Cities increasingly rely on predictive algorithms to allocate police patrols and advise judges on bail. Proponents argue that statistical models neutralize human bias, yet the promise of objectivity depends on data gathered from historically unequal practices. If a neighborhood has been overpoliced, arrests rise, models predict more crime there, and patrols return, closing a loop that looks like truth because it repeats itself. Critics also note that accuracy can conflict with fairness: a model that lowers false negatives may raise false positives for certain groups. Policymakers face a subtler paradox. Transparent models allow public scrutiny, but transparency can enable gaming by both officials and citizens; opacity resists gaming, but it hides value choices in math. Meanwhile, the language of efficiency reframes justice as optimization, shifting moral debate into technical settings where thresholds and cost functions silently encode priorities. Should an algorithm forecast risk, or should it forecast opportunity, pointing resources toward housing, education, or mental health? A city is not only a dataset; it is a contested narrative about safety, dignity, and belonging. The real question may be who chooses the story the model tells, and who gets to revise its plot when the model predicts them for their futures.

Which of the following questions, asked during reading, would most effectively deepen understanding and promote sophisticated analysis of the passage?

In Texas, drought feels less like an interruption than a recurring stanza in a long poem about land, law, and growth. Rivers cross county lines, but water rights do not flow so easily. The state balances two legacies: groundwater that belongs to landowners "as far down as they can draw," and surface water apportioned through permits shaped by history, influence, and hydrology. As cities along the I-35 corridor expand, ranchers and aquifer districts worry that pipelines will turn rural wells into urban faucets. Environmental advocates argue that a river needs a right to remain a river--enough flow to sustain estuaries, oysters, and migration--while industries warn that constraints ripple into jobs and prices. Models promise certainty, yet rainfall arrives as memory and surprise, and conservation campaigns compete with political aversion to mandates. Desalination, reuse, and market transfers attract investors, but each solution redraws who gains and who bears risk. The debate pivots on what counts as "beneficial use": immediate consumption, strategic reserve, ecological resilience, or cultural continuity. In a state that celebrates private stewardship and regional identity, which institution--local district, statewide board, or court--can translate parched urgency into a fair plan when the next dry year is already forming over Texas.

Which of the following questions, asked during reading, would most effectively deepen understanding and promote sophisticated analysis of the passage?

The narrator returns to a town that exists only when the river floods. In dry months, the streets are a map sketched on cracked clay; in wet months, the buildings lift like boats and drift to their remembered corners. People there speak in futures: you will meet me yesterday, they say, and the narrator believes them because photographs fade into blank paper before every goodbye. The story's sentences mirror the tide, swelling with clauses before falling to bare nouns. Objects carry double lives. A school bell is also a lighthouse; a calendar is a house key; a suitcase is a pond that keeps the shape of hands. The narrator insists that none of this is magical, just a language for grief. The town's rule is simple: you can keep only what can float. He packs apology, a letter never sent, and a stone from his mother's garden. When the water rises, the letter turns into mist, the apology into a lantern, and the stone into an anchor. By the end, the map is unreadable, but the narrator claims he knows the way home by the light he is still carrying, which no one else can see in the dark tonight.

Which of the following questions, asked during reading, would most effectively deepen understanding and promote sophisticated analysis of the passage?

Texas prides itself on energy independence, yet the state's grid reveals a complicated bargain between autonomy, abundance, and vulnerability. Operating mostly apart from federal oversight, the market rewards low prices in ordinary weather, inviting investment in wind farms, gas plants, and solar arrays while discouraging capacity that sits idle. When heat stretches beyond forecasts or a freeze lingers, scarcity pricing spikes, and consumers discover that efficiency on paper can feel like fragility at home. Advocates for a firmer fleet call for incentives to build dispatchable power and strengthen winterization, while others warn that paying for rarely used insurance will raise bills and slow innovation. Meanwhile, rural counties negotiate the costs and benefits of transmission lines that carry urban demand, and coastal communities weigh export terminals against fisheries and storms. The public language alternates between freedom and responsibility: the right to choose a provider, the duty to conserve, the preference for competition, the need for reliability. Because the grid is an ecosystem of contracts, cables, and weather, policy choices echo through technical details like ancillary services and interconnection queues. The question is whether independence can be redesigned as interdependence without sacrificing the distinctive speed that built the system from the start.

Which of the following questions, asked during reading, would most effectively deepen understanding and promote sophisticated analysis of the passage?

In Texas, the language of water law divides what rivers carry from what aquifers store: surface water is governed by prior appropriation, while groundwater often falls under the "rule of capture." That split, more historical accident than natural truth, shapes how drought is felt and who bears its costs. Cities argue that conservation and pipelines signal stewardship; farmers counter that orchards and herds cannot be idled like lawns. Energy producers need vast volumes for cooling and extraction, yet promise jobs and tax bases. Environmental advocates insist that springs and bays have flows that are not mere amenities but living systems. Interstate compacts and coastal fisheries link local choices to distant consequences; a pumped aquifer can tilt salinity, which shifts shrimp nurseries, which ripples through economies. Amid this complexity, equity is both a measure and a method: are colonias and rural communities at the planning table, and whose "need" becomes law? The state's regional planning process invites public input, but technical models often encode assumptions about growth and risk that are not neutral. The argument, then, is not only about water but about which futures Texas chooses to make liquid.

During reading, which question would most effectively deepen understanding of the author's argument about Texas water policy and its layered trade-offs?

Advocates of gene editing often speak of surgical precision, a metaphor that suggests certainty; critics answer with the image of a symphony edited mid-performance, warning of cascading disharmony. The debate is less about whether CRISPR can cut a sequence than about how uncertainty distributes across time and community. A correction in one embryo could echo across generations; a release into a wild population could reroute an ecosystem's feedback loops. Proponents emphasize moral urgency—preventing avoidable suffering—while skeptics foreground asymmetries of risk, noting that benefits may accrue to those who can pay while harms, if any, diffuse widely. Regulatory frameworks try to stabilize decisions by demanding thresholds of proof, yet what counts as "enough" evidence is shaped by values: precaution where reversibility is low, innovation where the status quo is itself harmful. The public narrative toggles between personal stories and statistical models, making the reader weigh pathos against projections. In this text, evidence is not only data but framing, with metaphors that smuggle in assumptions about control, reversibility, and responsibility. The question becomes: how do we deliberate when consequences are both measurable and incalculable, and when our tools for fixing problems can also redraw what we call a problem?

During reading, which question would most effectively promote sophisticated analysis of how the author constructs the debate on gene editing?

After a devastating winter storm, Texans learned the difference between reliability in theory and resilience in practice. The state's energy-only market rewards power generation when prices spike, on the premise that scarcity signals will finance capacity. Critics argue that rare but catastrophic cold snaps require investments that markets underprice: weatherization, firm fuel, demand response at scale. Supporters counter that adding mandated capacity payments burdens ratepayers and dampens innovation. Rural cooperatives, urban hospitals, and low-income households experience outages differently, revealing how a "neutral" design can produce uneven harms. The entity that coordinates the grid faces a paradox: to keep prices low most days while ensuring redundancy on the worst days. Additionally, gas supply, transmission bottlenecks, and interconnection choices complicate the tidy boundaries of electricity policy. The debate is not simply technical; it turns on how we value reliability, on whose terms we calculate cost, and which failures we're willing to prevent rather than recover from. In that sense, the grid is a civic mirror: it shows what risks we socialize and what we individualize.

During reading, which question would most effectively deepen understanding of the trade-offs in Texas grid design beyond surface descriptions of outages?

Debates about online speech often falter because participants smuggle in different metaphors: some call platforms private malls, others public squares, still others utilities. Each metaphor carries a policy kit. If a platform curates like a newspaper, editorial discretion is central; if it hosts like a phone company, neutrality becomes the norm; if it designs attention like an arcade, the game mechanics—not only the players—deserve scrutiny. The essay threads these analogies with a distinction between speech and reach: the right to speak versus algorithmic amplification. Moderation policies, then, are not merely about removal, but about ranking and recommendation—quiet forms of governance that calibrate visibility. The author juxtaposes user safety with concerns about the chilling of dissent, showing that harms travel both in content and in design. The reader is asked to track how definitions do work: what becomes "harm," who is the "speaker," and where "public" begins when access depends on private code. The argument suggests that the vocabulary we choose predetermines which solutions feel plausible.

During reading, which question would most effectively extend comprehension beyond surface-level summaries of 'free speech vs. censorship'?

After a Gulf Coast hurricane, emergency managers pilot an AI system to triage rescue requests across a flooded city. The model promises to shorten response time by ranking calls: rooftops first, then medical needs, then property damage. Yet the inputs that make speed measurable also smuggle in judgments. Neighborhood risk scores derive from past incident maps, insurance data, and social media pings—signals that skew toward people who had coverage, connectivity, or documented addresses before the storm. The author traces two clocks: one ticking toward the golden hour of survival, another measuring the accumulation of disadvantage when certain blocks wait longer, again. The argument refuses an easy villain. Human dispatchers carry bias; code can standardize bias. A proposed fix—weighting the queue with a vulnerability index—raises a second dilemma: when every call is urgent, what does fairness mean operationally? The essay circles a paradox: to act quickly, one must decide what to ignore, but the act of ignoring is never neutral. By the final paragraph, the author asks whether the city is optimizing for the visible crisis or for the invisible one that began long before landfall.

Which question would most effectively deepen understanding during reading of this passage?

In Texas, groundwater is often governed by the "rule of capture": if water lies beneath your land, you may pump it, even if neighbors' wells run dry. The essay maps how this individual right collides with regional realities. Municipal growth pulls new straws into shrinking aquifers; agriculture times pumping to markets, not recharge cycles; energy booms and busts puncture the subsurface with competing claims. Local conservation districts try to coordinate withdrawals, but their authority is patchwork, and climate variability scrambles the baselines on which plans rest. To imagine the collective stakes, the author offers an analogy: the aquifer as a shared checking account with invisible deposits and delayed statements. One landowner can legally withdraw today, but the overdraft fee posts to a future town in the form of subsidence, saltwater intrusion, or wells that fail in a heatwave. The piece resists easy moralizing, noting that rural tax bases, urban thirst, and property traditions all carry historical weight. It asks whether Texas can honor local control while acknowledging hydrology's indifference to county lines, and whether planning that anticipates uncertainty can be called "fair" to any single user.

Which question would best deepen your understanding during reading of this text?