I came back to the Panhandle in late August, when the wind made a language of every hinge and pumpjack. The grain elevator still holds the horizon steady, a white punctuation mark that keeps the sentence of prairie from running on. At dusk, the neon boot flickers, stubborn as a promise, and the diner smells like cinnamon and diesel. People here know how to last. Yet permanence, I learned, is curated. In the "pioneer" museum, the glass cases polish the story until fingerprints disappear. The mural that once showed a cotton crew under a high sun—brown faces bent to the same row—has been repainted: now an oilman shakes hands with a banker, both with teeth like billboards. "Heritage," the waitress says, sliding me pecan pie, "is what you can tell the grandkids without arguing." On Main, the last Spanish-language sign came down "to match the new façade." The wind still speaks, but some vowels are missing. Claim: The narrator admires the town's resilience while criticizing its selective memory, which erases the labor of Mexican and Black residents who built its endurance.

Which evidence provides the strongest support for the claim?

We speak of freedom as if it were a gate swung open onto empty land, but gates also hold when the wind rises. A promise not to take everything you can is not the end of liberty; it is the beginning of trust. Autonomy ripens when it learns its own edges and makes those edges legible to others. Private conscience may keep a secret vow, but shared life is built from vows we can see. On the gravel road that narrows to one lane at the creek, I ease off the gas when I see dust ahead; my brake lights are a small beacon that says: I am choosing you, too. No law commands this; no deputy tracks it. A town is a grammar for our choices, a way to conjugate I into we without erasing either. Claim: The author argues that genuine autonomy arises from self-limitation made visible to others, rather than from the mere absence of restraint.

Which evidence provides the strongest support for the claim?

When I unlock my grandmother's door, the smell is not the cinnamon I remember but the flat dust of cardboard, sunlight collecting on boxes like fine ash. The hall has narrowed, as if the walls have leaned in to listen. I carry with me a story: the blue bowl with a hairline crack, unbroken despite our clumsy hands, its resilience a proof that love knew how to hold weight. In the kitchen I find the bowl wrapped in old newsprint. Under the paper it is smaller, green, the crack a spider instead of a river. A photograph tucked beneath confirms it was always green, perched on a tablecloth I had turned into gingham in my mind. I feel the tug to restore the old version, to paint over what the light corrects. I say to myself that the bowl merely shifted shades when the curtains changed, that colors are fickle in memory, generous in meaning. Outside, a delivery truck coughs. Inside, I set the bowl down and hear the soft ring of ceramic, a note I cannot pretend away, and I understand that keeping the story means choosing which part to believe.

Claim: The narrator suggests memory functions as present self-fashioning rather than objective retrieval.

Which evidence from the passage provides the strongest support for the claim?

Texas calls water a local matter until the drought arrives like a tax notice, impersonal and due. Commissioners' courts hold meetings where neighbors speak in the patient grammar of wells and windmills. Yet the map on the wall keeps changing color: aquifers dropping, rivers crosshatched with intake sites. The state's rhetoric of local control fits neatly into the frame, but the funding flows refuse to sit still. Grants favor long pipelines and regional plants sized for distant suburbs; the wells that go quiet are on somebody else's ranch. When rural counties propose modest caps, they are chided for "blocking growth," and told the market will sort the scarcity. Desalination, floated as independence, arrives with bonds backed by state-level guarantees. A court can defend a landowner's right to pump, while the same session applauds an export project as innovation. In the newspaper's letters, old-timers praise self-reliance, even as the public ledger absorbs the risk.

Claim: Appeals to "local control" in Texas water policy mask a centralized pattern of risk-shifting onto rural communities.

Which evidence from the passage best supports the claim?

On museum walls and license plates, the cowboy rides alone against a sunset no one can source. The curators mention vaqueros and Black trail hands in a paragraph that feels like a corralling, dutiful and distant. Meanwhile, campaign ads splice pumpjacks with riders, saddle leather with steel, so that extraction looks like inheritance. The myth does not survive our archives by accident; it is fed because it is useful. In legislative hearings, a witness can cite "frontier grit" and pass for an economist. It promises that risk is a test of individual character, not a structure of wages and leases; it turns a payroll into a posse. When bust follows boom, the story simply swaps deserts: dust for shale, always the same horizon. The real trail was a caravan of languages, foremen who could read contracts, cooks who negotiated wages, and herds that belonged to banks. But that version cannot sell a deregulated season, and so the single rider remains, lonesome and unaccountable.

Claim: The lone cowboy myth endures not despite contradictory facts but because it offers a politically usable past for Texas's boom-and-bust policies.

Which evidence from the passage most strongly supports the claim?

City councils love the optics of a sapling in a plaza, the ribbon straining against ceremonial scissors. But heat does not negotiate with symbols; it keeps a ledger in asphalt and air. In our study of four neighborhoods, blocks with continuous canopy cooled twice as much five years later as plazas boasting feature trees, even when the budgets matched. Shade is additive and social: a line of crowns persuades pedestrians to stay, businesses to open early, and water crews to install permeable gutters because the street has become worth lingering in. The lone showcase oak throws a perfect circle at noon, admirable in a photograph, powerless against nights that never cool. Planting is policy, not pageantry.

Claim: Equitably distributed, contiguous canopy—not isolated "showcase" plantings—drives long-term urban heat mitigation through cumulative, networked effects.

Which evidence from the passage provides the strongest support for the claim?

All summer the lake held its breath, and so did I. The cousins told stories like stones tossed from the dock—plunk, ripple, gone. Mine I kept in my pocket, warm with handling. I mistrust my memory; it frays like the rope at the cleat, but fray is not the same as break. I remember enough to know what disclosure does to a room. When Aunt Mae went inside to fetch the lemon pie and the porch went quiet but for the moths, I felt the truth lean against me like an insistent friend. I kept the fact folded until the porch empties; truth is a door I open only when no one is made spectacle by its swing. If you had been there, you would have seen what I cannot say: the way a face stiffens at a name; the hush that follows a date. The lake keeps its silted histories without complaint; I do not. I keep them because keeping them is kinder than letting them loose among people who never learned to swim. Claim: The narrator's withholding is a deliberate ethical practice—an exercised moral agency—rather than a mere failure of memory or an unavoidable limitation of knowledge.

Which evidence from the passage best supports the claim that the narrator's silence is an ethical choice rather than a lapse of memory?

After the freeze, the question was not whether wires could carry more power or plants could withstand ice; engineers had filed reports for years explaining how. The more stubborn matter lay in the story the state told itself about its grid: an island recast as independence. In hearings, proposals to tie a few more threads across borders were treated less like cables and more like umbilicals—threats to self-reliance. Weatherization plans were priced in spreadsheets, but the ideology of market purity priced them out: it was cheaper, on paper, to valorize scarcity than to pay for capacity that might sit idle on a mild year. Consumers learned new vocabulary for darkness. When blackouts ended, applause went to the same design that had failed, as if stoicism were a substitute for insulation. The engineers did not speak the language that won the vote. Claim: The grid's fragility stems less from technical impossibility than from an ideological commitment to autonomy that distorts incentives and sidelines coordination even when experts recommend it.

Which evidence best supports the claim that ideology, not engineering limits, is the primary obstacle to grid resilience?

The town's archive keeps its clippings brittle and its handwriting slanted. In the 1887 minutes, a committee angling for the railroad sketches prosperity in neat sums: freight cheaper than mule teams, cattle moving without losing weight on dusty drives, letters arriving with regularity. Yet the letters tucked behind the minutes tell another calculus. A storekeeper writes of trust extended on winter credit because he knows a man's mother; a midwife describes blankets paid in eggs come spring. The editor's columns praise steel and smoke, but a farmer's margin notes fear that a timetable will turn neighbors into customers, and customers into strangers. If some opponents misjudge the grain rate by a few cents, their arithmetic error is not the core. What unsettles them is the idea that a price will replace a promise. One elder, who signs with an X, nonetheless explains that the road "will make everyone hurry." Claim: Opposition to the railroad arose less from ignorance of commerce than from anxiety that reciprocal obligations—the texture of local life—would be thinned by transactional speed.

Which evidence most strongly supports the claim that resistance was driven by fear of losing reciprocal social bonds rather than by economic ignorance?

In the Texas Panhandle, the Ogallala is measured in feet and in stories. Extension agents bring charts that slope downward over decades; the lines are clean, the wells less so. Groundwater districts post new rules, and some ranchers pocket the pamphlets like traffic warnings. But at a school gym meeting in Tulia, a younger agronomist tries a different register: he shows the old windmill his grandfather restored and calls conservation "keeping the song in the pipes." That night, hands go up for volunteer soil probes. The same slide deck, delivered the next week as "compliance requirements," draws fewer chairs. Fines doubled in two counties last year, and meters sprouted like fence posts; resentment sprouted, too. The aquifer is physics, but persuasion is culture. When saving water feels like an inheritance—something you pass down like a brand, not a burden imposed by strangers—people rearrange their days. Claim: The essay argues that durable adoption of conservation hinges on reframing sustainability as stewardship continuous with local heritage rather than as external regulation.

Which evidence best supports the claim that conservation succeeds when framed as inherited stewardship rather than imposed regulation?