High School Reading: Grades 11-12 Quiz: Reading Literary Nonfiction 11 12

What weakens the support in "Our library is thriving: its cafe sold twice as many lattes this year"?

In "The senator's speech was a masterpiece of saying nothing at length," the word "masterpiece" is used to:

"My grandmother kept every receipt, though she had not balanced a checkbook since 1974." What does the writer most likely imply?

In "The new mall did not open so much as metastasize across the old farmland," the word "metastasize" implies the mall's growth was:

From an essay on urban ecology by a contemporary naturalist:

We romanticize the wilderness as something distant—a cathedral of pine and granite untouched by asphalt. Yet the peregrine falcon, once thought lost to us, now nests on the ledges of skyscrapers, hunting pigeons above the taxi horns. Coyotes trot along the shoulders of interstates at dawn. The raccoon, that masked opportunist, has developed problem-solving abilities in cities that its rural cousins seem never to acquire.

What this reveals is not that nature has surrendered to the city, nor that the city has magnanimously made room for nature. Rather, the very categories we use—'wild' and 'built,' 'natural' and 'human'—have always been convenient fictions. The city is a habitat, no less than a marsh or a meadow. It selects for certain traits (boldness, dietary flexibility, tolerance of noise) just as a coral reef selects for others. To call the urban raccoon 'less natural' than its woodland relative is to mistake our own preferences for a law of biology.

This is not a comforting thought for those who would preserve nature by cordoning it off. If wilderness is not a place but a process—the ongoing negotiation between organisms and their environments—then it is happening on my fire escape as surely as in Yellowstone. The task of conservation becomes stranger and more difficult: not to protect a pristine elsewhere, but to attend to the wildness already among us, which we are, moment by moment, shaping into something new.

The author's central claim is best described as which of the following?

From a book review of a new history of the printing press:

Every generation announces that its technologies have transformed the human mind, and every generation is partly right and largely wrong. Harding's new history of movable type is welcome precisely because it resists the two familiar temptations. It does not, on the one hand, portray Gutenberg's press as a lightning bolt that split medieval Europe from modernity in a single flash; nor does it, on the other, retreat into the fashionable skepticism that treats all such 'revolutions' as marketing copy imposed after the fact by triumphalist historians.

What Harding shows, patiently and with a wealth of ledger books and letters, is that the press mattered enormously—but not for the reasons popular accounts suggest. It was not the sudden availability of the Bible in vernacular translations that shook the Church; those translations had circulated in manuscript for over a century. It was, rather, the standardization of texts: the fact that two readers, hundreds of miles apart, could now argue over the exact same words, punctuation and all. Disagreement, in the age of the manuscript, dissolved into the fog of textual variation. Print made disagreement precise, and precise disagreement is the engine of both science and schism.

Harding's argument will annoy readers who prefer their history dramatic. But drama, as she notes drily in her introduction, is what happens to people; explanation is what historians owe them.

According to the reviewer's account of Harding's argument, why was the printing press historically transformative?

From an essay on the ethics of memoir:

When I began writing about my father, I told myself I would be scrupulous with the facts. I would check dates against letters, cross-reference my memories with those of my sisters, refuse the novelist's license to invent a convenient detail. This scrupulousness lasted about three chapters. Not because I began to lie, but because I began to understand that the choice of what to include is itself a form of invention more consequential than any fabricated detail.

My father, in the pages I had written, was becoming a character—coherent, motivated, legible. But the man I remembered was none of these things. He was a shifting weather, contradictory from one hour to the next, and any account that resolved him into a person the reader could follow was already a fiction, however faithfully sourced. The choice was not between honesty and invention. It was between two kinds of invention: the kind that admits itself, and the kind that hides behind footnotes.

I do not conclude from this that memoirists should abandon accuracy. Facts still matter; a false date is still a false date. But I have grown suspicious of the memoirist who claims to have written 'exactly what happened.' What happened, in any life worth writing about, exceeds the shape of any sentence. The honest memoirist does not deny this. She works within it, and, when she can, she tells the reader she is working within it.

The author would most likely agree with which of the following statements about memoir writing?

From a personal essay on hospitality:

My grandmother kept a guest room that no guest ever entered. Its bed was made with linens starched to a stiffness that would have discouraged sleep; its bureau held soaps still in their cellophane; its window shade was drawn against a sun that might have faded the coverlet. Once a month, she dusted the room with the same brisk devotion she gave to the sanctuary of her church.

I understood, without asking, that the room was not for guests. It was for the idea of guests—for the possibility that a stranger might, someday, arrive in need, and be met not with apology or improvisation but with a readiness that had been maintained through years of patient uselessness. The room was a promise she made, daily, to a person who never came.

I think of that room often now, in a country that has grown suspicious of such promises. We are asked, increasingly, to justify our preparations by the frequency of their use, to demonstrate that our generosity is efficient, that our welcomes pay for themselves. My grandmother would not have understood this arithmetic. Hospitality, for her, was not what you extended when a guest arrived; it was what you were when no one was there. The room was not waiting to be used. It was already, in the only sense that mattered, in use.

The final sentence, 'It was already, in the only sense that mattered, in use,' most nearly means that:

From an essay in a journal of architectural criticism:

The new civic library, unveiled last month to considerable fanfare, has been praised for its 'transparency': its glass facades, its open floor plans, its refusal of the fortress aesthetic that dominated public buildings a generation ago. The rhetoric of transparency has become so pervasive in contemporary civic architecture that we scarcely pause to ask what, precisely, is being made transparent, and to whom.

In the case of the library, the answer is instructive. From the sidewalk, one can see readers at their tables, librarians at their desks, children in the story corner. What one cannot see are the negotiations that produced the building: the compromises with donors that shrank the periodicals collection, the zoning variances that displaced a community garden, the acoustic decisions that make certain kinds of conversation impossible within its walls. The building is transparent about its occupants and opaque about itself.

This is not a flaw of the particular architect but a feature of the architectural vocabulary she inherited. Transparency, as a design ideal, tends to display the life of a building's users while concealing the interests of its patrons. A truly transparent civic building would require not just glass but disclosure—of budgets, of contracts, of the choices that were considered and rejected. Until architecture develops such a vocabulary, we should regard the current usage of the word 'transparency' as we regard any advertising slogan: not as a description of the product, but as an inducement to purchase it.

The critic's central objection to contemporary 'transparent' civic architecture is that:

From an essay on the natural history of boredom:

Boredom, the psychologists tell us, is unpleasant, and this is where their inquiries mostly stop. Unpleasantness, after all, is the sort of thing a species evolves to avoid. And yet, the more one considers boredom, the stranger it becomes that we experience it at all. A creature adequately fed and safe might be expected to rest quietly, conserving calories. Instead, the well-fed human, secure in her chair, feels an itch that no external circumstance can explain and that drives her, often against her better judgment, to seek out risk, novelty, difficulty—the very conditions our ancestors presumably fled.

One possibility is that boredom is an evolutionary residue, a signal calibrated for environments in which sitting still was likely to end badly and that now misfires in our climate-controlled interiors. This is the standard account, and it is not implausible. But it treats boredom as an error, and errors that persist for millions of years deserve suspicion.

A more provocative possibility is that boredom is not a malfunction but a function—that it exists precisely to prevent us from settling into the comfortable stagnation that would, over generations, be maladaptive. The bored ancestor invented tools, migrated, told stories. The unbored ancestor, contented with her cave, has no descendants to speak on her behalf. On this view, our discontent with rest is not a bug in the human operating system. It is the operating system.

How does the author's second explanation of boredom (as a 'function') relate to the first explanation (as an 'evolutionary residue')?

From an essay on reading in the digital age:

A colleague of mine, a scholar of Victorian fiction, recently confessed that she can no longer read a novel straight through. She reads in fragments, checking her phone between paragraphs, skimming description, returning to dialogue. She blames the internet, and she is not alone. A whole genre of lament has emerged around the claim that our devices have shortened our attention, hollowed our reading, degraded a capacity that generations before us possessed as a birthright.

I find the lament sincere and the diagnosis suspect. The Victorian reader my colleague mourns was, in fact, a fairly rare creature—educated, leisured, and largely male—whose habits of sustained reading depended on conditions (servants, lamp oil, silent parlors) that most of our ancestors did not enjoy. To describe our present distractibility as a fall from grace is to compare ourselves not with humanity but with a narrow historical elite. And even within that elite, sustained reading was often less sustained than we imagine; Victorian diaries record the same interruptions, the same wandering minds, the same guilty returns to the page that fill our own reading lives.

This is not to deny that something is happening to attention. Something is always happening to attention. It is to insist that the story is more interesting than nostalgia allows. What our devices have changed is not our capacity to read but our sense of what reading is for—and that sense, being cultural rather than neurological, is negotiable in ways that a lost cognitive faculty would not be.

The author's argument would be most seriously weakened by which of the following findings, if true?

From an op-ed by an economist writing in the aftermath of a market panic:

Among the many curiosities of financial crises is the discovery, always fresh, that the experts did not see it coming. Newspaper columnists demand accountability; commissions are appointed; textbooks are revised. And yet, within a decade, the cycle resumes: complacency, exuberance, collapse, astonishment. Why do we not learn?

The usual answer is that memories are short and greed is long. This is true but insufficient. The deeper problem is that the very act of preparing for the last crisis makes the next one more likely. Regulators tighten the rules that failed; capital flees to sectors the rules do not yet reach; risk accumulates in those unwatched corners until it detonates there instead. The system does not fail to learn. It learns exquisitely—but what it learns is how to disguise its next failure as something novel.

This suggests that the ambition to make finance 'crisis-proof' is not merely difficult but incoherent, like designing a maze that no mouse can solve. A better ambition would be to make crises survivable: to build institutions that absorb shocks rather than deny them, and to teach the public that the periodic collapse of confidence is not an aberration in the system but a feature of it. This is not a counsel of despair. It is a counsel of maturity, which is what we ask of individuals and, occasionally, ought to ask of societies.

The author's argument depends most directly on which of the following claims?

From a magazine feature on the science of expertise:

The stopwatch has done more harm to our understanding of skill than any other instrument. Because we can measure the time a surgeon takes to complete a procedure, or a pianist to run a scale, we have come to believe that speed is a proxy for mastery. It is not. Speed is a proxy for automaticity—the offloading of a task to procedures that require no conscious attention. Automaticity is useful, even essential, but it is precisely what expertise, at its highest levels, transcends.

The grandmaster does not play chess faster than the club player; often she plays slower, because she sees more. The senior diagnostician spends longer with a puzzling patient, not less, because she notices the anomalies that the resident's rapid pattern-matching overlooks. What distinguishes the expert is not the speed of her responses but the richness of her perception—the density of features and possibilities she can hold in view before committing to a course of action.

This has consequences for how we train professionals. A curriculum that rewards quick answers produces confident amateurs; one that rewards attentive answers produces experts who know when to be slow. The tragedy of contemporary medical education, one physician told me, is that we now graduate students who can pass a hundred-question exam in ninety minutes but who cannot sit with a patient for twenty.

Which statement best captures the logical relationship the author draws between speed and expertise?

From a lecture on the philosophy of science:

We are told, from an early age, that science advances by experiment: a hypothesis is proposed, an experiment devised, and the hypothesis stands or falls by the result. This picture is not so much wrong as radically incomplete. It omits the messiest and most consequential moment in scientific practice, which is the moment when the experiment yields a result no one expected and no one knows how to interpret.

At such moments, the scientist has a choice—though it does not usually feel like a choice, because it is made in the same breath as the observation. She may decide that the anomaly is real and that the theory must yield. Or she may decide that the anomaly is an artifact of the apparatus, of contamination, of the observer's fatigue. History records the triumphs of the first decision: the anomalies that turned out to be pulsars, or cosmic background radiation, or the accelerating expansion of the universe. History is quieter about the second decision, but it is far more common, and, on the whole, far more often correct. Most anomalies are, in fact, artifacts. A discipline that treated every glitch as a revolution would collapse into noise.

The art of science, then, is not primarily the art of designing experiments. It is the art of knowing which anomalies to take seriously—an art that no methodology has ever formalized, and that is transmitted, when it is transmitted at all, by apprenticeship.

The speaker's argument implies which of the following about the standard 'hypothesis-and-experiment' model of science?

From a memoir by a former translator at international tribunals:

People assume that translation is a matter of substitution: for every word in one tongue, a word in another, like changing currency at a border. They picture the translator as a kind of clerk, tallying equivalences. In truth, we are more like smugglers. We move meaning across borders that were never meant to be crossed, and something is always confiscated at the checkpoint.

Consider the Japanese amae, a word for the pleasurable dependence of an adult who is permitted, briefly, to behave like a beloved child. English has no such word, because English-speaking cultures rarely license such behavior in adults. To translate amae as 'dependence' is to smuggle a suitcase across the border and, on arrival, discover that half its contents have been replaced with something similar-looking but subtly wrong. The word arrives; the world it came from does not.

This is why the best interpreters at the tribunals were not those with the largest vocabularies but those with the deepest suspicion of their own fluency. They knew when to pause, when to circumlocute, when to warn the judges: 'The witness has used a term that does not translate. Permit me a moment.' Their scrupulousness was often mistaken for slowness. In fact, it was the opposite of slowness—it was the refusal to pretend that a difficult thing was easy.

The author uses the extended comparison of translators to smugglers primarily to convey which idea?

From a foreword to a collection of civil-rights-era speeches (original composition in the register of mid-twentieth-century American oratory):

We have been told, and told again, that patience is the great virtue of a people seeking redress. That to press too hard against injustice is to invite the closing of doors that a softer approach might yet leave ajar. That the arc of moral progress, being long, does not require our shoulders against it. To such counsel I would offer a single observation, drawn not from any political philosophy but from the plain history of our republic.

No right now enjoyed by any American was granted from above at the moment of its natural ripening. Every right was demanded before it was ripe, insisted upon while it was still called premature, and asserted in the face of the accusation—so wearily familiar to those of us who march—that the demand was ill-timed. The vote for women was ill-timed. The end of child labor in our mills was ill-timed. The dignity of the laborer, the schooling of the immigrant, the very independence of the colonies from a distant crown—all were, in their season, ill-timed.

I conclude from this record not that timing is unimportant, but that those who counsel patience have never, in the whole history of our country, been the ones who won a right. They have only been, at best, the ones who accepted rights won by others. Let us not confuse their counsel with wisdom. Let us call it what it is: the voice of a comfort that has never had to wait.

The speaker's argument against 'counsels of patience' rests principally on which type of evidence?