so, i'm attempting another post on our notoriously untrustworthy computer, hopefully it won't crash. i have not done a whole lot today, mainly because i am feeling slightly under the weather. having some sort of low-grade sickness is kind of a general state in china, between the somewhat unhygenic food, the small children, and the some what dirty atmosphere, although i had gone through about a month with no cold or digestion issues. this one was pretty inevitable, seeing as dan and our other roommates had all been sick a few days earlier.
today, i lay on the couch and watched a korean soap opera. i have become addicted to korean soap operas through one of my roommates. they are really popular in qingdao--all the dvd stores sell dozens of korean soaps and hundreds of korean movies. they are much better than american soap operas, and a lot shorter--they are only about 12-20 episodes long. the one we are watching now is called "full house," it's about a woman who enters into a contract marriage with a pop star in order to get back her house, yet he is in love with another woman and she is attracted to another man, but they are also both falling in love with eachother. in some ways, korean tv is very similar to american tv, but in other ways, its really different. for example, in one scene, she threatens to divorce him, and he tells her to think about his parents and how much it would hurt them, and what a loss of face it would be to them. she stops and says, yes, i hate you, but i can't do that to his parents. i don't think appeals to filial piety would really keep an arguing american couple together on a soap. also, it's much less steamy--all sorts of love triangles and scandals, and not so much even a peck on the cheek.

other than that, i have also been helping one of my chinese friends study for her postgraduate translation/linguistics exam. she is graduating from qingdao university this spring and wants to study in shanghai, one of the top schools for english linguistics and translation. the test is incredibly difficult--much harder than any standardized test i've seen in america. on one section, she had to read sentences and fill in a missing word from a word bank. the sentences however, were from passages of from authors such as edward said, joseph campbell, and foucault, as well as long grammatically awkward sentences filled with enormous words about saussere, gramsci, the new testement, and marx. the words were things like diachronic, which i had to look up in my english-chinese dictionary, antithesis, realm, structure, structuralist, etc.
there were reading passages with questions that were incredibly convoluted, two about poe, baudelaire and the issues of identity and plagiarism. one of the more straightforward readings was w.e.b. dubois' "double consciousness essay."
there was also a section where she had to identify an error in a sentence (out of a choice four things wrong) and then correct it. one sentence was really hard, i couldn't tell what exactly was wrong and how to correct it, maybe one of you will know:

In the United States, for example, reading may be less essential than it ever was--at least where books are concerned.

the possible options are in bold, which one of those four do you think are wrong, and why?