High School Reading: Grades 11-12 Quiz: Citing Evidence And Uncertainty Informational

The following is adapted from a 2019 essay on the economics of attention.

When scholars first began to warn that the digital economy would monetize human attention, they were often dismissed as alarmists trafficking in metaphor. Attention, critics said, could not really be bought or sold like sugar or steel; it was a private faculty, a mental disposition, not a commodity. Two decades later, this objection has curdled into a kind of nostalgia. The infrastructure of contemporary media does not merely solicit attention—it measures, segments, auctions, and resells it in fractions of a second. What was once a metaphor is now a spreadsheet.

Yet the more interesting shift is not technical but moral. Because attention has become a currency, the failure to attend has acquired the shape of a debt. Users who scroll past an advertisement are not simply exercising indifference; they are, in the ledger of the platform, defaulting on an implied obligation. This inversion—where the audience owes the medium, rather than the reverse—would have astonished the broadcasters of the twentieth century, who understood themselves to be courting a public that could, at any moment, turn the dial.

Which quotation from the passage most strongly supports the claim that the author views the change in the attention economy as fundamentally ethical rather than merely technological?

Adapted from an address delivered by a fictional civic reformer, 1911.

Fellow citizens, I do not come before you to denounce the machinery of our municipal government, for machinery, however clanking, may yet be steered. I come rather to protest the operators—those quiet men who, having inherited the levers, have persuaded themselves that the levers belong to them. When a streetcar franchise is awarded without competition, when a paving contract is signed in a back parlor, when a judge's docket is arranged to suit a creditor, we are told that such is the necessary friction of any great enterprise. I say to you that friction of this kind is not the wear of honest use; it is the grinding of gears deliberately misaligned.

Let no one mistake my meaning. I do not ask you to burn the ledgers or to sweep the offices bare. I ask only that the ledgers be opened to any citizen who wishes to read them, and that the offices be filled by those whom the citizens, and not the operators, have chosen. Reform, properly understood, is not revolution; it is the insistence that the instruments of the public serve the public that made them.

Which excerpt provides the strongest evidence that the speaker distinguishes his position from a radical or revolutionary one?

From a fictional 1867 pamphlet on the aftermath of civil war.

Citizens, we are told that peace has arrived because the guns have fallen silent, and we are asked to receive this silence as though it were the same thing as concord. But a house in which the members have ceased to shout may yet be a house in which the members have ceased to speak; and a nation in which the armies have withdrawn to their quarters may yet be a nation whose citizens have withdrawn to their grievances. The task before us is not to congratulate ourselves on the absence of battle, but to construct, deliberately and in daylight, the institutions that will make battle unnecessary in the future. Courts must be reopened where they were closed; schools must be founded where they never stood; the ballot must be extended, without qualification of birth or estate, to every adult who owes allegiance to the Republic. Anything less is a truce dressed in the clothing of a settlement, and truces, as history reminds us, have short memories.

Which excerpt provides the strongest evidence for the pamphleteer's central claim that the mere cessation of fighting is insufficient to constitute genuine peace?

Adapted from an essay on translation.

Amateur readers of translated literature often ask, with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion, whether a translation is "faithful" to its original. The question sounds reasonable and is nearly always the wrong one. Faithfulness, as the metaphor of marriage suggests, implies a single object toward which loyalty is owed. But a literary work is not a single object; it is a bundle of effects—rhythmic, semantic, allusive, tonal—that no target language can reproduce in the same proportions as the source. To be faithful to the rhythm of a Pushkin stanza is often to be unfaithful to its diction, and to preserve its diction is to lose its music. The translator does not choose between fidelity and betrayal; she chooses which fidelity to honor and which to sacrifice.

The better question, then, is not "Is this translation faithful?" but "To what has this translator been faithful, and at what cost?" A translation of Dante that preserves the terza rima will have surrendered something of the plainness of certain passages; a translation that preserves the plainness will have surrendered the architectural insistence of the rhyme. Neither surrender is a failure. What would be a failure is a translator who pretends that no surrender has occurred.

Which quotation most directly supports the author's claim that the concept of "faithfulness" in translation is fundamentally misleading rather than merely difficult to achieve?

From a review of contemporary architecture.

The glass tower, that emblem of postwar corporate ambition, has entered its baroque phase. In the 1950s a curtain wall of tinted glass signaled austerity, discipline, and a kind of Protestant confidence in the transparency of institutions. Half a century later, the same building type has become ornamental: its facades twist, its corners chamfer, its skins are printed with fritted patterns that mimic, of all things, foliage. The gesture toward transparency remains—one can still, in principle, see through the walls—but the transparency is now theatrical, a performance staged for the pedestrian below rather than a condition offered to the worker within, whose office is likely to face an interior atrium and to receive no daylight at all.

What has happened is not a betrayal of modernist principles so much as their exhaustion. When a formal vocabulary loses its capacity to make new statements, it does not fall silent; it turns to decoration. The glass tower today is a monument to a rhetoric it can no longer mean.

Which excerpt provides the strongest evidence that the reviewer sees contemporary glass architecture as hollowed out rather than actively dishonest?

From an op-ed on jury service.

We are accustomed to speaking of jury duty as an inconvenience—a summons that arrives at the wrong moment, disrupts the workweek, and delivers the citizen into a room of strangers to arbitrate a dispute in which she has no personal stake. This vocabulary is not wrong, exactly, but it is unserious. It treats as a nuisance what is, in fact, one of the few remaining occasions on which ordinary citizens are asked to exercise power over other citizens face to face, in real time, with consequences that will follow the parties out of the courtroom and into their lives.

The philosophical significance of the jury does not lie chiefly in the accuracy of its verdicts, which is debatable, nor in its efficiency, which is poor. It lies in the fact that the jury refuses to delegate to experts a decision that a democratic society insists on making collectively. A judge, however learned, is a single mind trained in a specialized tradition; a jury is twelve minds drawn from the community whose norms are, ultimately, at issue. To surrender jury trials to bench trials in the name of expertise would be to concede that the community has no standing to interpret its own commitments—that self-government, at the point where it becomes hardest, must yield to those who know better.

Which sentence most strongly supports the author's central claim that the value of the jury is grounded in democratic self-government rather than in accuracy or efficiency?

From an essay on scientific pedagogy.

The laboratory notebook, that battered and coffee-stained artifact, is often mistaken for a mere archive—a place where results are deposited for later retrieval. In truth, the notebook is the workshop itself. A finding that has not been written down has not yet occurred; it hovers in the investigator's memory as a rumor, subject to the distortions that memory always imposes. Only when the observation is committed to the page, dated, and situated among its neighbors does it acquire the density of a fact.

It follows that teaching students to keep a notebook is not a matter of imposing tidiness upon adolescent chaos. It is a matter of teaching them what it feels like to know something. Students who record their measurements haphazardly are not simply disorganized; they are, in a precise sense, not yet doing science. They are performing gestures that resemble science—pouring, weighing, timing—without the discipline that transforms gesture into evidence. To insist on the notebook, then, is to insist that the student join a community whose membership is defined not by curiosity, which anyone may possess, but by the willingness to be corrected by one's own record.

Which sentence best supports the inference that the author regards the notebook as constitutive of scientific practice rather than as a supplement to it?

From a philosophical essay on promises.

Why should a promise, once uttered, bind the person who uttered it? The question is older than moral philosophy and, in some sense, generates it. One tradition, which we may call the contractual, holds that the promise binds because the promisee, having relied upon it, would be wronged by its breach. Another tradition, which we may call the expressive, holds that the promise binds because in making it the promisor has revealed a commitment that is now part of who she is; to break it is not merely to injure another but to become a different, and worse, person.

These two accounts are often presented as rivals, but a moment's reflection shows that they answer different questions. The contractual account explains why the promisee has a claim against the promisor: something has been given, and something is owed. The expressive account explains why the promisor has a reason to keep the promise even when no one is watching, even when the promisee has forgotten, even when breach would cost the promisor nothing external. Any adequate theory of promising must accommodate both facts—the interpersonal debt and the intrapersonal integrity—and any theory that reduces one to the other will, sooner or later, produce moral monsters: promisors who calculate breach when observation is unlikely, or promisees who forgive too easily what they should not.

Which sentence most strongly supports the author's claim that the two theories of promising are complementary rather than genuinely competing?

From a magazine essay on the history of medical diagnosis.

The stethoscope, when Laennec introduced it in 1816, was greeted less as a triumph than as an embarrassment. Physicians who had spent their careers pressing an ear directly to the patient's chest were now to interpose a rolled tube of paper—later a wooden cylinder—between themselves and the body they professed to know. The instrument, its critics observed, created distance where intimacy had prevailed. It substituted an artifact for a touch.

What the critics failed to notice, and what a full generation of doctors would slowly discover, is that the distance itself was the innovation. Direct auscultation had bound diagnosis to the physician's willingness to lean close—a willingness that varied with the patient's cleanliness, social station, and sex. The stethoscope democratized the ear. A tubercular scullery maid and a tubercular baroness could now be examined by the same procedure, and their lungs could be described in the same vocabulary. The instrument that seemed to introduce coldness was, in fact, the instrument that made a more uniform attention possible.

This pattern—an innovation dismissed as alienating that turns out to have been equalizing—recurs throughout the history of clinical technology, and it should caution us against the reflex that treats every new interface between doctor and patient as a diminishment of care.

Which sentence provides the most direct evidence for the essay's larger claim that seemingly impersonal medical technologies may actually promote a more equitable practice of medicine?

Adapted from a policy paper on urban tree canopies.

Among the interventions available to cities confronting rising summer temperatures, the planting of street trees is often celebrated as a rare instance of a policy that is at once inexpensive, popular, and technically effective. Trees cool the air by shading pavement and by transpiring water through their leaves; they absorb particulate matter; they are, in the language of municipal reports, "multifunctional green infrastructure." Yet the enthusiasm surrounding tree-planting campaigns has tended to obscure a distributional problem that any honest planner must confront.

Studies conducted in twelve American cities between 2015 and 2022 have shown that new plantings, though nominally distributed across neighborhoods, disproportionately survive in wealthier districts. The reason is not conspiracy but arithmetic: a young tree requires watering for its first three to five summers, and the labor of watering—whether performed by residents, by property owners, or by paid gardeners—is more reliably supplied where households have leisure, capital, or long tenancy. A tree planted on a block of transient renters and absentee landlords is, on average, a tree that will die. The consequence is that a program advertised as universal becomes, in practice, regressive: the neighborhoods most in need of shade receive the fewest mature trees a decade after the ribbon-cutting.

Which sentence most strongly supports the author's argument that the inequity in tree-planting outcomes is structural rather than intentional?

From a review of a biography of the composer Clara Wieck Schumann (fictional).

Helena Novak's new biography of Clara Wieck Schumann is a strange and instructive book. It is strange because Novak, an accomplished musicologist, has chosen to devote three of her eleven chapters to Clara's household accounts—the receipts for candles, the wages of the cook, the negotiations with landlords across half a dozen German cities. It is instructive because these chapters, which a less confident writer would have relegated to an appendix, prove to be the volume's argumentative spine. Novak's contention is that Clara's celebrated career as a touring pianist cannot be understood apart from the ceaseless domestic engineering it required, and that previous biographers, in their eagerness to place Clara at the keyboard, have quietly erased the ledger book beside it.

This is not a merely corrective gesture. Novak is not adding the household as a footnote to the concerts; she is arguing that the concerts were, in an economic and even artistic sense, produced by the household. When Clara programmed a Beethoven sonata for a Leipzig recital, the choice was shaped by the cost of transporting a particular score, by the availability of a rehearsal room in a rented apartment, and by the demands of four children whose schooling had to be arranged around their mother's travel. To notice these constraints is not to diminish Clara's artistry but to specify the conditions under which artistry, for a nineteenth-century woman, was possible at all.

Which quotation offers the most direct textual evidence that the reviewer endorses Novak's central methodological claim rather than merely reporting it?