Reading Standards for Informational Text: Rhetoric, Style, and Persuasion (CCSS.RI.11-12.6) Practice Test

A bee's path looks like dithering until you attend to the air itself. What seems erratic is a choreography with invisible partners: eddies of scent, threads of polarized light, a sun that appears to move and yet can be held in the brain like a compass rose. In the dark interior of the hive, a returning forager does not speak the flower but the geometry—angle to the sun, duration of the waggle, amplitude of the turn—so that distance becomes rhythm and direction becomes dance. Precision is not a cold instrument here; it is the warmth of agreement. To say this clearly requires the temper of a careful sentence: modifiers that do not overreach, verbs that carry weight without swagger, metaphors that illuminate without pretending to be the thing itself. We call it objectivity, as if the world were an object and we were not in it. But the better name may be fidelity: to the pattern, to the limit of what has been measured, to the astonishment that remains. The hive persuades us—gently—that intelligence can be distributed without being diluted; that order can arise not from command but from enough good information moving quickly enough. If the prose leans, occasionally, toward lyric, it does so not to ornament the facts but to keep them from drying into jargon. A clean line can carry wonder. In that, the bee and the sentence are kin: both find their way by attending to signals we might otherwise miss.

Open your feed and it opens you: not to the world, but to the version of the world your past clicks would like to see again. The algorithm is generous in the way a mirror is generous. It offers you back to yourself, brightened. I am not here to scold the mirror. I am here to argue for the usefulness of smudges—of friction inserted on purpose into what feels like frictionless attention. When everything is smooth, your convictions glide, never catching on a fact rough enough to revise them. Notice the prose of your day: the thumb-flick, the blink, the small applause of a heart icon. Now imagine interrupting that sentence. A required pause after every tenth post; a deliberate switch to a source you would not choose; a setting that asks you whether you want to keep becoming the person your history predicts. This is not technophobia. It is a design request for humility. Engineers already know how to optimize for time spent; they can also optimize for time reconsidered. We talk about attention as a resource. It is also a habit, and habits are architectural. If we build rooms with doors, we will walk through them. If we build corridors, we will not notice we are walking at all.