Difficulty Level: Medium

#64
Abstract: Amateur runners carry risks for insurance companies because
they are prone to injury, despite their healthy habits.
Vocabulary: syndrome, demographic, sustained, restrictions, provisions,
cultivate, urban, recreational, potential, zeal, supplemental
October 24, 2010
Distance Runners Are a Paradox for Insurers
By ERIN BERESINI
Jennifer Frighetto is not a marathoner, but it is not for lack of trying. Had she
crossed the finish line at this years race in Chicago, it would have been her
first successful attempt at the 26.2-mile distance. But just as at the 2008 and
2009 Chicago Marathons, Frighetto was unable to finish because of injury.
Frighetto, a self-described former couch potato, said that since she first
decided to run a marathon in late 2006, she has seen doctors for a stress
fracture in her foot, plantar fasciitis and iliotibial band syndrome. The
activity that promised to make her healthier was actually increasing the
frequency of her doctor visits, a fact that makes amateur athletes like her a
problematic group of people for health insurance companies to insure. And
as more and more people become marathoners the 2011 Boston Marathon
sold out in eight hours distance runners are becoming a hard group to
ignore.
Insurance companies love runners because theyre healthy people, said
Nathan Nicholas, the president of Nicholas Hill Group, a Colorado-based
insurance brokerage firm that works with USA Triathlon. Many of them are
younger and have disposable incomes. Theyre a great demographic.
But, he added, because they train so hard, they have injuries and accidents
that can sometimes make them difficult to insure.
Distance running, in particular, has a documented history of injury: a 2007
study published in The British Journal of Sports Medicine found rates of injury
to the lower extremities were as high as 79 percent in long-distance runners.
Another study published in 2008 in The Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and
Science in Sports found that 28 percent of 694 male runners polled
sustained a lower-extremity injury while running in a marathon or in the
month before it.
Athletes are going to have more injuries than a couch potato, said Kevin
Luss, the founder of New York-based insurance services company the Luss
Group. But their height-weight ratio and cholesterol will be better than a
couch potatos. Their physiological age will be younger.

Nicholas said benefits like those made insurance companies view athletes
very favorably from a health standpoint, but that those benefits did not
prevent companies from denying coverage to injured athletes.
States have come up with regulations under the best intentions that had
unintended consequences, Nicholas said.
For example, insurance companies in California are no longer allowed to
exclude pre-existing injuries from treatment. So if a healthy 25-year-old
marathoner with a broken leg were shopping for individual health insurance,
instead of being accepted and receiving coverage for everything except the
leg, insurance companies could deny her coverage. In 2014, provisions of the
new health care law passed in March will go into effect, restricting
insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing
conditions.
In New York, where such provisions already exist through state law, Luss
said, it doesnt matter if youre an athlete or a person participating in
organized athletic events at almost any level.
He added, Youll pay the same amount as someone who is overweight and
unhealthy.
This fact upsets New York-based runners like Barbara Gubbins. A 50-year-old
Southampton resident, Gubbins has been running since high school and
placed second out of 895 women in the Hamptons Half Marathon in October.
She says the injuries associated with endurance running are minor compared
with the benefits to health and wants insurance companies to consider her
identity as a runner when calculating her premium, not just her age and
gender.
The fact that youre an active runner or a triathlete doesnt factor in at all,
which is very counterproductive, Gubbins said. But for the insurance
companies, its a bonus because theyre getting a big pool of healthy
applicants.
New York-based health insurance companies like Group Health Incorporated
work hard to cultivate this ideal pool of applicants without the injury risk
posed by endurance athletics by focusing sponsorship on events like
tennis tournaments rather than distance running.
What were promoting is a healthy lifestyle, said Karen Chaikin, Group
Health Incorporateds director of public affairs.
But with marathon participation in the United States at a record high of
about 467,000 finishers in 2009, according to Running USA, a nonprofit

organization that tracks running trends, insurance providers like Connecticutbased Aetna do not shy away from promoting their products to distance
runners.
We do believe running events can help people make healthier lifestyle
choices, said Floyd Green, the head of community relations and urban
marketing for Aetna. Although Aetna tends to focus more on the 5-kilometer
to 10-kilometer events, he said, we sponsor events like the marathon
because its an opportunity for people who are into that kind of race to
remain healthy.
When it comes to health insurance and marathoners, particularly in New
York, the risk of injury should be more of a consideration for the applicant
than for the insurance company, according to Luss.
A lot of athletes feel invincible and dont buy the insurance that they
should, he said.
For recreational athletes who do not earn income from competition, Luss
said a health insurance plan was all that was necessary to cover potential
injuries.
However, if that passion for running turns into a zeal for triathlon, Nicholas
recommends supplemental accident insurance to cover potential bicycle
crashes. To serve this athlete demographic, Nicholas founded Adventure
Advocates, a nonprofit organization that provides members accident
insurance.
For Frighetto, a 40-year-old working mother who has health insurance
through her employer, the marathon remains the ultimate athletic goal.
Even if Ive been injured and havent reached my goal of completing the
marathon, there have been tremendous benefits, she said. Training got me
off of the couch, and a couple of friends from work started running after
listening to me talk about training all of the time.
Green says Aetna is happy to work with runners like Frighetto.
We will work with athletes to provide the resources and services they need
to live healthy lives and also to run healthier, he said.
Questions:
1. Why is it risky for insurance companies to provide amateur runners with
coverage?
2. Why might people be surprised that it is difficult for some runners to get
insurance coverage?
3. What do you think is behind the increased popularity of marathons? What
does that say about peoples attitudes toward their health?

Difficulty Level: Medium/Hard

#65
Abstract: The upcoming Broadway revival of Tony Kushners Angels in
America reveals how times have changed since the production first came to
Broadway.
Vocabulary: controversy, canon, reverence, sprawling, audacious, marginal,
didactic, chronic, ambition
October 24, 2010
Angels in America Earns Place in Pantheon
By PATRICK HEALY
Angels in America, Tony Kushners fever dream about Ronald Reagan and
AIDS, love and abandonment, has emerged as the most influential American
play of the last two decades. Now about to open in its first New York revival
since an acclaimed Broadway run in 1993-94, the play has survived
controversy and its own unusual, unruly structure to become a mainstay of
the literary canon, produced on college campuses and taught in classrooms
with the same reverence as Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named
Desire.
Sprawling and audacious seven hours long, with scenes set in heaven
and with an angel crashing through the set to bless an AIDS-stricken man as
a prophet Angels has even endured commercially. An HBO mini-series
adaptation with Meryl Streep and Al Pacino swept the Emmys in 2004. And
while the New York revival by the Signature Theater Company is no surprise
for this Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, theaters in Bloomington, Ind.; Denver;
Salt Lake City; and elsewhere are mounting the play at the same time as the
New York run.
That a play involving a gay Mormon and his drug-addicted wife is being
produced without public fuss one mile north of the headquarters of the
Mormon Church in Utahs capital underscores how times have changed since
Angels reached Broadway. That same year the portrayal of gay lovers
dealing with AIDS in the Tom Hanks film Philadelphia was a cultural
milestone. Today the gay parents with an adopted daughter are central to
ABCs Emmy-winning comedy Modern Family.
A firm belief in cultural change is embedded within the play itself. As the
main character, Prior, says in Angels, The world only spins forward.
Written by Mr. Kushner in his 30s during the heat of the AIDS crisis, Angels
unfolds in two parts, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. The play
follows Prior, a gay New Yorker who discovers the purple AIDS lesion on his
arm one day in 1985, and the swelter of humanity and history around him: a
lover who leaves, Mormons in crisis, a closeted McCarthyite (the real-life Roy
Cohn) and his enemy the formidable ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, and a host of

angels who help end the story on a note of optimism.

Angels has inspired subsequent Pulitzer-winning playwrights like Doug
Wright (I Am My Own Wife), who calls it one of the most stringently moral
plays to come along in a long time, and Lynn Nottage, the author of
Ruined.
Tony emboldened me and others to try to tell epic stories and truths
through the marginal voices in history, said Ms. Nottage, who won the
Pulitzer in 2009 for Ruined, a play about prostitutes in war-torn Congo. He
taught writers how to handle political content without being didactic and to
handle difficult subjects without putting people to sleep.
But the play has also roused a new generation of writers, many of whom
grew up after President Reagan left office and in a time when HIV and AIDS
had become chronic, not fatal.
Bradley Cherna, a 22-year-old aspiring playwright, recalled finding a copy of
Angels in his Florida library in the eighth grade and said he was blown
away page after page by the ambition and sweep of the story, which
jumps through time and places and mixes naturalistic and supernatural
drama.
I guess everyone longs at some point for an angel to crash through their
roof to provide some sort of hope and help for me it came at a time of
conflict with my parents about my sexuality, said Mr. Cherna, who is gay
and now lives in Brooklyn. The play also showed me what theater can do
capture history, realize the imaginary and familiarize the strange.
By now there have been hundreds of professional productions worldwide. But
the reach of Angels into the heartland came with furious protest at first. Mr.
Cherna read the play in secret, for fear that his parents or others would see
the book. The depiction of gay sex and AIDS-related symptoms triggered
picketing or condemnation for productions in Michigan, Florida, Texas and
elsewhere. The Texas Shakespeare Festival lost $50,000 in county money in
1999 for staging Angels. Some Michigan lawmakers threatened to cut
support for Saginaw Valley State University over a student production in
2007.
Perhaps the biggest impact came in Charlotte, N.C., after a newspaper article
questioned if the community was ready to welcome Angels at Charlotte
Rep in 1996. Protests raged; one headline called it a holy war. Charlotte
Rep eventually closed in 2005 because of long-standing financial troubles,
and many artists there point to the Angels battle as a factor.
Such was the passion that the Actors Theater of Charlotte, in 2007,

commissioned the playwright Eric Coble to write a dark satire based on the
events. Mr. Cobles work, Southern Rapture, includes a stand-in character
for Mr. Kushner and renames his play Rapture in America. That the play
opened in Charlotte in 2008 without incident, Mr. Coble noted in an
interview, was maybe a sign of where the culture is now.
Another Angels-inspired play, When Last We Flew, played at the New York
International Fringe Festival in August; its author, 29-year-old Harrison David
Rivers, said he wanted to honor how Angels influenced him as 15-year-old
reader to consider the relationship between theater and personal growth.
Artists in other genres have taken up Angels as well. Peter Eotvos, an
avant-garde composer, adapted it into an opera. Last spring an
undergraduate at Brandeis University reimagined the play as a dance and
movement piece inspired by the characters and themes.
The New York revival is part of Signatures full season devoted to Mr.
Kushners work. Already sold out even before opening, the production offers
theatergoers a chance to assess Angels at a distance from the crisis that
inspired it, and a decade into the new millennium that held out hope for
more life, as Prior says, for those with AIDS and others struggling against
intolerance.
Like Death of a Salesman and Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the play
stakes a claim to a particular time and became the defining play of its
generation, said Joe Mantello, the Tony-winning director who played Louis,
the boyfriend who abandons Prior, on Broadway. Revivals like this one make
us ask what happened to our sense of responsibility to one another.
Long lines of people reliably gather at Signature before performances, hoping
for cancellations. Among those who did have tickets last week were students
in Columbia Universitys Text and Performance seminar who are studying the
play and seeing the revival and the HBO film. Another Columbia class in the
spring will be devoted solely to Mr. Kushner, whose subsequent body of work
includes Homebody/Kabul, set in Afghanistan, and the musical Caroline,
Or Change.
Several high school and college classes are making plans to see the play,
Signature executives said. On Wednesday night three women from the
Columbia course turned out, one toting her copy of Angels. Born after
Reagan was president and in a time when improved HIV medication was
already lengthening lives, the women said they were by turns curious about
the fuss over Mr. Kushners work and excited to experience what one called
a living legend of a play by a modern playwright.

I dont see myself in any of the characters in Angels, but reading the play
did make me think about what it means to be American, said Kate
Clairmont, a 21-year-old senior who grew up in New York City. We learned as
children about the country as this great melting pot, but this was the first
play that reflected that idea for me. No perfect people, no perfectly happy
nation. Just all of us dealing with difficult times, and hoping for the future.
Questions:
1. Why is Angels in America considered a play that defines its generation?
2. How does the current revival of Angels in America show how times have
changed since the original Broadway production opened?
3. Why does the author compare Angels in America to Death of a Salesman,
Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and A Streetcar Named Desire?

Difficulty Level: Easy

#66
Abstract:. MTV is reforming its programming to get back in touch with
todays youth.
Vocabulary: renaissance, irrelevant, resuscitated, rambunctious, diversify,
slate, fickle, catalyst, revamp, authenticity, insight, franchise
October 24, 2010
MTV Is Looking Beyond Jersey Shore to Build a Wider Audience
By BRIAN STELTER
The second-season finale of Jersey Shore last week was one of the highestrated hours all year on MTV. There was, perhaps, no better time to promote
another boozy, in-your-face unscripted show.
Instead, in every commercial break, MTV promoted Skins, a remake of a
scripted British series about the sexually charged trials of teenage life that is
scheduled to make its debut in January.
We were using one of our biggest moments of the year to loudly shout
about a very different kind of show, said Stephen K. Friedman, MTVs
general manager.
MTV is enjoying a renaissance. Written off as irrelevant just a few years
ago, the channel was resuscitated this year by the rambunctious cast of
Jersey Shore and the young parents on Teen Mom.
Lest it rely too heavily on those shows, MTV is rapidly diversifying its slate
of programs, Skins being one example.
Were in a constant state of reinvention, said Van Toffler, the president of
MTV Networks Music/Film/Logo Group.
Mr. Toffler is fond of saying that MTV executives have to embrace the
chaos, especially because MTV has a fickle young audience.
Advertisers and analysts have taken note of the revival. Benjamin Swinburne,
a media analyst for Morgan Stanley, said theres no question that Jersey
Shore has been the catalyst for ratings gains at MTV.
But theyve been able to build off that by taking some intelligent risks, he
added.
Investors expect advertising growth to accelerate in the next two quarters at
MTV and its parent, MTV Networks, which is owned by Viacom.
Cast members like Nicole Polizzi, better known as Snooki, from Jersey
Shore get some of the credit, but the rebound is also a result of rethinking

the channels programs for the millennial generation, as those born in the
1980s and 90s are sometimes called.
It is happening at a time of wholesale revamping within MTV. A year ago,
Tony DiSanto, president of programming, approached Mr. Toffler about
wanting to set up his own production company. Mr. Toffler asked him to stay
on while MTV strengthened its programming leadership. That is what the last
year has been about, as a half-dozen new executives have been hired away
from Warner Brothers, E! and elsewhere. Mr. DiSanto will leave at the end of
the year.
Under the new guard, flashy reality shows are out The Hills, once a
flagship franchise for MTV, wrapped up last summer and a new buzzword,
authenticity, is in. It is shorthand for a new filter for MTVs
programming decisions.
Until this year, MTV had been shedding viewers for the better part of a
decade, falling to an average of 481,000 at any given time in 2009 from an
average of 636,000 in 2005. MTV, which the MTV Networks chief executive,
Judy McGrath, has said should be the forever young network, had clung to
Generation X a little too long, some believed, at the expense of the
millennials.
Compounding the problem, there was a perception that MTV was flailing
online, where its audience was spending more and more time.
We were the company that didnt get MySpace, said Ms. McGrath, referring
to Viacoms failed bid for the social networking site. News Corporation
acquired MySpace, instead, and the site has since withered. I dont think
about that anymore, she said in an interview last week.
MTVs music Web sites now have more than 60 million unique monthly
visitors.
Mr. Friedman, the former head of MTVs college channel mtvU, was put in
charge of MTV in 2008, after Christina Norman departed to take over Oprah
Winfreys forthcoming cable channel. He said he sensed that reality was
starting to feel really unreal to our audience, citing the show Paris Hiltons
My New BFF. No one believed Ms. Hilton would actually find her new best
friend through a reality show.
At the same time, the actual reality shows on MTV unglamorous stalwarts
like Made and True Life were picking up new viewers.
They were inspirational, authentic stories, Mr. Toffler said. The channel saw
a way forward, and most of its new reality shows, like The Buried Life,

World of Jenks and If You Really Knew Me, share that DNA.
As a result of MTVs research about the millennial generation, Mr. Toffler and
Mr. Friedman said they had come away thinking that teenagers and
twentysomethings nowadays were less rebellious than those in the past.
They are not rebelling against their parents so much as they are watching TV
with their parents.
These insights have informed the development of new shows, including
Jersey Shore, which was first conceived as a reality competition show for
MTVs slightly older-skewing sibling, VH1. Mr. Toffler decided to redevelop it
for MTV, and what changed says a lot about the channel today.
As opposed to making it a competition, we accentuated the fact that they
come around and support each other yes, they fight with each other, but
they are a family, Mr. Toffler said. You even see their parents come in and
cook pasta for the house.
Mr. Friedman added: Four years ago, you never would have seen that on
MTV. Parents were absent!
Now parenting is the main topic of Teen Mom, which is second to Jersey
Shore in popularity. Teen Mom, which features four young mothers, is a
spinoff of 16 and Pregnant, which started in mid-2009 and stunned MTV
executives with high ratings out of the gate. Its second-season finale this
month attracted an average of 5.5 million viewers, while the finale of Jersey
Shore averaged 6.1 million.
This year, MTV is averaging 558,000 viewers at any given time, up 16
percent from last year.
MTV is restarting 16 and Pregnant with new cast members this month, and
it is bringing back Jersey Shore for a third season in January. Several
Shore spinoffs featuring individual cast members are also under
consideration.
But MTVs programmers know they cannot rely too heavily on these two hits.
You have to plan for all of these franchises obsolescence, Mr. Toffler said,
and we are.
The channel recently gave up on production of Bridge and Tunnel, a reality
show about young people who live on Staten Island. Asked by a reporter if it
was simply Jersey Shore on Staten Island, Mr. Toffler said, Thats probably
exactly why we didnt want to do it.
That comes back to diversification. Still trying to come up with a viable
successor to the music video countdown show TRL, MTV this month started

a pop culture newscast on weekday afternoons called The Seven. A

scripted show, The Hard Times of RJ Berger, started last summer, and four
more scripted shows will come online next year, including Skins and Teen
Wolf. Beavis and Butt-Head is coming back, too, thanks to a newly
reformed animation unit.
The times when our network has been one-note, Ms. McGrath said, have
never been as good as the times when we were diverse.
Questions:
1. What generation was MTV targeting previously? What generation is MTV
targeting now? What is the reason for this change?
2. Do you feel that the articles assessment of the young people of the
millennial generations relationships with their parents is accurate? Why or
why not?
3. If you had your own television network, would you allow these shows to air
on it? Why or why not?

Difficulty Level: Medium

#67
Abstract: Recent changes in Chinas policies on dog ownership reflect how
the nation has changed in other ways.
Vocabulary: blas, phenomenon, elite, ideological, dogma, render,
bourgeois, decree, pinnacle, pretension, immaculate, incredulous, arbitrary
October 24, 2010
Once Banned, Dogs Reflect Chinas Rise
By MICHAEL WINES
BEIJING Xiangzi Lucky, in English is aptly named. A trim Siberian
husky, his owner, a sports marketer named Qiu Hong, pampers him with two
daily walks, a brace of imported American toys and grooming tools, $300
worth of monthly food and treats and his own sofa in her high-rise
apartment.
When city life becomes too blas, Ms. Qiu loads Xiangzi in the car and takes
him out for a run on the trackless steppes of Inner Mongolia, seven hours
north.
Its a huge grassland. Very far, but very pretty, she said. He really likes to
scare the sheep and make them run all over the place.
Metaphorically speaking, Xiangzi is not just a dog, but a social phenomenon
and, perhaps, a marker of how quickly this nation is hurtling through its
transformation from impoverished peasant to first-world citizen.
Twenty years ago, there were hardly any dogs in Beijing, and the few that
were here stood a chance of landing on a dinner plate. It remains possible
even today to find dog-meat dishes here. But it is far easier to find dog-treat
stores, dog Web sites, dog social networks, dog swimming pools even, for
a time recently, a bring-your-dog cinema and a bring-your-dog bar on
Beijings downtown nightclub row.
All that and, Beijing officials say, 900,000 dogs as well, their numbers
growing 10 percent a year. And those are the registered ones. Countless
thousands of others are unlicensed.
How this came to be is, in some ways, the story of modern China as well.
Centuries ago, Chinas elite kept dogs as pets; the Pekingese is said to date
to the 700s, when Chinese emperors made it the palace dog and executed
anyone who stole one.
But in the Communist era, dogs were more likely to be guards, herders or
meals than companions. Both ideological dogma and necessity during
Chinas many lean years rendered pets a bourgeois luxury. Indeed, after
dogs first began to appear in Beijing households, the government decreed

in 1983 that they and seven other animals, including pigs and ducks, were
banned from the city.
Chinas economic renaissance changed all that, at least in the prosperous
cities. People used to be focused on improving their own lives, and they
werent really acquainted with raising dogs, Ms. Qiu said. But with the
improvement in the economy, peoples outlooks have changed. Theres a lot
of stress in peoples lives, and having a dog is a way to relieve it.
But there are other factors in dogs newfound popularity: Many owners also
say Chinas one-child policy has fanned enthusiasm for dog ownership as a
way to provide companionship to only children in young households and to
fill empty nests in homes whose children have grown up.
Some say dogs have become a status symbol for upwardly mobile Beijingers.
He Yan, 25, owner of two small mixed breeds named Guoguo and Tangtang,
said young Beijingers like her are dubbed gouyou, or dog friends. Dogs,
she said, have become a way to display ones tastes and, not least of all, a
way to meet people with similar interests.
And for a certain class with more money than sense, owning an especially
prized breed has become the Chinese equivalent of driving a Lamborghini to
the local supermarket. The pinnacle of pretension appears to be the
Tibetan mastiff, a huge and reportedly fierce breed from the Himalayan
plateau that, lore says, was organized by Genghis Khan into a 30,000-dog K-9
corps.
One woman from Xian, a city west of Beijing, was widely reported last year
to have paid four million renminbi roughly $600,000 for a single dog
that was escorted to its new home in a 30-Mercedes motorcade.
Mostly, though, it appears that Beijing dogs have, as in the West, become
objects of affection even devotion by their owners. On a given weekend,
hundreds of dog owners flock to Pet Park, a 29-acre canine spa east of
Beijing that includes a dog-and-owner restaurant, a dog show ring, a dog
agility course, a dog cemetery and chapel, a dog-owner motel, an
immaculate 600-bay kennel visitors must step in a disinfectant vat
before entering and two bone-shaped swimming pools.
Those who board their dogs are guaranteed an hours daily dog play, a
weekly bath and a Web site where, every Monday, they can see fresh
snapshots of their pet. The park, which opened last year, is the brainchild of
a Beijing dog lover who amassed a fortune in the refrigerator business,
according to Li Zixiao, the parks sales manager.
Everyone who brings his dog here considers his dog as a child, he said.

To be sure, not all Beijingers are so inclined. A Beijing Internet blog, City Dog
Forbidden, moderates a spirited debate between dog lovers and those who
believe, as one wrote, that dogs are seriously disturbing the normal lives of
other people.
The birth of humans needs to be planned, but anyone can raise a dog?
asked one incredulous post. The resources that you conserve from having
less people, you give to dogs? This is a very serious problem. Are you saying
that people are worth less than dogs?
Yet the doglike devotion of pet owners here seems to have softened even the
hardened city government heart. In 1994, Beijing officials relaxed their nodog policy to severely restrict dogs; in 2003, it was changed again to allow
anyone to own a dog, but to limit city dogs to no more than 35 centimeters
a bit less than 14 inches in height.
The rule is widely sidestepped by dog lovers who say it is arbitrary and
unfair. Daily, thousands of large-dog owners wait until midnight, when police
officers are sparse, to walk the inner-city alleys with their beloved golden
retrievers, Labradors and German shepherds. A July proposal to ease the
restrictions once more, filed with a national legislative advisory body, has
drawn nearly 30,000 Internet comments, compared with a few hundred for
most other proposals.
The city has even opened its own tiny dog park, with a rudimentary kennel,
an agility course and a kidney-shaped swimming pool that is as mobbed in
summertime as any urban American beach.
As for stir-fried Pekingese well, that dog, too, may have seen its day. A
formal proposal to ban the eating of dogs has been submitted to Chinas
semi-independent legislature, the National Peoples Congress. Nothing the
legislature does becomes law without a nod from higher-ups, but the
proposal has survived two rounds of public comment, which bodes well for its
future.
The proposals sponsor, a law professor named Chang Jiwen, says he is not
so much a dog lover as a China lover. Other developed countries have
animal protection laws, he said in a telephone interview. With China
developing so quickly, and more and more people keeping pets, more people
should know how to treat animals properly.
Questions:
1. Why is owning a dog in China suddenly a big deal? Why was it previously
restricted?
2. What does this change say about the development of China as a whole?

3. Why are some Chinese people treating dogs with extravagance?