Common Core High School ELA Question of the Day

Two coastal cities face the same rising tide yet choose divergent paths. Rather than treating them in isolation, the essay braids a point-by-point comparison across three criteria—cost volatility, social continuity, ecological resilience—alternating cities at each turn. Under cost, the barrier city's upfront expense is weighed against the retreat city's continuing buyouts; under continuity, one preserves neighborhoods behind walls while the other relocates schools inland; under ecology, one compresses tidal flows while the other restores wetlands to absorb surge. Each section closes with causal links: how a capital decision today constrains adaptation options tomorrow. Only after this alternation does the author switch modes, pausing to map the interactions among criteria, noting, for example, that social continuity and ecological resilience can converge through "sponge" infrastructure. The final section synthesizes—not a compromise, but a conditional recommendation: a staged, hybrid strategy triggered by sea-level thresholds and budget conditions. The organization thus resists the lure of the "which city won?" frame. Instead, it builds a comparative matrix in readers' minds, then invites them to see that the strongest plan is contingent on interacting variables rather than allegiance to a single model.