It’s a general practice for small factories to ___ more workers during times of prosperity, and lay off some when recession hits.

A.take in B.take over C.take on D.take up

Many painters and writers live in the artists’ havens of Taos and Santa Fe cities that are rich in New Mexico’s ethnic heritage.

Once our attention has been ensnared, we still need to be sufficiently intrigued to read the story.

Luis Figueroa lives down the street from UC Merced, the newest campus in the University of California system. So it’s not surprising that the 21 years old studies from the comfort of his own home. But he’s not enrolled at Merced: from his living-room computer, Figueroa is earning his bachelor’s degree in business administration at Columbia College in Missouri, some 2,000 miles away. At $630 per course—about $1,800 per semester—his online degree will cost far less than even in-state tuition at UC. Not only that, Figueroa is able to continue working full time in a management-training job with AT&T in Merced, a job he feels lucky to have in the current economic climate. “Once I realized I had time constraints, I knew the traditional classroom wouldn’t work,” he says. “Courses online are open 24 hours a day, and I’m able to go there any time I want.”That convenience is one of the main reasons nearly 4 million American students took at least one online course in the 2007-2008 school year, according to a study by the Sloan Foundation. The same study found that online enrollment is growing at a rate more than 10 times that of the higher-education population at large—12.9 percent vs.1.2 percent for traditional in seat students. Nowhere is the growth faster than among younger students like Figueroa who are opting for online learning, even when the traditional classroom is—in his case—right outside the front door. “This is a generation that lives online,” says Vicky Phillips, founder and CEO of Geteducated.com, a service that ranks online learning institutions. “Everything is instant, accelerated, and accessible, and they expect their education to be that way too. For them there is no clear line between the virtual world and the actual world.”Once targeted at older, working adults, distance learning has moved into the education mainstream at stunning speed over the past couple of years, as technology allows ever-richer, more -interactive learning experience online—and as college costs continue to rise and classrooms are packed to capacity. For traditional brick-and-mortar institutions, that has meant a scramble to enter a lucrative market that used to be the exclusive territory of for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University. Established brand-name educators—including Stanford, Cornell, Penn State, and MIT, which has placed its entire curriculum online through its Open Courseware program—now offer extensive online learning options and are competing with the for-profits for students. “The stigma is gone,” says Phillips. “Online learning has reached mass cultural acceptance. It’s no longer the ugly stepsister of the higher-education world.”Online offerings these days can sometimes even surpass the classroom experience. Aaron Walsh, a professor at Boston College and a former videogame designer, has pioneered Immersive Education, a method of teaching through virtual worlds. Meeting in Second Life instead of a physical classroom, says Walsh, allows for some feats that gravity renders impossible, like having art-history students fly to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or biology majors to take a Magic School bus-like trip through the human body. Using videos, podcasts, live chats, Webcams, and wikis, educators increasingly see online learning as a way to engage the videogame generation with pedagogy that feels more like entertainment than drudgery. Students in the new homeland-security master’s degree program at the University of Connecticut this fall, for example, will have coursework that resembles Grand Theft Auto: dwelling in a cyber-city called San Luis Rey plagued with suicide bombers, biochemical attacks, and other disasters. At Arizona State, students in an Introduction to Parenting class raise a “virtual child”. They have to post the progress of their online charge through all the phases of childhood. “The classes are so much more interactive, and I can log on when I’m most ready to learn,” says Jaquelyn Holleran, a junior majoring in family and human development at ASU. “I like that s

By the middle of the twentieth century, painters and sculptors in the United States had begun to exert ______ over art.

In Britain people ______ more than four million tons of potatoes every year.