On Tuesday nights, when the press idled like an old truck in the back room, I proofed the front page beneath the humming neon. The refinery's flare, visible through my office window, burned a steady second sun over our bay town. That week, a line cook had slipped me a phone video—rainbow sheen drifting from the plant's outfall, mullet skipping past it as if the water stung. The ad rep had already sold the refinery a full-page congratulating the high school's playoff run; the check cleared before the team bus rumbled north.

I told myself it wasn't the video's blurriness that kept me from assigning the story. It was the way the grocery sponsored the band uniforms, the way the motel comped rooms for evacuation nights, the way my son's ag teacher kept extra feed sacks for families that needed them. People around here count favors like rainfall.

I filed a softer piece about the flare's "reliability" during cold snaps. I wrote it clean and neutral. Then I drove the long way home, past the boat ramp where nobody fishes anymore after dark, and watched the tide slide under the pier. The water didn't look dangerous. It only looked like it had learned to keep secrets.

Which inference best explains the narrator's decision not to run the spill story?

Every evening after closing the shop, I carry a tin of oil to the back lot and tend the gate. Two swings, one latch. The hinges complain in a voice I know better than my own, a rusted vowel that held our yard together when Dad was alive and the storms came teasing the coastline. He used to say a gate is a promise: it should move when asked and hold firm when told. He left no will, only a drawer of receipts that smelled like salt, and a gate that sags when the wind turns east.

Neighbors have offered a new chain-link, something that won't remember our weather. I nod, thank them, return to the hinges. Oil darkens the metal delicately, as if the years could be convinced to behave. When I work the latch, the sound reaches the alley and back again. I imagine it traveling like a message that never quite lands, like the last voicemail from the night shift I never deleted. The shop's books agree we are solvent in the daylight. Night asks different questions, and the gate keeps answering them, back and forth, until I can lock up the quiet and go home without needing to turn on any lights.

Which inference about the narrator's nightly ritual is best supported by the passage's nuanced details?

At the church basement off Commerce, the engineers unfolded foam boards showing the new lanes braided like river channels across the East Side. One measured "throughput" with a ruler, as if time itself could be widened. The barber from Pine, fresh apron still dusted with hair, leaned over the maps and found his street where the line turned gray—"relocation zone." A trucker said he just wanted to stop idling on I-35; a nurse asked where the pedestrian bridge would land; a grandfather asked whether asthma travels in the same direction as traffic.

Later, I walked the block where a house leaned into a pecan tree and a basketball hoop listed toward a ditch. The surveyor's stakes made a careful geometry of what could be removed. I wrote the column that night. I did not call the plan cruel; cruelty presumes intention. What I wrote was that concrete is our most legible handwriting, and it keeps spelling the same sentence: that speed is a right some are too late to claim. The comments accused me of hating cars. It's not cars. It's the arithmetic that counts minutes in one place and erases breath in another, the math that pretends both sums equal fairness.

Which inference best captures the author's underlying critique of the highway plan?

In the archive, donors arrive with boxes that want to become stories. They bring letters in careful stacks and ask if we can "clean up" the margins—names crossed out in a marriage announcement, a recipe stained with grease, a postcard that says "Wish you were" and never finishes the sentence. They smile as if history were a hallway that refuses to show its closets.

My job description lists preservation, not persuasion, though the difference blurs when I decide which page gets sleeved first. The scanner shows me what a light can do to paper: it flattens the bruise of a coffee ring into a polite shadow. I could edit the shadow entirely. No one would know there was once a cup and a hand and a haste. A grandson, reading, would meet a version of his family that never spilled.

Sometimes I leave the error a little loud. Not to embarrass, but to keep the documents honest about the lives that made them. I think of the first-year students who come here believing history is a shelf of answers and leave suspecting it is a shelf of arguments. We are not custodians of perfection. We are custodians of the courage to be incomplete.

Which inference about the archivist's philosophy is most strongly supported by the passage's nuanced details?

By the time the county posted drought restrictions, the courthouse lawn looked like a map of old rivers, the grass seamed with pale channels where kids once raced after Fourth-of-July fireworks. My grandmother, who keeps a mason jar of 1957 dust on her windowsill, says a dry year teaches you what a promise is worth. At the water board meeting, the ranchers brought photographs of cracked tanks; the wind-farm manager brought charts stapled in tidy stacks. No one mentioned the Spanish name of the creek that the developers call Arroyo Vista on their glossy brochures. I found myself counting the beats between applause and silence, the way you count seconds after lightning. When the chair suggested a "temporary" pipeline to the oil field, he held the word like a bridge he could walk back across later. The old men in starched shirts lifted their hats, both salute and shield. I think about the little school in the Panhandle that closed last spring, its trophy cases boxed and stored, like a mouth without teeth. We tell ourselves water runs downhill, as if need had a gravity all its own; but in this room, it follows the slope of influence and habit.

Which inference is most reasonable and best supported by the passage?

The dashboard learns me by forgetting me. Each morning it serves a carousel of almosts: articles I might finish, songs I might have liked if I were still the version of myself who ran at dawn. The machine is diligent, even tender in its way, smoothing away the grit of yesterday's hesitation. I do not claim virtue for paper and dust, but I notice that a shelf does not rearrange itself to flatter my impatience. A tide follows clocks; attention follows small covenants—standing in line, letting a paragraph resist me until it yields its second weather. When the platform interrupts to suggest I "skip ahead," it is not impolite; it is a host who has mistaken anticipation for a problem to be solved. My students ask whether curation can be neutral, as though a garden could grow without paths. I tell them neutrality is a posture one holds until the wind turns, and then the posture is a sail. To be attentive is to admit that choosing brings loss, that every yes throws a shadow shaped like no. The dashboard does not grieve; it only improves. I would rather keep an imperfect ledger and remember what the totals cost me.

Which inference demonstrates the most nuanced understanding of the author's argument?

After the water receded, the street learned to sound different: trucks hummed like distant bees, and a new silence pooled under the eaves where cicadas once raged. On Saturday, the men hauled smokers to the curb, their barbecue smoke an argument that you could eat. My aunt spread a map on the hood of her car and used bottle caps to mark who had taken the developer's buyout. She left the cap over our house empty, as if an absence could weigh something down. The church posted another potluck, this time in the rec center with a ceiling that still wore tide lines. The birds came back first—herons lifting off the bayou like unmoored notes—and then the insurance adjusters with clipboards, offering math with a smile. When I asked my aunt why we stayed, she pointed past the live oaks toward a fenced square of ground you would miss if you were driving too fast. The cemetery is shallow here, she said, and names have more trouble holding. The new houses on higher ground have balconies that look toward downtown. Ours looks toward water. It isn't brave. It's an address that keeps answering when we call it home at night.

Which inference is best supported by the passage's imagery and details?

They said the curtain must rise at eight, but eight is a rumor audiences tell themselves so their waiting will seem orderly. Theo, who once marked time by the metronome in his pocket, is late or has decided to be. I have moved the lamps to make a corridor of shadow downstage, where an absence can read as intention if you give it good framing. The stage manager glares at the clock as if it were a conductor who has missed his cue. I call for another hold, and someone in the balcony laughs the way people laugh when a string almost breaks. Theo taught me that an actor enters twice—once with his body, and once with the air he changes by promising to arrive. It turns out that promise can be kept by someone else. The understudy is ready, but I ask him to wait, which is to say I ask the audience to write a scene with me about patience that is really about loss. When the curtain finally climbs, it feels like a synonym smeared thin across a missing word. They will applaud, generously. We will take it. We will say the timing was deliberate all along.

Which inference reflects the most sophisticated reading of the director's choices?