Zach Olson

There are many different arguments stated in this article. One of them is that the Industrial Revolution is the main reason for the rise in IQ scores. They say it is because of easy access to information. It is a lot easier to get a hold of information in today's world because all you have to do is get on a computer and type in what you want and thousands of suggestions will pop up and you are done. Although this may be true, there are a few reasons why technology may not be the answer to the question. One reason someone may argue that technology is not the answer because you do not know if everything you read on the internet is true. Some websites are reliable, but not all of them are and if you do not know which ones are reliable and which ones are not, you might be reading wrong information. In past generations, people went to the library, where the information is all correct, to learn and write down what they need. I think that technology is still the biggest reason for the rise in IQ scores. I think this because a lot of the information on the internet is correct and if some of it is wrong, it gets changed pretty fast by someone else to the correct information, so it is not that big of a deal.
Another argument is that family size helped the scores rise. "The intermediate causes are things like smaller family size. If you have a better ratio of adults to children in the home, than an adult vocabulary predominates rather than a child vocabulary."(Gambino. par.7). They say this is a factor because if you have a smaller family, the kids will pick up their parents vocabulary and will learn to speak like them, which will be the correct way and will help them in school. The only problem with this is that not every adult talks with correct vocabulary and that is where you can get a counter argument. Most likely adults will talk with correct vocabulary, but if they do not, it will not help their kids develop a strong language. I agree that smaller families will help, only if the parents talk correctly and watch what they say because if an adult cusses a lot, their kids will listen and start to cuss, which is obviously a problem. If a family is bigger, the kids will pick up what they are saying from each other and that can become a problem also. Again, I agree with a smaller family size, but the adults also have to watch what they say if they care how their children will be brought up and how they talk to you and other kids because they feed off of each other when they are around each other, like at school.

                                                                     Works Cited

Gambino, Megan. "Smithsonian" December 3, 2012. November 24, 2014.

The argument in this text is if new generations are getting smarter and smarter than the previous generation. While James Flynn was in New Zealand, he made a discovery saying that new generations are smarter than the older ones, so teenagers in today's world are having more and more potential to do bigger things in the world and make bigger advances because they have more ability to do things. In today's world, we have advanced technology. That alone is going to help younger people in today's world get a hold of a lot more information and be able to learn a lot faster in a certain something that they are interested in.

"The overall gain is about 3 points every 10 years, which would be 9 points in a generation. That is highly significant." (Gambino. par.5). Certain tests on an IQ test called subtests, test different things in a person's mind. One is called similarities and one is called arithmetic. The similarity test scores have increased drastically over the years, however the scores on the arithmetic test have not increased so much over the the past 30 years. They have increased, but it has been very little. The IQ's have not just been increasing in America. The scores have been increasing all over the world. Scandinavia's scores are increasing massively over the years, just like the United States. Countries like South Korea, Germany, and Britain are consistently staying the same from the past to the previous generation. 

"The ultimate cause is the Industrial Revolution. It affects our society in innumerable ways." (Gambino. par.8). As I have already stated, technology is a huge part in the scores changing. More factors are family size and schooling. Family size is important because the smaller the family the better. The reason is because if you have less children in your family, the kids will pick up their parents vocabulary rather than talking how their brothers and sisters are talking and picking their own little language. The more the kids hear their parents talk, the more they will talk like them. Schooling is pretty obvious on why it is important. It helps you think and figure things out better so that when you get to the IQ test, you will be thinking like they do and will not have as hard of a time while taking the test. 

Citation:

Gambino,Megan. "Smithsonian." December 3, 2012. November 16, 2014. 

Zach Olson

This essay is a perfect example of how the media is ruining people's lives. Yes, the media can be a good thing, but it also puts a hurting on society and can cause problems. Being a guy I can't say I have experienced the feeling of depression through looking at people on a magazine, but I can see why girls have problems when they see models because I know that girls want to look the best that they can and the way models look is not healthy. When girls try to look like the models, it causes problems. This essay does a good job of stating an argument and it explains how this problem is hard to solve and gives reasons on how society can solve it, but even that may cause problems.

Are New Generations Smarter

Zach Olson

In this article, James Flynn talks about the increasing IQ's in the newest generation. Each generation's IQ score is gradually getting higher and higher. "The average IQ of schoolchildren in 1900 was around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago, the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded" (Gambino. par.4). The IQ scores are drastically increasing with each generation by 9 points. I personally think that this is because of technology. Technology lets people exchange information very, very easily, which lets young people get access to a lot of information that teenagers in the past did not have the ability to do. The argument is the question that are new generations going to keep getting smarter and are we smarter than our ancestors. James Flynn says that our minds are just more modern. We study different things than people did 100 years ago, so our brains think a little differently. He compares our brains between now and then to a body builder's muscles and a swimmer's muscles. He says that they both use muscles, but in different ways just like people now and then use their brains, just in different ways. Vocabulary can depend on the number of children you have or how other teenagers are talking. Technology can change someone's vocabulary because when people text, they tend to shorten words so that they do not have to type as much, but also get the point across to the reader. This can be a problem because that is the way people start to talk permanently and that is not how it should be. Teenagers start to use slang and young people need to know when it is okay to use slang and when it is not okay to use it because it can make a difference. James says that the parent to kid ratio in a family can make a difference on vocabulary. He says that kids in smaller families have a better vocabulary, because in larger families, the kids feed off of each other and talk like each other, but in smaller families, the kids tend to listen to their parents more and feed off of what they say and how they talk, which is how young adults and kids should talk.