslides, France
Offers Lessons in Cutting Oil Use by Jad Mouawad. "The New York Times", October
5, 2004.
Although France's alleged diplomatic obstruction to the Iraq
war provoked a boycott of its products by some Americans, there is a quality that the U.S.
could import from France: its impressive tenacity in waging what the French call the war on
gaspi, short for gaspillage, or waste. It has done this in a way the U.S. has not been able
to: over a long term.
Spurred by the oil shocks of the 1970s, France embarked on a
vast state-led drive to flush out as much oil from its economy as possible. With the national
slogan at the time, "we don't have oil, but we have ideas," it accelerated the shift of electricity
production from oil consuming power plants to nuclear reactors, increased taxes on gasoline
to the equivalent of $3.75 a gallon, encouraged the sale of diesel-powered cars and gave tax
breaks to energy-hungry industries like aluminum, cement and paper manufacturers to shift
from oil to other fuels. And this worked. In contrast to the United States, where oil consumption
initially fell but then ended up rising by a total of 16 percent from 1973 to 2003, in France,
despite some increase in recent years, oil use is still 10 percent lower today than it was
three decades ago, according to the United States Energy Information Administration. Germany
too has matched France's record.
"Americans have completely abandoned their
efforts at energy conservation over the past decade and have been incredibly care-free
about oil consumption because they believed they would get access to cheap energy, through
force if necessary," said Pierre Terzian, an energy specialist who runs the Paris-based consulting
firm, PetroStrategies.
The contrast between French resolve and American abandon in
recent years is sharp. The United States, too, took the high road in the 1970s and early 80s,
when the combined impact of the 1973 oil embargo, the growing power of OPEC and the Iranian
revolution of 1979 created long gas lines and raised the prospect of an oil producer's stranglehold
over the American economy. Americans responded with a nationwide speed limit of 55 miles per
hour, a home insulating boom and blossoming energy-technology start-ups to help businesses
cut their energy bills. Vast improvements came in home appliances: refrigerators, for example,
now consume a third of the energy they needed 30 years ago. But slowly, the nation resumed
old habits and oil consumption has grown to very high levels.
Now that the price of oil has increased sharply to almost double
what it was two years ago, and with many energy analysts expecting substantially higher energy
prices in the next decade than during the 1990s, experts are saying that a rethinking of America's
wasteful ways is an urgent undertaking. It might be time to turn to the country some Americans
love to hate for lessons on how to curb its reliance on imported oil: France.
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