"Cellphones and driving: As dangerous as we think?"

Chicago Tribune reporter Matthew Walberg suggests that the answer is not clear. He summarizes his position in a sentence before the rest of the online article: "Despite calls for cellphone bans, there's no conclusive data on handheld devices and safe driving."

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 8 Unit 2's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: Grant and Lee, Harrison Bergeron, The Giver, Banned Books Week, Fatal Text Message, Distracted Driving, How the Brain Reacts, Cellphones and driving
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. conclusive
    forming a decisive end or resolution
    But two decades of research done in the U.S. and abroad have not yielded conclusive data about the impact cellphones have on driving safety
  2. consensus
    agreement in the judgment reached by a group as a whole
    Nor is there a consensus that hands-free devices make for safer driving than handheld cellphones.
  3. determine
    establish after a calculation, investigation, or experiment
    In theory, the effect of cellphones on driver performance should be relatively easy to determine: Compare crash data against phone records of drivers involved in accidents.
  4. obtain
    come into possession of
    But phone records are not easily obtained.
  5. correlation
    a statistical relation between two or more variables
    The expectation would be that as cellphone use has skyrocketed we would see a correlation in the number of accidents, but that hasn't happened
  6. proponent
    a person who argues for a cause or puts forward an idea
    Proponents of cellphone restrictions--whether total bans or prohibition of handheld phones--can cite some studies to back up their positions.
  7. factor
    anything that contributes causally to a result
    Researchers tracked the number of accident reports that listed cellphone use as a factor during the two-year periods before and after the 2008 passage of a statewide ban on handheld devices.
  8. fatality
    a death resulting from an accident or a disaster
    The study concluded that while overall traffic fatalities of all kinds dropped by 22 percent, fatalities caused by drivers who were talking on a handheld phone at the time of the crash dropped nearly 50 percent.
  9. decline
    change toward something smaller or lower
    Similar declines were found for drivers using hands-free devices.
  10. counter
    in the opposite direction
    Those surveyed, however, overwhelmingly believed that hands-free devices made cellphone use safer, a perception that runs counter to research showing such tools do little to reduce the distraction.
Created on Mon Dec 15 14:02:28 EST 2014 (updated Mon Dec 15 14:27:39 EST 2014)

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