The Jungle

1) What qualities did Sinclair believe a person must have to succeed in Packingtown?

Sinclair believed a man must be dishonest, liar, and deceiving to succeed in Packingtown.
No one succeeded by being a good worker.

2)According to the passage, what is the plant owner's main goal.

A plant owner's main goal was to make as much money as possible no matter how they went about doing it.

3) What does Sinclair mean when he says, "...there was no place in it where a man counted for anything against a dollar....?"

Sinclair means that to the business owners, no man was more important than the profit so if someone dissatisfied them, they wouldn't think twice about replacing them.
 
When it was published, The Jungle was so shocking that it launched a government investigation of the meatpacking industry.  The investigation eventually led to the establishment of laws regulating the industry.  Using the internet, research an area that our government regulates now (meat packing, environment, pharmaceuticals) and report how this is enforced today.

Today, meat packing is enforced by routinely inspections of the meat products as well as policies and examinations of the safety of the worker's environment by the OSHA.

Industrialization's Effect on America

Industrialization is the process of converting to a socioeconomic order in which industry is dominant. This meant that during the Industrial Revolution, America went from a country of man power to a country of machine power. This era was known for producing inventions such as the refrigerator, the gramophone record, lightbulbs, and hundreds of other tools that helped company owners with fast and efficient production of their products. It positively affected America by increasing our income, caused the amount of our exported goods to increase, and helped people become more wealthy, increasing out economy.












http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/287204/industrialization

Gramophone Record

In the year 1856, Leon Scot demonstrated how to record sounds on the Phonoautograph. This was the first time there had been sound recording but not sound reproduction. On November 8, 1887, Emile Berliner, a man from Germany working in Washington, D.C., patented recording sounds on round flat disks (records), instead of the cylinders previous inventors such as Scot and Edison used. At first the records were made out of glass but then they turned to zinc and later plastic. These records were the first way people could mass produce sound recordings and put them in a mold. Berliner's records were more durable than Edison's so they were quickly popularized and could be created more quickly and they didn't need to be stored in a large storage box like the cylinders. Berliner had made enough money to hire the Duranoid Company to produce his records and they came up with a shellac pressing that was even more superior to the plastic. In 1896 he formed the Berliner Gramophone Company of Philadelphia and they had a national level distribution.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone

http://cs-exhibitions.uni-klu.ac.at/index.php?id=516