English Language Arts: Reading Strategies (TEKS.ELA.9-12.5.I) Practice Test

Scholars of innovation often mistake metaphor for mere ornament, when in fact metaphor operates as an instrument of discovery. Consider how "platform" migrated from carpentry to software: the term does not simply decorate a preexisting reality; it furnishes a lens that foregrounds extensibility, modular relations, and governance. Yet the lens also occludes. By rendering people as "users" and interactions as "plugins," the metaphor quietly delimits what counts as accountable action. The analytic puzzle is double: we must measure what the metaphor reveals and also quantify the shadow it casts. Doing so requires patience with sentences that braid description, evaluation, and method; the strands do not separate cleanly. A claim may define a term while critiquing it and piloting a procedure, all within a single paragraph. Readers who hurry to extract "findings" risk amputating the very apparatus that made the finding possible. The argument's difficulty is therefore structural, not merely lexical.

Some argue that moral responsibility attaches only to agents who could have done otherwise; others insist that outcomes emerging from many small, individually insignificant acts still generate collective obligations. The paradox intensifies in climate ethics: any single commuter's choice barely alters atmospheric chemistry, yet the ensemble of choices reshapes the planet. If responsibility requires control, then the commuter seems blameless. But if responsibility tracks foreseeability, the commuter seems implicated, because the pattern is visible even if caused by dispersed hands. The argument turns on whether we treat agency as additive—my part plus yours—or as configurational, where the arrangement itself acquires properties no part owns alone. The philosopher's task here is not to assign guilt like accounting entries, but to refine concepts so they neither excuse paralysis nor demand omnipotence. The text's difficulty lies in following distinctions that shift across examples while because each example revises the terms that introduced it.