The classic Key West-style house just off Fleming looked much like the rest of the residences on the block - two-story wooden frame walls and peaked roofs with shallow porches nearly butting up against the sidewalk. Chloe's rusting blue Vespa was tucked away beside the house, in the narrow space separating it from the neighbors. To anyone walking by outside, everything looked quiet and peaceful. Inside, Chloe was pissed. Everything had been going great and then those stupid fuckers had decided to show up a week early, forcing her to scramble to pack a week's work into a single day. She wore a black bandana wrapped around her head, covering her buzz cut pink hair. Numerous smudges of dirt on her cheeks and the tip of her nose testified to the heavy-duty cleaning she'd been doing for the past five hours. She wore loose fitting shorts and a tight-fitting tank top that had once been white. In her bare feet she pushed a mop across the hardwood floors, grumbling to herself. She heard the door open and looked up to see Paul standing in the doorway. Even though it wasn't his fault, she glared at him as he came in. As much as Chloe liked a clean house, she hated housework, and this wasn't even her house. This particular space was sparsely decorated with just a few worn pieces of furniture and some bad condo art on the walls. After six months of being sealed up tight with the air conditioner off, it smelled of dust and mildew and needed a good airing out. "What are you doing?" asked Paul, closing the door behind him. "Mopping," she said, her voice flat. "Right. But why are you mopping here? Whose house is this anyway?" "It's one we just added to the roster last week. The cleaning service hasn't had a chance to get in here yet." "I see that," said Paul. "So why're you cleaning it tonight?" "We're cleaning it tonight because the Guidarizzi's decided to make a surprise visit to their winter home in Key West. They're coming in tomorrow afternoon. Every other decent place is filled up, so we have to use this one instead." Why is Chloe mopping? Pick the correct answer from the following options: - Because Paul is coming. - Because it is her house. - Because the Guidarizzi's are coming. - not enough information
Because the Guidarizzi's are coming.
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Let's rewind to January 2013 for a moment. It's a sunny and warm day in Los Angelesa bit of a weather shock to me after 11 years of Seattle's cold and rain. I've been officially on the job in the web department for all of 12 hours. I'm sitting in a conference room at a big wooden table, surrounded by my new coworkers and team members in the Getty's web group. A big monitor is displaying the prototype of the newly designed and almost-built Getty Iris. We're discussing The Iris logo you see at the top of this page, its multiple iterations, and, quite frankly, the pain involved in trying to get it to look right. Wait-wait-wait, let's pause for a moment. My name is Will Lanni. I'm a Web production specialist at the Getty, which is a complex way of saying I'm a developer and designer, which is a nice way of saying that I'm basically a "web monkey." Before I started at the Getty, I worked as a partner in a small web design and development firm for several years. I had some experience working for the GettyI built the Pacific Standard Time at the Getty site, the Pacific Standard Time Festival site, as well as the interactive Getty Impact map. And, at the time of my hiring, I was not only working on the new design and build of The Iris, due to go live in only a month, but also the soon-to-be-launched website for Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. So I wasn't exactly new to projects at the Getty, even though I was a brand-spanking-new full-time employee. OK. Now that you know who I am, let's get back to that moment. The Iris logo, and the hair-pulling it was causing for all of uswhich is a pretty good representation of the steps that Web projects go through as we move from idea, to execution, to setback, to solution. What is probably true of Lanni? Pick the correct answer from the following options: - Lanni probably had to go to college to learn how to web design - not enough information - Lanni probably had no formal web design training - Lanni probably is only mediocre at his work
Lanni probably had to go to college to learn how to web design
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In 1981, when I was nine years old, my father took me to see Raiders of the Lost Ark. Although I had to squint my eyes during some of the scary scenes, I loved it in particular because I was fairly sure that Harrison Ford's character was based on my dad. My father was a palaeontologist at the University of Chicago, and I'd gone on several field trips with him to the Rocky Mountains, where he seemed to transform into a rock-hammer-wielding superhero. That illusion was shattered some years later when I figured out what he actually did: far from spending his time climbing dangerous cliffs and digging up dinosaurs, Jack Sepkoski spent most of his career in front of a computer, building what would become the first comprehensive database on the fossil record of life. The analysis that he and his colleagues performed revealed new understandings of phenomena such as diversification and extinction, and changed the way that palaeontologists work. But he was about as different from Indiana Jones as you can get. The intertwining tales of my father and his discipline contain lessons for the current era of algorithmic analysis and artificial intelligence (AI), and points to the value-laden way in which we "see" data. My dad was part of a group of innovators in palaeontology who identified as "palaeobiologists" meaning that they approached their science not as a branch of geology, but rather as the study of the biology and evolution of past life. Since Charles Darwin's time, palaeontology especially the study of the marine invertebrates that make up most of the record involved descriptive tasks such as classifying or correlating fossils with layers of the Earth (known as stratigraphy). Some invertebrate palaeontologists studied evolution, too, but often these studies were regarded by evolutionary biologists and geneticists as little more than "stamp collecting". What does the author probably think about paleontology today? Pick the correct answer from the following options: - The author probably gives it respect but doesn't want a career in it - not enough information - the author probably wishes he were a paleontologist - the author probably doesn't care whether he is a paleontologist or not
The author probably gives it respect but doesn't want a career in it
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