This passage is typical of a problem-solution pattern, which is made up of 4 parts.
Part 1 is from Paragraph 1 to Paragraph 7. Very often a problem-solution pattern starts with a situation for a problem as in this passage. Paragraph 1 tells us that everything is being normal for Jack Collins as he was at his desk, writing checks, paying bills the way he always had: on time. In Paragraph 2, suddenly the phone rang, breaking his normal life and that led to a nightmare. From Paragraph 3 to Paragraph 5, we can find details about Jack Collins suffering from identity theft. In Paragraph 6 and Paragraph 7 the author sets the problem as a frightening and fast-growing crime: identity theft with at least 500,000 new victims annually.
Part 2 is made up of 6 paragraphs, from Paragraph 8 to Paragraph 13, dealing with the causes and effects of the crime. Paragraphs 8, 9, 10 and 11 deal with the causes of the crime: Every identification number as well as the all-purpose SSN are the targets for the criminals and they can fall prey to the identity theft criminals. Paragraph 12 explains the consequences involved from an identity theft: enormous time and a huge amount of effort to clear the fraud from your credit report. Paragraph 13 gives us a specific example of how Jack Collins suffered from the crime in detail.
Part 3 consists of 7 paragraphs, dealing with solutions. We understand that not every solution works. This is true with identity theft too. Paragraph 14 is about one solution: Congress made identity theft a federal crime, which helps to streamline police efforts by tracking cases on a national scale. However, the solution meets its negative response from consumer advocates in Paragraph 15. Consumer advocates argue to say that this does not address the basic problems as industry rushed to attract more customers with too few legal protections for consumers' personal information. With the solution being negative, it is only too natural to look for other solutions. Paragraphs 16 and 17 tell us that several proposed laws have attempted to protect personal privacy and avert fraud. One of the laws suggests prohibiting businesses from obtaining or distributing anyone's SSN and clamping down on the selling of “credit headers”. However sound the law might appear, it faces, in Paragraph 18, fierce resistance from the credit industry. Credit industry leaders are opposed to the law by saying that withholding consumer information and removing the SSN as the universal criterion for establishing a person's identity would bring harm to transactions. As a result, it seems the proposed law doesn't work either even before it is legally adopted. The problem of identity theft remains unsolved while it is a crime with no way to gauge the true magnitude of identity fraud. With this in mind, Paragraphs 18 to 20 lead us to another solution: advice from experts. The experts LISTED as many as 7 pieces of advice for people to protect themselves from the crime. But so far, no response to the advice has been mentioned in the reading passage.
Part 4 is Paragraph 21. Clever readers might have found from the reading passage that it seems to have no way to deal with identity fraud. The author in the last paragraph just calls on us to fight against the new epidemic: steeling identity, probably leaving it to the public to continue the effort to solve the problem of identity theft.
