Practice test 1

Apparently, both the listening and the reading discuss the causes of crime, but an opposition to the reading’s argument is implied in the listening at three points as follows.

The first point the professor casts doubt on the reading is poverty issue. The passage shows that because poverty creates more and more hunger and low living standard, people have to commit crimes like robbery, shoplifting or burglary, etc to live. However, poverty, according to him, is not the cause of crime. In many countries like the US, for example, the better the economy is, the more crimes are committed, and vice versa in some poor countries.

The professor’s next argument focuses on race. It is stated in the reading that blacks commit more crimes than the whites do. On the contrary, the lecturer supposes that their race or color is not the problem here. Instead, that broken families are more prevalent in the black than in the white is the reason for that fact.

Finally, with regard to the size of population and its composition, the lecturer refutes the notion presented in the passage that how big the population in one place is or how high the proportion of men and teens is has no influence on crimes there. Instead, he believes broken families itself is the cause of higher crime rate. A lot of evidences show that teenagers in broken families tend to commit crimes because they begin to feel emotionally deprived when they are abandoned by their parents. The feeling of not being loved makes them violent to the society.

To sum up, the points made in the lecture contradict the reading. The lecturer concludes that poverty, race, the size of population and its composition has no effect on crime rate in society.