ACT Reading Quiz: Supporting Details And Evidence

PASSAGE III

HUMANITIES:

Passage A is adapted from the essay The Universal Pantomime (1932).

Passage B is adapted from Voices in the Dark: The Dawn of Sound (1945).

Passage A

The sudden death of the silent film at the hands of the "talkie" is one of the greatest artistic tragedies of the twentieth century. Before the microphone invaded the studio, cinema was a universal language. A film starring Charlie Chaplin or Greta Garbo could be shipped to Tokyo, Paris, or Buenos Aires, and the audience would understand every beat of the emotional narrative. The actors did not rely on the crutch of spoken dialogue; they communicated through the pure, unadulterated art of pantomime. A slight widening of the eyes or the nervous flutter of a hand conveyed volumes more than a paragraph of exposition ever could.

Furthermore, the silence of early cinema demanded an active, imaginative engagement from the audience. When a locomotive crashed or a heroine wept, the viewer's mind supplied the sound. The musical accompaniment—usually a live pianist or an orchestra—provided the emotional color, but the ultimate interpretation belonged to the viewer. With the advent of synchronized sound, cinema ceased to be a visual poetry and became merely photographed theater. By giving characters literal voices, the industry stripped them of their mythological grandeur, reducing them to ordinary, chattering people. We traded a transcendent global art form for the mundane reality of everyday conversation.

Passage B

Nostalgia for the silent era often obscures the severe limitations of early cinema. While it is true that visual storytelling achieved impressive heights in the 1920s, it was fundamentally handicapped. Because actors could not speak, they were forced into a style of exaggerated, melodramatic acting that looks entirely unnatural to the modern eye. Villains had to twirl their mustaches and scowl; heroines had to faint with the back of a hand pressed dramatically against their foreheads. Subtlety was frequently sacrificed at the altar of clarity.

Moreover, the narrative flow of silent films was constantly interrupted by title cards—blocks of text spliced between frames to explain the plot or deliver dialogue. Reading a movie is not watching a movie. The arrival of synchronized sound in 1927 with The Jazz Singer shattered these limitations. Sound allowed for naturalistic acting, where a whispered confession could carry the emotional weight of a scene without a single grand gesture. It allowed screenwriters to craft complex, layered plots that did not have to pause every three minutes for a title card. Sound did not destroy the art of cinema; it matured it. It gave directors a new, vital tool to build immersive, realistic worlds that could resonate with audiences on a much deeper psychological level.

The author of Passage B criticizes the acting style of the silent era primarily for being:

PASSAGE II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the essay The Pedaled Revolution: How the Bicycle Shaped Modernity.

The 1890s are often remembered for the Gilded Age, the rise of industrial tycoons, and the expansion of the American railroad. Yet, on a more personal level, the decade was defined by a quieter, human-powered revolution: the bicycle boom. Prior to the late 1880s, cycling was a hazardous hobby reserved for daring young men. The standard machine of the era was the "penny-farthing," a precarious contraption featuring a massive front wheel and a tiny rear wheel, making it notoriously difficult to balance and dangerous to fall from.

The introduction of the "safety bicycle" in 1885 changed everything. Featuring two wheels of equal size, a chain drive, and pneumatic rubber tires, the safety bicycle was accessible, comfortable, and, most importantly, easy to ride. Almost overnight, cycling transformed from an extreme sport into a mass phenomenon. By 1897, over two million bicycles were being sold annually in the United States alone.

This explosion in popularity had immediate economic ripple effects. The demand for bicycles drove innovations in manufacturing, specifically in the production of ball bearings, steel tubing, and stamped metal parts. Moreover, the millions of new cyclists quickly realized that America's infrastructure was woefully inadequate for their new machines. Outside of major city centers, most roads were little more than dirt paths, prone to turning into impassable muddy ruts after a rainstorm. In response, cyclists formed the League of American Wheelmen, a powerful lobbying group that launched the "Good Roads Movement." They successfully pressured local and state governments to pave roads and improve streetscapes, laying the literal groundwork for the automobile era that was soon to follow.

However, the bicycle's most profound impact was arguably sociological, particularly regarding the lives of women. In the late nineteenth century, Victorian social codes strictly dictated female behavior and dress. Women were expected to wear heavy, restrictive corsets and long, voluminous skirts that swept the ground, outfits that made physical exertion nearly impossible. The safety bicycle demanded a different wardrobe.

To ride comfortably and safely, women began adopting "rational dress," which included divided skirts, shorter hemlines, and most controversially, bloomers. While conservative critics decried these fashion changes as scandalous, the bicycle offered women an unprecedented degree of physical mobility and independence. They no longer had to rely on men to drive carriages or wait for scheduled trains; a woman with a bicycle could travel miles under her own power. In 1896, women's rights leader Susan B. Anthony famously declared, "I think (the bicycle) has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance."

The bicycle also acted as a social leveler in rural communities. Farm life in the 1800s was often deeply isolating. The horse-and-buggy was expensive to maintain and slow, limiting the radius of a typical farmer's social circle to just a few miles. The bicycle collapsed these distances. Young adults could easily pedal to neighboring towns for dances, church socials, and political meetings. Sociologists note that the advent of the bicycle significantly broadened the marriage pool in rural areas, as people were suddenly able to court partners who lived outside their immediate geographic confines.

Ultimately, the bicycle craze of the 1890s was brief, eclipsed within a few decades by the advent of the affordable automobile. Yet, the social and physical landscape of America had been irreversibly altered. The bicycle had paved the roads, modernized manufacturing, and given marginalized groups a taste of autonomous travel. It was a simple machine that accelerated the arrival of the modern world.

The author indicates that the 'safety bicycle' was an improvement over previous models for all of the following reasons EXCEPT:

PASSAGE I

LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is adapted from the fictional memoir Glass and Roots by Elias Thorne.

My Aunt Miriam did not so much garden as she waged a quiet, calculated war. Her greenhouse, a sprawling Victorian monstrosity of wrought iron and clouded glass attached to the back of her otherwise tidy suburban home, was her battlefield. To a ten-year-old boy whose previous experience with nature was limited to neatly mowed municipal parks, stepping into the greenhouse was like stepping onto another planet. The air was thick and tasted of damp earth and crushed mint.

"Don't touch the Monstera," Miriam commanded on my first day, not looking up from a terra-cotta pot she was vigorously filling with loam. "It's temperamental. And keep your elbows tucked in. The orchids require a specific humidity, and I won't have you disrupting the microclimate with your flailing."

I tucked my elbows tightly against my ribs. I had been sent to live with her for the summer while my parents finalized a messy, drawn-out divorce. I felt small, displaced, and entirely out of my depth.

Miriam handed me a small, rusted watering can with a long, thin spout. "Your job is the seedlings. Bottom shelf, north wall. They are fragile. They do not need a deluge; they need a suggestion of moisture."

I approached the designated shelf. Hundreds of tiny green shoots, no larger than eyelash clippings, pushed bravely through the dark soil in uniform plastic trays. Watering them felt terrifying. If I tilted the can too far, a torrent of water would unearth them. If I didn't tilt it enough, they would wither in the sweltering heat of the glass room. I spent an hour painstakingly dispensing droplets, holding my breath with each tilt of my wrist.

Over the next few weeks, a rhythm established itself. Miriam rarely spoke of my parents or the situation back home. Instead, she spoke of nitrogen deficiencies, root rot, and the necessity of pruning. At first, I thought she was simply ignoring my obvious misery. But gradually, I began to listen to the specific vocabulary of her world. "Look at this," she said one humid Tuesday, pointing to a sprawling fern that looked perfectly healthy to me. She snipped a large, vibrant frond right at the base. I gasped. "It's overgrown," she explained, tossing the frond into a compost bucket. "It's putting all its energy into maintaining old growth. If you don't cut back the comfortable parts, the plant will never produce anything new. It feels destructive, Elias, but it is actually an act of faith."

I looked at the fern. Where the large frond had been, a tiny, tightly coiled green spiral—a fiddlehead—was now exposed to the sunlight.

Miriam was not a warm woman. She did not bake cookies or ask me about my feelings. But she taught me how to graft a lemon branch onto an orange tree, binding the wounded wood tightly with tape until they healed into a single, stronger organism. She showed me that roots need to be periodically stressed—allowed to dry out just a fraction—so they will reach deeper into the soil in search of water.

By late August, the chaos of the greenhouse no longer intimidated me. I knew which plants needed the heavy, soaking rains of the larger watering can, and which needed the delicate misting of the spray bottle. When my mother finally arrived to pick me up, her face tight with the exhaustion of the past few months, I was repotting a spider plant.

"You've got dirt under your fingernails, Elias," she said, trying to smile.

"It's not dirt," I replied automatically, quoting Miriam. "It's soil. Dirt is what you sweep off the floor. Soil is what keeps things alive."

Miriam stood in the doorway of the greenhouse, wiping her hands on her canvas apron. She didn't wave, but she gave me a single, firm nod. I nodded back, feeling, for the first time all summer, that my roots had finally taken hold.

The passage indicates that Aunt Miriam interacts with the narrator primarily by:

PASSAGE II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the essay The Mall Maker's Regret.

In 1956, a new architectural form appeared in Edina, Minnesota, that would forever alter the American landscape. It was a massive, windowless box surrounded by a sea of asphalt, but inside, it was a climate-controlled paradise of commerce and community. This was the Southdale Center, the world's first enclosed shopping mall. Its creator, Victor Gruen, was an Austrian socialist and a refugee who had fled the Nazis in 1938. He did not design the mall to celebrate American consumerism; he designed it to save the American suburbs from themselves.

When Gruen arrived in the United States, he was horrified by the chaotic sprawl of the suburbs. He saw miles of tract housing isolated from one another, with no central "heart" where people could gather, walk, or debate. To Gruen, the suburb was a "land of wasted opportunities." He envisioned a solution inspired by the Vienna of his youth: the agora, or city center. He believed that by clustering stores, art, and civic spaces within a pedestrian-friendly enclosure, he could recreate the intimacy of a European downtown in the middle of the Midwestern sprawl.

Gruen's concept was revolutionary. Before Southdale, shopping centers were "strip malls"—linear rows of stores facing the street, exposed to the elements. Southdale was introverted. It turned its back on the automobile, forcing drivers to leave their cars at the perimeter and enter a protected, pedestrian-only environment. It featured a central garden court with a skylight, sculptures, and a café. It was designed to be a "third place," distinct from home and work, where social life could flourish protected from Minnesota's harsh winters.

The economic success of Gruen's invention was immediate and overwhelming. Developers across the country rushed to replicate the Southdale model. However, they copied the form, not the philosophy. They stripped away the libraries, post offices, and community centers Gruen had envisioned, leaving only the retail stores. They realized that the enclosed environment had a powerful psychological effect on consumers, a phenomenon later termed the "Gruen Effect." By sealing off the outside world—removing clocks, windows, and weather—malls disoriented shoppers, suspending their sense of time and making them more susceptible to impulse buys.

Instead of curbing suburban sprawl, the shopping mall accelerated it. The massive tax revenue generated by these retail giants encouraged municipalities to rezone land for commercial development further and further from the city center. The "heart" of the community became a fortress of private property, policed by security guards rather than public consensus. Downtown districts, unable to compete with the climate-controlled convenience of the mall, began to wither.

Gruen watched this transformation with growing horror. He had intended to bring the culture of the city to the suburbs; instead, he had drained the life from the city. In his later years, Gruen became a vocal critic of his own creation. He described the proliferation of malls as "bastard developments" that distorted his original vision. In 1978, just before his death, he famously disavowed the movement he started. "I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments," he told a journalist. "They destroyed our cities."

Today, the enclosed mall is in decline, replaced by online shopping and "lifestyle centers"—open-air developments that ironically mimic the traditional main streets Gruen tried to replace. Yet, Gruen's legacy remains visible in the DNA of American commerce. He proved that environment controls behavior, even if the result was not the utopia he imagined.

Based on the passage, the "Gruen Effect" refers to:

PASSAGE II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the essay The Mall Maker's Regret.

In 1956, a new architectural form appeared in Edina, Minnesota, that would forever alter the American landscape. It was a massive, windowless box surrounded by a sea of asphalt, but inside, it was a climate-controlled paradise of commerce and community. This was the Southdale Center, the world's first enclosed shopping mall. Its creator, Victor Gruen, was an Austrian socialist and a refugee who had fled the Nazis in 1938. He did not design the mall to celebrate American consumerism; he designed it to save the American suburbs from themselves.

When Gruen arrived in the United States, he was horrified by the chaotic sprawl of the suburbs. He saw miles of tract housing isolated from one another, with no central "heart" where people could gather, walk, or debate. To Gruen, the suburb was a "land of wasted opportunities." He envisioned a solution inspired by the Vienna of his youth: the agora, or city center. He believed that by clustering stores, art, and civic spaces within a pedestrian-friendly enclosure, he could recreate the intimacy of a European downtown in the middle of the Midwestern sprawl.

Gruen's concept was revolutionary. Before Southdale, shopping centers were "strip malls"—linear rows of stores facing the street, exposed to the elements. Southdale was introverted. It turned its back on the automobile, forcing drivers to leave their cars at the perimeter and enter a protected, pedestrian-only environment. It featured a central garden court with a skylight, sculptures, and a café. It was designed to be a "third place," distinct from home and work, where social life could flourish protected from Minnesota's harsh winters.

The economic success of Gruen's invention was immediate and overwhelming. Developers across the country rushed to replicate the Southdale model. However, they copied the form, not the philosophy. They stripped away the libraries, post offices, and community centers Gruen had envisioned, leaving only the retail stores. They realized that the enclosed environment had a powerful psychological effect on consumers, a phenomenon later termed the "Gruen Effect." By sealing off the outside world—removing clocks, windows, and weather—malls disoriented shoppers, suspending their sense of time and making them more susceptible to impulse buys.

Instead of curbing suburban sprawl, the shopping mall accelerated it. The massive tax revenue generated by these retail giants encouraged municipalities to rezone land for commercial development further and further from the city center. The "heart" of the community became a fortress of private property, policed by security guards rather than public consensus. Downtown districts, unable to compete with the climate-controlled convenience of the mall, began to wither.

Gruen watched this transformation with growing horror. He had intended to bring the culture of the city to the suburbs; instead, he had drained the life from the city. In his later years, Gruen became a vocal critic of his own creation. He described the proliferation of malls as "bastard developments" that distorted his original vision. In 1978, just before his death, he famously disavowed the movement he started. "I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments," he told a journalist. "They destroyed our cities."

Today, the enclosed mall is in decline, replaced by online shopping and "lifestyle centers"—open-air developments that ironically mimic the traditional main streets Gruen tried to replace. Yet, Gruen's legacy remains visible in the DNA of American commerce. He proved that environment controls behavior, even if the result was not the utopia he imagined.

According to the passage, Gruen viewed the American suburbs of the 1940s and 1950s as:

PASSAGE III

HUMANITIES: Passage A is adapted from the essay The Mirror with a Memory. Passage B is adapted from The Frame and the Lie.

Passage A

When the French government announced the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, the public was struck by a singular sensation: the feeling that they were looking at truth itself. For centuries, painting had been the only way to capture a likeness, but painting was always filtered through the fallible hand of the artist. The camera, however, was a machine. It possessed a mechanical objectivity that the human eye could not rival. William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the medium's fathers, famously called his collection of photographs The Pencil of Nature, implying that the sun itself was doing the drawing, unmediated by human bias.

This belief in the "forensic" power of the photograph has remained its most potent virtue. A photograph is evidence. It certifies that a specific set of photons bounced off a specific object at a specific moment in time. When we look at a Matthew Brady photograph of the Civil War, we are not looking at an interpretation of a soldier; we are looking at the soldier. We see the mud on his boots and the exhaustion in his posture with a clarity that no prose or oil paint could invent. The camera acts as a mirror with a memory, preserving the intricate, messy details of reality that the human mind would otherwise edit out or forget. In this sense, the photographer is not a creator, but a witness; their duty is not to invent, but to attend.

Passage B

To accept a photograph as a neutral record of reality is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of vision. There is no such thing as a "passive" image. The moment a photographer lifts the camera to their eye, they are making a series of aggressive choices: what to include, what to exclude, how to frame the subject, and how to shape the light. The act of framing is, by definition, an act of censorship. By choosing to show us the flower, the photographer is choosing not to show us the garbage dump next to it.

Furthermore, the image captures only a fraction of the sensory experience. It freezes a split second of time, stripping it of sound, smell, and context, often creating a false narrative. A snapshot of a politician mid-sneeze might look like a scream of rage; a photo of a weeping athlete might be tears of victory or defeat. The renowned landscape photographer Ansel Adams spent hours in the darkroom, dodging and burning his prints to darken skies and brighten peaks. The resulting images were majestic, but they were not "true" in a literal sense; they were emotional landscapes, manipulated to convey a specific feeling. A photograph is not a window on the world; it is a canvas, and the photographer is as much a fiction writer as any novelist.

Passage A states that the "singular sensation" felt by the public in 1839 was primarily due to:

PASSAGE IV

NATURAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article Life in the Dark: The Oasis of the Abyss.

Until the late twentieth century, marine biologists operated under a fundamental assumption: all life on Earth ultimately depended on the sun. Photosynthesis was the undisputed engine of the global food web. It was believed that the deep ocean floor, plunged in perpetual darkness, freezing temperatures, and crushing pressure, was a biological desert. Scientists assumed that the few scavengers living in the abyss survived solely on "marine snow"—the slow drift of dead organic matter falling from the sunlit surface miles above.

That paradigm was shattered in 1977. Geologists piloting the deep-sea submersible Alvin were exploring the Galápagos Rift, a mid-ocean ridge in the eastern Pacific. They were searching for hydrothermal vents—underwater hot springs predicted by plate tectonic theory. They found the vents, but they also found something entirely unexpected: a thriving, densely populated ecosystem.

The vents are formed where the Earth's tectonic plates spread apart. Freezing seawater seeps down through cracks in the ocean crust and is heated by underlying magma chambers to temperatures exceeding 400°C (750°F). Because of the extreme hydrostatic pressure, the water does not boil. Instead, it becomes superheated and highly corrosive, leaching minerals like iron, copper, and zinc from the surrounding rocks. When this buoyant, mineral-rich fluid shoots back up into the freezing ocean water, the dissolved minerals instantly precipitate out, forming massive chimney-like structures known as "black smokers."

The sheer abundance of life around these toxic, boiling geysers was a biological anomaly. There were blind white crabs, pale eel-like fish, and beds of giant clams. Most striking were the giant tube worms, Riftia pachyptila, which grew up to eight feet long in dense, bush-like clusters, waving blood-red plumes in the dark water. Without sunlight, how was this oasis of life sustaining itself? The answer lay in a process entirely separate from photosynthesis: chemosynthesis.

The vent fluids are rich in hydrogen sulfide ($H_2S$), a chemical compound highly toxic to most known terrestrial and shallow-water organisms. However, specialized microorganisms—chemosynthetic bacteria—have evolved to use the chemical energy stored in the bonds of hydrogen sulfide to convert carbon dioxide and water into organic sugars. In this abyssal ecosystem, these bacteria serve the exact same foundational role that plants serve in a sunlit forest.

The giant tube worms are perhaps the most remarkable example of evolutionary adaptation to this environment. Upon dissection, biologists discovered that the adult Riftia tube worm has no mouth, no digestive tract, and no anus. It cannot eat in any traditional sense. Instead, its body contains a massive internal organ called a trophosome, which houses billions of symbiotic chemosynthetic bacteria. The worm's red plume acts as a gill, absorbing oxygen, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide from the water and transporting them via its blood to the bacteria. In return, the bacteria synthesize the organic compounds the worm needs to survive and grow at astonishingly rapid rates.

The discovery of hydrothermal vent communities fundamentally expanded our understanding of biology. It proved that life could thrive in the most extreme, hostile environments on the planet, completely divorced from solar energy. Furthermore, the genetic ancientness of these chemosynthetic bacteria has led some evolutionary biologists to propose a radical new theory: that life on Earth may not have begun in a warm, shallow sunlit tide pool, as Charles Darwin once speculated, but rather in the dark, boiling, chemical-rich crucible of a deep-sea vent.

According to the passage, before 1977, scientists believed that deep-sea life survived primarily by:

PASSAGE III

PHYSICS: This passage presents three hypotheses regarding the discrepancy between the observed mass of galaxies and their rotational speeds.

Introduction

In the 1970s, astronomer Vera Rubin observed that stars at the edges of spiral galaxies move just as fast as stars near the center. According to Newtonian physics, stars further from the center should move slower due to the decrease in gravitational pull. This observation implies that galaxies contain far more mass than what is visible in stars and gas. This missing mass is referred to as "Dark Matter." Three scientists propose different explanations for its nature.

Scientist 1

The missing mass consists of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). These are subatomic particles that have mass but do not interact with electromagnetic radiation (light), making them invisible. WIMPs interact only through gravity and the weak nuclear force. They were produced in the early universe and now form a vast, spherical "halo" that surrounds every galaxy. Computer simulations of the universe's formation match observational data only when this "cold dark matter" is included. If WIMPs exist, they should eventually be detectable by sensitive underground experiments designed to catch rare collisions between WIMPs and atomic nuclei.

Scientist 2

The missing mass is not some exotic new particle; it is simply normal ("baryonic") matter that is too dim to see. These objects are called Massive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs). They include black holes, neutron stars, brown dwarfs (failed stars), and rogue planets. Because they emit little to no light, they have escaped detection. The gravitational pull of these objects accounts for the high rotational speeds of galaxies. Evidence for MACHOs comes from "microlensing" events, where the gravity of a massive, invisible object bends the light of a distant star, causing it to brighten temporarily.

Scientist 3

There is no missing mass. The discrepancy is caused by a flaw in our understanding of gravity itself. This theory is known as Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). Newtonian laws work well on the scale of our solar system, where accelerations are high. However, on the galactic scale, where accelerations are incredibly low ($\< 10^{-10} m/s^2$), gravity behaves differently. Below this threshold, gravitational force decays more slowly with distance ($1/r$ instead of $1/r^2$). This stronger effective gravity eliminates the need for invisible halos or new particles. The rotation curves are exactly what the laws of physics predict when corrected for this scale.

According to Scientist 3, the need for "Dark Matter" arises because:

1 When Stockholm introduced congestion charges on vehicles entering its 2 city center in 2006, planners expected traffic volume to 3 fall by roughly ten percent, based on results from 4 similar programs in London. Instead, traffic dropped by nearly 5 twenty percent within the first six months, a decline 6 that held steady even after a public referendum briefly 7 threatened to repeal the charge. Economists later attributed the 8 larger-than-expected drop not to the price of the toll 9 itself, which was modest, but to a shift in 10 commuter habits that occurred before the charge even took 11 effect: months of publicity about the upcoming fee had 12 already prompted many drivers to test alternate routes and 13 bus schedules, so that by the time tolls began, 14 a substantial share of commuters had already abandoned their 15 old routines and had little incentive to return to them.

According to the passage, why did Stockholm's traffic decline exceed planners' initial expectations?

1 Geologists dating the lakebed sediments initially assumed the pale 2 gray layer near the surface had formed slowly, since 3 similar layers elsewhere in the basin took centuries to 4 accumulate through ordinary seasonal deposition. Chemical analysis of this 5 particular layer, however, revealed unusually high concentrations of volcanic 6 ash mixed uniformly throughout its thickness, matching the ash 7 signature of a nearby volcano known to have erupted 8 in a single event around 1300 years ago. Because 9 ash from a single eruption could not have settled 10 gradually over centuries without separating into distinct sub-layers 11 visible under magnification, and because the ash instead appears 12 evenly distributed with no such banding, researchers concluded that 13 the entire pale gray layer was deposited within a 14 span of weeks rather than through gradual accumulation.

According to the passage, what led researchers to reject their initial assumption that the pale gray layer had formed through gradual, centuries-long deposition?

1 Warren noticed the change before anyone else in the 2 office did, though he could not have said exactly 3 when it began. Marlene still arrived at eight sharp 4 and left her desk lamp burning until well past six, 5 the same as always, but she had stopped bringing 6 the crossword puzzle she used to work on during lunch, 7 and twice that week Warren had seen her slip her 8 phone into a drawer the moment he walked past. 9 When he mentioned, in passing, that the Hendricks account 10 was finally closing, she asked him to repeat the 11 client's name, something she would never have needed to 12 ask a month earlier, when she had known every account 13 in the office better than the partners who managed them.

According to the passage, what does the narrator identify as evidence that Marlene's familiarity with the office's accounts had diminished?

1 When wolves were reintroduced to a mountain valley after 2 a seventy-year absence, ecologists expected elk populations to fall 3 and, as a result, willow trees along the valley's 4 streams to grow taller once fewer elk were browsing 5 on their shoots. Elk numbers did decline within the 6 first decade, yet willow height barely changed, puzzling researchers 7 for several years. Camera traps eventually revealed the explanation: 8 elk had not disappeared from the valley but had 9 simply shifted their grazing to higher, drier slopes away 10 from open stream banks, where wolves could not easily 11 ambush them. Willows along the streams remained stunted because 12 a smaller number of elk continued grazing there just 13 as intensively as before, concentrated now in the narrow 14 strips of open ground the surviving elk still judged 15 safe from ambush.

According to the passage, what did camera trap evidence reveal about why willow height failed to increase despite falling elk populations?

1 Thomas told his sister he was glad to be 2 moving to the coast, and he said it so often 3 in the weeks before the move that she eventually 4 stopped questioning whether he meant it. He packed his 5 books in careful, labeled boxes, gave away furniture that 6 would not fit in the new apartment without complaint, 7 and even joked about the ocean view he would 8 finally have. Only once, the night before the movers 9 came, did his sister see him standing in the 10 emptied living room long after midnight, running his hand 11 along a doorframe where he had marked his children's 12 heights in pencil every year since they were small, 13 a mark he made no effort to photograph or 14 otherwise preserve before the men painted over it the next day.

According to the passage, what detail suggests that Thomas's stated enthusiasm about moving did not fully reflect his private feelings?

1 Arctic ground squirrels endure winters in which soil temperatures 2 fall several degrees below freezing, yet the squirrels survive by 3 allowing their own body temperature to drop nearly as low, 4 sometimes to twenty-seven degrees Fahrenheit, without their tissues freezing solid. 5 Every two to three weeks, however, each squirrel interrupts this 6 deep state and shivers vigorously for several hours, driving its 7 core temperature back up to near-normal levels before subsiding once 8 more into torpor. Researchers long assumed these costly rewarming episodes 9 existed simply to prevent frostbite in the extremities, but recent 10 measurements of brain activity suggest a different explanation: the arousals 11 coincide with bursts of REM sleep that the animals appear 12 to have accumulated a debt for during the deepest, coldest 13 stretches of torpor, when the brain is too cold to 14 sustain normal sleep architecture at all.

According to the passage, recent measurements of brain activity suggest that the periodic rewarming episodes mainly serve to:

1 During the early decades of the twentieth century, many 2 mining companies in Appalachia paid workers partly in scrip, 3 a currency redeemable only at company-owned stores. Company officials 4 defended the practice by pointing to the high cost 5 of building supply lines into remote mountain valleys, arguing 6 that scrip allowed them to extend credit to miners 7 between paydays without handling cash that might be lost 8 or stolen along mountain roads. Critics countered that the 9 arrangement left miners with little choice but to buy 10 goods at inflated prices, since scrip could not be 11 spent anywhere else. Because most mining towns had no 12 competing merchants, families who fell into debt at the 13 company store often remained bound to a single employer 14 for years, unable to accumulate savings in real currency.

According to the passage, what reason did mining company officials give for paying workers in scrip?

1 Researchers tracking bar-tailed godwits during their nonstop flight 2 from Alaska to New Zealand noticed that the birds 3 did not fly in a straight line, even though 4 a direct route would have shortened the journey by 5 several hundred miles. Instead, the godwits followed a route 6 that curved to avoid a band of persistent headwinds 7 known to form over the central Pacific in autumn. 8 Wind sensors placed along the corridor showed that birds 9 which stayed closer to the theoretical straight path burned 10 through their fat reserves nearly twenty percent faster than 11 those that took the curved route, even though the 12 curved route added distance. The researchers concluded that the 13 birds were adjusting their path to conserve energy rather 14 than to minimize the number of miles flown.

According to the passage, why did godwits on the curved route use less energy than those closer to the straight path?

1 When the moving truck finally pulled away, Teo stood 2 in the empty living room and noticed the pale 3 rectangle on the wallpaper where his grandmother's mirror had 4 hung for as long as he could remember. His 5 mother explained that the mirror wasn't going into storage 6 with the rest of the furniture; she had given 7 it, along with the dining table, to a cousin 8 in another state who had recently lost her own 9 house in a flood. Teo argued that the mirror 10 should have stayed with them since it was the 11 last object that had belonged to his grandmother directly, 12 but his mother reminded him that his grandmother had 13 always kept a spare bedroom ready for relatives who 14 needed one, and that giving the mirror away honored 15 that same instinct better than storing it in a box would.

According to the passage, what reason does Teo's mother give for giving away the mirror rather than keeping it in storage?

1 City council members debating the streetcar proposal in 1911 2 split largely along neighborhood lines rather than party affiliation. 3 Representatives from the newly developed suburbs argued that a 4 streetcar line would raise property values along its route 5 by making downtown jobs accessible without requiring residents to 6 own horses or automobiles, an expense few working families 7 could manage. Representatives from the older riverfront wards opposed 8 the plan, contending that the franchise fees the streetcar 9 company would pay the city were far lower than 10 the revenue lost when the company was exempted from 11 the property taxes that any other business would owe 12 on its rail yards and depots. The council ultimately 13 approved the line after suburban representatives agreed to a 14 renegotiated tax exemption that expired after fifteen years rather 15 than remaining permanent as the company had originally requested.

According to the passage, why did riverfront ward representatives initially oppose the streetcar proposal?

1 The apprentice had been assigned to sweep the forge 2 floor every evening, a task he considered beneath someone 3 who had already learned to shape a hinge without 4 supervision. When he finally asked the blacksmith why the 5 sweeping could not be given to a younger boy, 6 the blacksmith set down his hammer and pointed to 7 the fine metal shavings scattered near the anvil, explaining 8 that a careless apprentice who ignored the floor eventually 9 ignored the temperature of his tongs as well, and 10 burned himself or ruined a blade through simple inattention. 11 He said he had lost two fingers that way himself, 12 as a young man convinced that sweeping was someone 13 else's job, and that he assigned the task to 14 every apprentice, however skilled, until they proved they noticed 15 details without being told twice.

According to the passage, why does the blacksmith require every apprentice, regardless of skill, to sweep the forge floor?

1 Farmers in the valleys surrounding the volcano have long 2 planted new fields in areas covered by ash from 3 recent eruptions, even though the same eruptions destroy existing 4 crops and occasionally bury entire villages. Soil scientists studying 5 the region found that fresh ash deposits release potassium 6 and phosphorus as they weather, nutrients that had often 7 been depleted from older fields after decades of continuous 8 planting without fallow periods. Fields planted directly in ash 9 less than five years old produced yields nearly thirty 10 percent higher than nearby fields on soil that had 11 not received a fresh ash layer in over a 12 century, even when both fields received identical irrigation and 13 fertilizer treatment. The scientists cautioned, however, that ash deposited 14 during a single catastrophic eruption, rather than gradually over 15 many years, could bury fields too deep for roots 16 to reach the nutrients at all.

According to the passage, why did fields planted in fresh ash produce higher yields than fields without recent ash deposits, despite identical irrigation and fertilizer?