Every week students have the opportunity to take a complete, timed, proctored mock PSAT. In addition to the test, there is a 1.5 hour test review session where an instructor with over eight years of experience teaching SAT and PSAT fundamentals and test-taking strategies reviews and discusses the questions students found challenging. The review also covers the design of the PSAT and question types frequently asked.
Sample of passage and questions are based on passage.
This passage is from Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class. ©2002 by Richard Florida.
For all the attention given to workplace motivation over the years, surprisingly little hard numerical research or analysis has been done on Line what motivates today's creative workers. In the 5 summer of 2001, I had a chance to address this issue by analyzing data from what I believe are among the largest and most comprehensive extant surveys on the subject. As a columnist for Information Week, a print/on-line magazine covering 10 the information-technology industry, I have access to the publication's research data. Every year Information Week conducts a Salary Survey that asks readers detailed questions not only about their pay and benefits, but about their job 15 satisfaction and a host of work-related factors. Some 20,000 information-technology (IT) workers completed the survey in both 2000 and 2001. Of these, approximately 11,000 identified themselves as IT staff and 9,000 as management. The sample is not 20 scientifically random, since people self-select by choosing to respond. But it is extremely large and it reaches far beyond the computer and software industries per se, including IT workers in virtually every sector of the economy.
25 IT workers provide an interesting vantage point from which to examine these issues. On the one hand, they have been said to be a fairly conventional sector of the Creative Class. They are certainly a good deal more mainstream than artists, musicians or 30 advertising copywriters. On the other, IT workers are said to care a great deal about money. They are a high-paid segment of the workforce to begin with, and during the late 1990s, companies went to great lengths to provide bonuses, stock options,' six-figure 35 salaries and other financial incentives to lure them. My colleague Kevin Stolarick and I combed through the raw data from the Information Week surveys and repeatedly resifted it to seek a better understanding of what IT workers value.
40One key question in the survey asked-"What matters most to you about your job?" It then listed thirty-eight factors from which respondents could check one or more. Just from glancing at the initial results, one bottom line is clear- money is an 45 important but insufficient motivator (see "Job factors" graph). Base pay ranked fourth as a factor, selected by 38.5 percent of respondents. Nearly twice as many selected "challenge of job/responsibility," making it the top-ranked factor. Interestingly, the so ability to share in the financial upside through stock options did not even make the top twenty- fewer than 10 percent of all people selected it. When we sorted the thirty-eight individual job factors in the Information Week survey into eleven 55 broad clusters, challenge remained by far the top-ranked factor, followed by flexibility and job stability (see "Key categories" graph). Compensation was again fourth, followed by peer respect, technology and location; and further down the list 60 were company orientation, organizational culture, career orientation and benefits. The things that matter to IT workers tend to stay fairly constant as economic conditions change. To determine this, I compared the Information Week
65 surveys for two consecutive years. The surveys are taken early in the year and the one for 2000 was done before the high-tech downturn, when the stock-option dream was supposedly hottest. The 2001 survey came after the NASDAQ crash had 70 supposedly wiped out the dream. The same three general attributes—a challenging job, a flexible workplace and job stability—topped the list in both years. Only a small, percentage of people in each survey, the roughly 10 percent cited above, ranked 75 stock options as being very important. Both before and after the crash, pay was generally important, but not nearly so much as intrinsic rewards. What people value and desire in their work is not contingent on the stock market or the rise and fall of the tech sector.
In the first paragraph, the author refers to the number of people who completed the survey primarily to
A) concede that some types of IT workers may not be represented in the data.
B) explain why he and his research partner sorted the data into new categories.
C) underscore the broad range of values among the survey respondents.
D) establish the scope of the data captured in the survey.
The author indicates that the evidence about IT workers' attitudes that he presents is
A) corroborated by employers' descriptions of their IT workers' attitudes.
B) representative of the attitudes of IT workers in a variety of fields.
C) at odds with the findings of earlier research on IT workers' attitudes.
D) consistent with the popular view of IT workers' attitudes.