High School Reading: Grades 9-10 Quiz: Reading Literary Nonfiction 9 10

When Marion Donovan invented the disposable diaper in 1946, the response from established manufacturers was not enthusiasm but ridicule. Executives at every major paper-goods company she approached told her the same thing: mothers were satisfied with cloth, and no one would pay a premium for convenience. Donovan, undeterred, manufactured and sold her waterproof diaper cover herself, and within a decade the industry that had dismissed her was scrambling to catch up.

Donovan's experience illustrates a pattern historians of technology call 'incumbent blindness.' Companies that dominate a market often mistake their customers' current habits for their permanent preferences. Because cloth diapers were what mothers used, executives assumed cloth diapers were what mothers wanted. They confused a lack of alternatives with a lack of demand. This confusion is not the result of stupidity; it is the predictable consequence of success. The very data that makes established firms confident—sales figures, customer surveys, market share—is generated by the world as it currently exists, not the world as it could be.

Which statement best expresses the central idea of the passage?

Adapted from a 1912 essay on public libraries.

The critics of the free public library have always had one argument that seemed, on its face, unanswerable: why should the taxpayer be compelled to buy books for his neighbor? If a man wishes to read, let him purchase what he pleases; if he does not wish to read, let him keep his money. The library, in this view, is a species of charity, and charity ought to be voluntary.

The answer is that the library is not charity at all. It is infrastructure. We do not ask whether the taxpayer who never leaves his village should be compelled to pay for the roads that carry other men's wagons. We do not ask whether the childless should be compelled to pay for the schools that educate other men's sons. We recognize, in these cases, that a road no one travels is useless, and a mind no one has trained is dangerous. The library rests on the same principle. A citizen who cannot inform himself is a citizen who cannot govern himself, and a republic of such citizens will not long remain a republic.

The author's comparison of libraries to roads and schools functions primarily to—

There is a particular kind of tiredness that afflicts people who have spent the day making small decisions. Psychologists call it 'decision fatigue,' and its symptoms are familiar to anyone who has ever stood, exhausted, in a grocery store aisle, unable to choose between two nearly identical brands of pasta sauce. What is less familiar is the mechanism. Decision fatigue is not caused by mental effort in the way that lifting boxes causes physical fatigue. Studies suggest, rather, that each choice depletes a limited reserve of self-control, and that when the reserve is empty, the brain begins to make decisions by default—choosing whatever is easiest, cheapest, or most immediately gratifying.

This has unsettling implications. It suggests that a judge's ruling may depend less on the merits of the case than on whether it comes before or after lunch. It suggests that a shopper who resists a dozen small temptations may lack the willpower to resist the thirteenth. And it suggests, most disturbingly, that the modern environment—which bombards us with choices from the moment we wake—may be systematically eroding the very faculty we rely on to navigate it.

Based on the passage, which situation would best illustrate decision fatigue?

From a 1953 lecture on the study of history.

Students often ask me why they should study events that happened centuries before they were born. The honest answer is that most of what we call history will be, for most students, useless in any practical sense. The date of the Peace of Westphalia will not help you get a job, save a marriage, or cure a disease. If usefulness is your measure, you would do better to study accounting.

And yet I persist in teaching history, and in believing that everyone should learn some, because the alternative is worse. A person who knows no history is a person who mistakes his own moment for the whole of human experience. He believes that whatever exists must always have existed, that whatever seems normal must be natural, that whatever his neighbors think must be what any reasonable person would think. History does not tell such a person what to do. It tells him, more valuably, that things have been otherwise, and could be otherwise again. It is not a manual. It is a mirror held up at an angle, so that we can see, for the first time, the shape of the room we are standing in.

The author most likely admits that history is not 'useful in any practical sense' in order to—

Adapted from a naturalist's field journal, 1934.

I have spent three weeks now observing the ravens at the north end of the valley, and I confess that I understand them less than I did when I began. On the first day, I recorded that they seemed to be scavenging in pairs. On the second day, I noted that the pairs sometimes split up and rejoined other pairs. On the third day, I saw a group of eleven ravens harassing a coyote, and I could no longer tell which pair was which.

The temptation, at this point, is to abandon the notes of the first day and start over with a new theory. But this is exactly what a careful observer must not do. The first day's observations were not wrong; they were incomplete. The ravens do sometimes forage in pairs. They also sometimes forage in larger groups, and sometimes alone, and the composition of these groups shifts in ways I have not yet mapped. A theory that accounts for only the pairs is inadequate. A theory that dismisses the pairs is worse.

The passage suggests that the naturalist's greatest challenge in studying the ravens is—

In 1854, when cholera swept through the Soho district of London, most physicians blamed the outbreak on 'miasma'—foul air rising from the city's waste. The theory had the authority of centuries behind it, and it had the further advantage of matching what people could smell: the neighborhoods that stank were the neighborhoods that sickened. A young doctor named John Snow disagreed. Snow suspected that cholera was transmitted through contaminated water, and he set out to prove it by mapping every death in the outbreak against the location of the nearest public water pump.

What Snow discovered was that the deaths clustered around a single pump on Broad Street. Residents who drew water elsewhere were largely spared, even when they lived in the smelliest streets. When Snow persuaded local authorities to remove the pump's handle, the outbreak subsided. His map did not, by itself, convince the medical establishment; miasma theory would linger for another two decades. But it introduced a new kind of evidence into public health—evidence that could be seen at a glance, and that pointed, unmistakably, at a single wooden handle in a London street.

The passage suggests that miasma theory persisted for so long primarily because—

The word 'algorithm' entered English through a curious accident of transliteration. In the ninth century, a mathematician named Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi worked in Baghdad's House of Wisdom, where he composed a treatise on solving equations. When his work was translated into Latin some three hundred years later, his name—al-Khwarizmi—was rendered as 'Algoritmi.' European scholars, encountering the Latin text, assumed 'algoritmi' referred not to a person but to the method he described. The mathematician's name became the name for his technique, and eventually for any step-by-step procedure.

This kind of accident is more common than we suppose. The word 'sandwich' preserves the title of an eighteenth-century English earl. The word 'boycott' preserves the surname of an Irish land agent. When we speak, we are constantly invoking people we have forgotten, and forgetting people we still invoke. Language is a graveyard whose headstones we cannot read.

The final sentence, 'Language is a graveyard whose headstones we cannot read,' primarily serves to—

For most of the twentieth century, American nutrition science was dominated by a single, elegant theory: that dietary fat—especially saturated fat—was the primary cause of heart disease. The theory was elegant because it was simple, because it fit the available evidence, and because it suggested a clear course of action. Eat less fat, live longer. Public health authorities embraced it. Food companies reformulated their products. A generation of Americans learned to read labels for fat content and to feel virtuous when the number was low.

The theory had one significant weakness, which was not widely discussed at the time: it was not, strictly speaking, proven. The studies on which it rested were largely observational, showing that populations with high-fat diets tended to have more heart disease, but not that fat itself was the cause. Correlations were treated as mechanisms. Alternative explanations—sugar, processed carbohydrates, sedentary lifestyles—were noted and set aside. It would take fifty years, and a great deal of unnecessary suffering, before the profession began to reconsider what it had so confidently declared.

Which sentence from the passage best supports the idea that the fat-heart disease theory was accepted more readily than the evidence justified?

There is a fashion, in current writing about technology, of treating every new invention as either a triumph or a catastrophe. The smartphone will liberate us or enslave us. Artificial intelligence will cure cancer or destroy civilization. Social media will democratize speech or corrode democracy itself. What is missing from these accounts is not intelligence—many of their authors are extremely intelligent—but a kind of patience. The honest answer to most questions about a new technology's long-term effects is that we do not yet know, and that we will not know for some time.

This is not a satisfying answer. It does not sell books. It does not generate the outrage or the enthusiasm that drives readers to share an article. But it happens to be true, and pretending otherwise—confidently predicting either paradise or apocalypse—produces a body of writing that will look, in retrospect, embarrassingly overconfident in both directions. The critic who declared in 1995 that the internet would have 'no lasting effect on society' and the enthusiast who declared it would 'end war' were both wrong, and both wrong in the same way: they mistook their own certainty for knowledge.

The author's reference to the 1995 predictions about the internet primarily serves to—

The first time I stepped into a working newsroom, in the summer of 1998, I expected the cinematic version: shouting editors, ringing phones, reporters sprinting toward the door with notebooks flapping. What I found instead was a room so quiet I could hear the hum of the fluorescent lights. Two dozen people sat at beige desks, typing. Occasionally someone would sigh. Once, a man stood up to refill his coffee.

I mention this because I have since read many memoirs by journalists of my generation, and nearly all of them describe newsrooms in the same breathless, movie-set terms I had imagined before I arrived. I suspect my colleagues remember what they expected to see, not what was actually in front of them. Memory is a generous editor. It cuts the boring parts, adds the music, and hands us back a version of our lives that would play well on screen. This is not exactly lying—my colleagues believe their descriptions—but it is not exactly truth either.

The author's description of the man refilling his coffee primarily serves to—

The great difficulty in writing about one's own family is that the writer knows too much. A novelist inventing a character can choose which details to reveal and which to withhold, because there is nothing behind the character except the choices themselves. But a memoirist writing about her mother knows a thousand things she has not put on the page, and every sentence she writes is shadowed by everything she has chosen to omit.

Readers sometimes complain that memoirs feel selective or unfair. They are right, but not for the reasons they suppose. The unfairness is not that the memoirist has lied; it is that she has chosen. She has decided, out of the vast and contradictory reality of a person she loved, which two or three qualities to preserve on paper. The mother in the book is not the mother in life. She is a construction, honest in what it includes and dishonest in what it leaves out. The memoirist knows this. Sometimes it is what keeps her from writing at all.

According to the passage, the central difference between writing fiction and writing memoir is that—

When we say that a photograph 'captures' a moment, we speak more accurately than we know. The verb suggests seizure, imprisonment, the arresting of something that would otherwise have gotten away. And this is precisely what a photograph does. It takes a fraction of a second—an interval too brief for any human to consciously experience—and freezes it, so that we can examine it at length, share it with others, and revisit it years after the moment itself has been swept away by time.

But capture, in this sense, is also loss. The photograph preserves the visible surface of a moment while discarding everything else: the sounds, the smells, the temperature of the air, the thoughts of the people pictured. It preserves a fraction of a second while erasing the seconds before and after that gave the moment its meaning. We look at old photographs and feel that we are recovering the past. In truth, we are looking at a very thin slice of it, and often mistaking the slice for the whole.

The author's use of the word 'capture' throughout the passage is best described as—