Sporting Futures USA | SAT Prep | Critical Reading 1.7

Even though he looked ________ when the waiter brought the bill, Uncle George's pockets were ________ and we knew he could pay easily.

Select the words that best complete the sentence.

Read the Passage and answer the question below:

1 The Waitomo Cave on the north island of New Zealand
2 is a popular tourist attraction. Inside this cave, one can
3 see a magical, but explicable, phenomenon. The
4 normally pitch black interior is transformed by
5 hundreds of tiny pricks of bright blue light. The cave
6 ceiling looks more like a starry night sky than a dark
7 cavern. What is the cause of this transformation? It is a
8 very natural phenomenon called bioluminescence, a
9 form of light emission from a living organism.
10 In this case, the source of the bioluminescence is the
11 New Zealand glow worm. The glow worm produces
12 the blue light through a chemical reaction involving one
13 of the worm's waste products. The chemical reaction
14 involves the combination of Luciferin, the waste
15 product, with the enzyme Luciferase, the energy
16 molecule ATP, and oxygen. This light produced is
17 used to attract other insects for eating or other glow
18 worms for mating, and also attracts many tourists to
19 caves, such as the Waitomo Cave, where thousands of
20 glow worms can be found, producing a spectacular
21 show.

Question: All of the following literary techniques are present in the passage except:

Although Professor Taffy found the student's lab work to be quite ________, he considered the student's academic ability in the classroom to be surprisingly ________.

Select the words that best complete the sentence.

Read the Passage and then answer the question below:

1 Ever since the astonishing success of "I Love Lucy" in
2 the early 1950s, the situation comedy, also known as
3 the "sitcom," has been the most popular kind of pro-
4 gram on television. Sitcoms are 30-minute programs
5 which find humor in the banal realities of day-to-day
6 life.

7 Programs like "Friends" and "The Simpsons" portray
8 characters struggling with commonplace issues (such
9 as friendship, child rearing, and conflict at work) in a
10 funny and light-hearted way. Whether the topic is
11 Rachel's pregnancy on "Friends" or Homer Simpson's
12 fear of his boss Mr. Burns on "The Simpsons," sitcoms
13 show viewers that they are not alone in their troubles.

14 The sitcom has rarely been taken seriously as an art
15 form, yet sitcoms tell stories and introduce ideas that
16 are important to society. The rapid-fire jokes entertain
17 us, but they also play an important social role. Per-
18 haps, even as they make us laugh, sitcoms are playing
19 a part in holding society together.

Question: The rhetoric of the passage suggests that the author has which of the following attitudes regarding sitcoms?

Read the Passage and then answer the Question below:

1 Weather forecasts specific to wild land fire have been
2 provided since as early as 1916, when the U.S. Weath-
3 er Bureau was still a part of the U.S. Department of
4 Agriculture. In the last decade, though, the fire weather
5 program has been a repeated target of budget cuts.
6 An agreement between the National Weather Service
7 (NWS) and federal land management agencies speci-
8 fies that meteorological support will be provided for
9 wild land fire. The NWS, however, is struggling through
10 a nationwide Modernization and Associated
11 Restructuring (MAR), and the fire community is more
12 than a little worried about the degradation of services
13 that may result.

14 One of the key pieces of MAR is the phasing out of
15 meteorologists who specialize in fire weather. These
16 people are being moved, transferred, re-assigned, or
17 otherwise attritioned out of fire weather forecasting.
18 The NWS contends that its core staff of generalists can
19 do a better job than the fire weather specialists did,
20 with the help of new forecast technology. This new-
21 and-improved technology, however, has proved to be
22 less helpful than expected; it wasn't ready on time and
23 its quality is questionable. In addition, MAR will close
24 the former specialized fire weather offices; the fire
25 meteorologists, or "fire mets," will be absorbed into the
26 staffs of the new modernized offices, where they will
27 take on additional forecast duties including aviation
28 meteorology, hydrology, marine forecasting, and
29 severe weather warnings. MAR's planned transition,
30 though, has been stalling, partly because of problems
31 with the technology, partly because of budget short-
32 falls, and partly because of objections from the wild
33 land fire community.

34 The fire agencies -- the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of
35 Land Management, National Park Service, U.S. Fish &
36 Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Indian Affairs -- see
37 clearly the connection between fire weather and safety.
38 But the NWS has not acknowledged the value of or the
39 need for dedicated fire weather specialists who are
40 familiar with local conditions and weather patterns,
41 and their relevance to fire behavior. The NWS does not
42 seem to understand the connection between these
43 meteorologists and safety -- in fact, the NWS does a
44 dismal job of tracking statistics on the injuries,
45 fatalities, and property damage caused by fire weather.
46 Private for-profit weather companies lobbied Congress
47 to transfer weather services away from government
48 agencies without any understanding of the program-
49 matic structure which is needed in order to maintain
50 timely and accurate fire weather forecasts, and Con-
51 gress has, in turn, slashed funding for the programs.
52 The cumulative effect of these factors has created an
53 explosive situation that has fire agencies worried, and
54 NWS management scrambling for a solution.

Question: In line 17, "attritioned" is most similar in meaning to which of the following words from the passage?

Read the Two Passages and then answer the Question below:

Passage 1 -

1 In an age when sound-bites and media glitz are
2 confused with authentic information, views about
3 euthanasia in the Netherlands have taken on a
4 monochromatic quality they do not really possess.
5 Although a more homogeneous society than most
6 countries, the Netherlands, for over twenty-five years,
7 has vigorously debated the ethics of euthanasia with-
8 out reaching a social consensus. As voluntary
9 euthanasia has developed in the Netherlands, the
10 fault lines of beliefs and values have surfaced to
11 polarize professionals, families, policy makers, and
12 the public.

Passage 2 -

13 German physicians and political leaders voiced strong
14 opposition to the Dutch Senate's decision to legalize
15 assisted suicide and some forms of active euthanasia.
16 "Doctors should help dying patients get through the
17 process, not cut it short," said Frank Ulrich
18 Montgomery, president of the Marburger Bund, a
19 physicians' organization. Many German doctors share
20 the view that pain management, not mercy killing, is
21 the best way to help patients who suffer from incurable
22 diseases. According to cancer specialist Rudolf
23 Henke, Germany is ahead of the Netherlands in
24 developing methods for relieving pain and providing
25 hospice care for the terminally ill. If anything, he said,
26 doctors need to become more liberal in offering
27 patients pain-reducing drugs.

Question: Which of the following best summarizes the relationship between the two passages?

Read the Passage and answer the Question below:

1 The relation of the success myth to American
2 capitalism has been an ambivalent one. On the one
3 hand, as many historians have noted, the "rags-to-
4 riches" tradition, by creating an illusion of opportunity,
5 served as a social pacifier inimical to reform.
6 Furthermore, by equating failure with sin and personal
7 inadequacy, self-help popularizers obscured the
8 objective cause of social injustice. The beneficiaries
9 of this misplaced emphasis, so this argument runs,
10 were the corporations and the wealthy. While this view-
11 point is illuminating, I find it ascribes too monolithic a
12 function to ideas that found adherents among
13 progressives and conservatives alike. The belief that
14 anyone can succeed is a two-edged sword. Taken as
15 a description of what is, it encourages complacency;
16 taken as a prescription for what ought to be, it
17 encourages the impulse to reform. Historically and in
18 the present, the commitment to open opportunity was
19 and is an important weapon in the reformer's
20 ideological arsenal.

Question: As lines 2-5 and lines 6-8 are constructed, "self-help popularizers" in line 7 is parallel to which of the following?

The following two passages discuss the high salaries of many C.E.O.s, or Chief Executive Officers.

Please read the two passages and answer the Question below:

Passage 1 -

1 Even the most jaded observer of American corporate
2 culture had to blink when, earlier this month, Home
3 Depot's board of directors handed the company's
4 C.E.O., Bob Nardelli, more than two hundred million
5 dollars after pushing him out of his job. Nardelli had
6 not delivered for shareholders: Home Depot's stock
7 price went down about six percent during his tenure.
8 And, while his operating performance was actually
9 quite good, he would have made a lot of money even if
10 it hadn't been: most of his contract was guaranteed,
11 and, when he had a hard time meeting a particular tar-
12 get for his bonus, the board generously substituted an
13 easier one.

14 The size of Nardelli's severance was startling, but his
15 "heads I win, tails you lose" arrangement is far from
16 unusual in corporate America these days. For all the
17 talk of restraining C.E.O. pay, most compensation
18 committees remain what Warren Buffett once called
19 them--"tail-wagging puppy dogs." At some companies,
20 this is simply because the C.E.O. has packed the
21 board with cronies. But at Home Depot Nardelli did not
22 pick the board members, and most of them were what
23 are usually called independent directors--ones who
24 don't work for the company or do any business with it.
25 Even when an independent board negotiates a
26 C.E.O.'s contract, however, the directors are often, in a
27 sense, negotiating with themselves. Of the ten inde-
28 pendent members of Home Depot's board, for in-
29 stance, eight are or have been C.E.O.s. Since C.E.O.
30 pay is often driven by comparisons between compa-
31 nies, directors have a certain interest in keeping
32 executive pay high. Furthermore, the salaries keep
33 escalating because, board members argue, there just
34 aren't enough good C.E.O. candidates out there.
35 There's no evidence that this is actually the case, but
36 who is more likely to feel that good C.E.O.s are rare
37 other than C.E.O.s?

38 A more complex problem lies in the nature of the social
39 networks that bind directors and executives together.
40 Home Depot has an exceptionally well-connected
41 board. On average, its directors sit on two other out-
42 side boards, and the compensation-committee chair-
43 man sits on four. Connections are often beneficial--
44 they insure that people are well-informed, creating
45 opportunities for new business. Unfortunately, the
46 more connected board members are, the likelier they
47 are to overpay for executive talent. In some cases,
48 which economists call "interlocking" directorates, this
49 is straightforward: I sit on your board and you sit on
50 mine, and we both have an incentive to be generous.
51 Sure enough, several studies have found that compa-
52 nies with interlocking directors pay C.E.O.s significantly
53 more. Surprisingly, though, connectedness remains
54 important even when the links are not direct. A study of
55 S&P 500 companies, by Amir Barnea and Ilan Guedj,
56 finance professors at the University of Texas, found
57 that, even after other factors were accounted for,
58 C.E.O.s at companies whose directors sat on a num-
59 ber of other boards were paid thirteen per cent more
60 than C.E.O.s at companies whose directors were not.

61 Why? One reason is that the more connections board
62 members have, the more likely they are to end up with
63 what you could call "friend of a friend" links to the com-
64 pany's C.E.O. A recent study by a team of business-
65 school professors mapped the social networks of
66 twenty-two thousand directors at more than three
67 thousand companies, charting the degrees of separa-
68 tion between directors and C.E.O.s, and found that
69 at companies where there are what the study's authors
70 termed "short, friendly" links between directors and
71 executives, C.E.O.s are paid significantly more. But
72 even in the absence of this kind of explicit back-
73 scratching, the tight connections between board
74 members insure that, once an idea takes hold at a few
75 companies, it's easier for it to spread, in a viral fashion.

Passage 2 -

76 Unlike many Americans, whose salaries aren't keep-
77 ing up with inflation, chief executives are seeing their
78 compensation packages rise by 13 percent annually. A
79 tight market allows C.E.O.s to command top dollars,
80 since there are so few with the leadership skills
81 needed to run a public company, some experts say
82 Critics argue the system for setting C.E.O. pay is
83 flawed and does not give enough consideration to
84 performance. They worry that giving C.E.O.s large per-
85 centage increases year after year causes resent-
86 ment among many workers, who have endured
87 decreases in wages, increases in health care costs,
88 pension reductions, and the loss of jobs overseas
89 during a slumping economy.

90 "We believe all employees should be paid fairly and
91 that includes workers and the C.E.O.," said Brandon
92 Rees, a research analyst with the AFL-CIO, a national
93 association of labor unions. "The trend has been that
94 C.E.O.s take a disproportionate share of compen-
95 sation." In 2004, the average chief executive earned
96 $10 million in total compensation, a 13 percent
97 increase over 2003, according a survey by consulting
98 firm Pearl Meyer & Partners for The New York Times.
99 However, the average American worker in a non-
100 supervisory job earned a salary of $27,485 in 2004,
101 only a 2.2 percent increase over 2003, according to
102 the AFL-CIO.
103 Many experts insist that comparing an executive's job
104 to that of a front-line worker is unfair, since the
105 expectations are different. They add that many of
106 the increases in compensation are tied directly to
107 a company's performance in a given year. That's the
108 case with A.L. "Tom" Giannopoulos, head of informa-
109 tion systems company Micros Systems Inc., whose
110 total compensation grew 69 percent, to $3.5 million,
111 in 2004 from $2.08 million in 2003. The increase
112 reflected an 80 percent growth in the value of the com-
113 pany's stock during 2004, said Louise Casamento,
114 a company spokeswoman. Excluding stock options
115 and other perks, Giannopoulos' annual salary grew 19
116 percent to $820,000 in 2004, compared with average
117 workers, whose salaries increased by 5.5 percent to
118 6 percent each year, she said.

119 Defending CEOs, some argue: "Not everyone is
120 capable of running a truly global company. Companies
121 pay them for literally giving over their entire lives to
122 the company . . Yes, they make a lot of money, but
123 you have to compare what it takes to do it."

Question: As used in line 94, "disproportionate" most nearly means ________.

The following two passages discuss the high salaries of many C.E.O.s, or Chief Executive Officers.

Please read the two passages and answer the Question below:

Passage 1 -

1 Even the most jaded observer of American corporate
2 culture had to blink when, earlier this month, Home
3 Depot's board of directors handed the company's
4 C.E.O., Bob Nardelli, more than two hundred million
5 dollars after pushing him out of his job. Nardelli had
6 not delivered for shareholders: Home Depot's stock
7 price went down about six percent during his tenure.
8 And, while his operating performance was actually
9 quite good, he would have made a lot of money even if
10 it hadn't been: most of his contract was guaranteed,
11 and, when he had a hard time meeting a particular tar-
12 get for his bonus, the board generously substituted an
13 easier one.

14 The size of Nardelli's severance was startling, but his
15 "heads I win, tails you lose" arrangement is far from
16 unusual in corporate America these days. For all the
17 talk of restraining C.E.O. pay, most compensation
18 committees remain what Warren Buffett once called
19 them--"tail-wagging puppy dogs." At some companies,
20 this is simply because the C.E.O. has packed the
21 board with cronies. But at Home Depot Nardelli did not
22 pick the board members, and most of them were what
23 are usually called independent directors--ones who
24 don't work for the company or do any business with it.
25 Even when an independent board negotiates a
26 C.E.O.'s contract, however, the directors are often, in a
27 sense, negotiating with themselves. Of the ten inde-
28 pendent members of Home Depot's board, for in-
29 stance, eight are or have been C.E.O.s. Since C.E.O.
30 pay is often driven by comparisons between compa-
31 nies, directors have a certain interest in keeping
32 executive pay high. Furthermore, the salaries keep
33 escalating because, board members argue, there just
34 aren't enough good C.E.O. candidates out there.
35 There's no evidence that this is actually the case, but
36 who is more likely to feel that good C.E.O.s are rare
37 other than C.E.O.s?

38 A more complex problem lies in the nature of the social
39 networks that bind directors and executives together.
40 Home Depot has an exceptionally well-connected
41 board. On average, its directors sit on two other out-
42 side boards, and the compensation-committee chair-
43 man sits on four. Connections are often beneficial--
44 they insure that people are well-informed, creating
45 opportunities for new business. Unfortunately, the
46 more connected board members are, the likelier they
47 are to overpay for executive talent. In some cases,
48 which economists call "interlocking" directorates, this
49 is straightforward: I sit on your board and you sit on
50 mine, and we both have an incentive to be generous.
51 Sure enough, several studies have found that compa-
52 nies with interlocking directors pay C.E.O.s significantly
53 more. Surprisingly, though, connectedness remains
54 important even when the links are not direct. A study of
55 S&P 500 companies, by Amir Barnea and Ilan Guedj,
56 finance professors at the University of Texas, found
57 that, even after other factors were accounted for,
58 C.E.O.s at companies whose directors sat on a num-
59 ber of other boards were paid thirteen per cent more
60 than C.E.O.s at companies whose directors were not.

61 Why? One reason is that the more connections board
62 members have, the more likely they are to end up with
63 what you could call "friend of a friend" links to the com-
64 pany's C.E.O. A recent study by a team of business-
65 school professors mapped the social networks of
66 twenty-two thousand directors at more than three
67 thousand companies, charting the degrees of separa-
68 tion between directors and C.E.O.s, and found that
69 at companies where there are what the study's authors
70 termed "short, friendly" links between directors and
71 executives, C.E.O.s are paid significantly more. But
72 even in the absence of this kind of explicit back-
73 scratching, the tight connections between board
74 members insure that, once an idea takes hold at a few
75 companies, it's easier for it to spread, in a viral fashion.

Passage 2 -

76 Unlike many Americans, whose salaries aren't keep-
77 ing up with inflation, chief executives are seeing their
78 compensation packages rise by 13 percent annually. A
79 tight market allows C.E.O.s to command top dollars,
80 since there are so few with the leadership skills
81 needed to run a public company, some experts say
82 Critics argue the system for setting C.E.O. pay is
83 flawed and does not give enough consideration to
84 performance. They worry that giving C.E.O.s large per-
85 centage increases year after year causes resent-
86 ment among many workers, who have endured
87 decreases in wages, increases in health care costs,
88 pension reductions, and the loss of jobs overseas
89 during a slumping economy.

90 "We believe all employees should be paid fairly and
91 that includes workers and the C.E.O.," said Brandon
92 Rees, a research analyst with the AFL-CIO, a national
93 association of labor unions. "The trend has been that
94 C.E.O.s take a disproportionate share of compen-
95 sation." In 2004, the average chief executive earned
96 $10 million in total compensation, a 13 percent
97 increase over 2003, according a survey by consulting
98 firm Pearl Meyer & Partners for The New York Times.
99 However, the average American worker in a non-
100 supervisory job earned a salary of $27,485 in 2004,
101 only a 2.2 percent increase over 2003, according to
102 the AFL-CIO.
103 Many experts insist that comparing an executive's job
104 to that of a front-line worker is unfair, since the
105 expectations are different. They add that many of
106 the increases in compensation are tied directly to
107 a company's performance in a given year. That's the
108 case with A.L. "Tom" Giannopoulos, head of informa-
109 tion systems company Micros Systems Inc., whose
110 total compensation grew 69 percent, to $3.5 million,
111 in 2004 from $2.08 million in 2003. The increase
112 reflected an 80 percent growth in the value of the com-
113 pany's stock during 2004, said Louise Casamento,
114 a company spokeswoman. Excluding stock options
115 and other perks, Giannopoulos' annual salary grew 19
116 percent to $820,000 in 2004, compared with average
117 workers, whose salaries increased by 5.5 percent to
118 6 percent each year, she said.

119 Defending CEOs, some argue: "Not everyone is
120 capable of running a truly global company. Companies
121 pay them for literally giving over their entire lives to
122 the company . . Yes, they make a lot of money, but
123 you have to compare what it takes to do it."

Question: The reference to the "viral" (line 75) spreading of ideas implies that:

The movement to ________ world hunger has been receiving global attention.

Select the word that best completes the sentence.

Cheney's thorough and incisive critique of the latest work in cancer research has ________ the approach of the most ________ studies being done at major cancer research centers.

Select the words that best complete the sentence.

Read the Passage and answer the Question below:

1 "NO! You've got it all wrong!" I wanted to cry out, but
2 the man had already walked away. When stumbling
3 across anyone alone on a winter's night, caution is
4 advised, let alone in the seedy underbelly of a strange
5 city. So when it became apparent that this man and I
6 would invariably cross paths, my apprehension grew,
7 my guard went up. At long last we met in passing, I
8 held my breath. He had mistaken my obvious fear as
9 doctrine instead of situation, and remarked sarcasti-
10 cally, "Naturally you'd be afraid, a man like me coming
11 toward you in the middle of the night." My mind
12 searched for how I could explain. He grimaced, walked
13 off, and all at once I was for centuries a brother of hate,
14 an enemy of race. I abhorred myself, and could not
15 come to my own defense. O the Slander! He left me
16 standing there dumbstruck in the oppressive silence.

Question: Why does the man remark sarcastically in lines 10-11?

Read the Passage and answer the Question below:

1 In the retrospective "Drawn from Life" at the NAB
2 Gallery, Marion Kryczka, Tom Robinson, and Bob Horn
3 showcase their drawings, paintings, and mixed media,
4 reflecting their life-long fascination with the figure as
5 conceptual art. The artists pay homage to the NAB
6 tradition of "holding figure drawing workshops for art-
7 ists to hone their perception and to use drawing as a
8 starting point as well as a point of departure to see
9 what is possible." And what is remarkable about this
10 show is not just the focus on drawing and the use of
11 traditional materials, but also the depiction of a
12 "Baroque style" portraying drama, vitality, and move-
13 ment--filtered through a modern sensibility. This show
14 is an allegory of art as poetry, transformation, and
15 social commentary.

16 Marion Kryczka's series begins with "Emperor of Ice-
17 Cream," a study in pastel on paper and another in oil
18 on canvas. Kryczka believes that "painting is like poetry
19 because both are filled with symbolism and both tell a
20 story." His series is named after the Wallace Stevens
21 poem "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," which has been
22 interpreted by some as celebrating the triumph of life's
23 pleasures and sensualities over the absoluteness of
24 death. Stevens re-emphasizes in the poem's last line
25 that "the only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream,"
26 perhaps meaning that what matters most is enjoying
27 life with all one's senses fully engaged, as they are
28 when eating ice-cream. Kryczka begins his story with a
29 chair in the foreground of a dimly-lit sitting room, beck-
30 oning the viewer to come into his world with a front row
31 seat. In the background, we see two women in profile,
32 one sitting and the other standing, both looking intently
33 at what appears to be a painting on the wall.

34 There is a bowl of ice-cream and a sheaf of wrapped
35 flowers on a long table, dividing the sitting room and
36 the doorway to the kitchen, which is bathed in natural
37 light. We are engaged in a painting that resembles the
38 17th-century Dutch master Pieter de Hooch with the il-
39 lusion of real perspective, portrayal of natural light, and
40 subtle use of color and tone. But, at the same time, the
41 painting also allows for a sense of modernism with
42 gestural drawings, a blend of realism and abstraction,
43 and a push and pull of intimate, close-up space and
44 receding space. Kryczka draws us deeply into the
45 world of poetry as painting.

46 Tom Robinson's series, including portraits, mixed me-
47 dia figures, and a video presentation of his models,
48 is "a newer form of art" for the artist. "Hannah" is a
49 larger-than-life portrait, first drawn gesturally with char-
50 coal on paper, then enhanced with Adobe Photoshop,
51 and finally printed on special paper, giving the portrait a
52 lithographic quality. The drawing resembles the real
53 person (seen on the video) but seems to emerge as a
54 character from a Kafkaesque landscape drawn in
55 Manga.* Her eyes are looking to the side as if she is
56 attempting to peer over her shoulder without moving
57 her head, trying to see if someone is following her.
58 We look closely at her enlarged pupils, trying to un-
59 cover any hidden images, but there is nothing there
60 except for reflected light. She could easily become a
61 Japanese anime heroine, with shifting features and
62 flowing hair, or a William Kentridge study of sustained
63 ambiguity. Robinson's drawings, enhanced by his use
64 of technology and mixed media, engage us with his
65 view of art as transformation.

66 Bob Horn's series includes large-scale frontal por-
67 traitures and smaller drawings of toys and cultural
68 icons, all drawn with charcoal and white pastel on fine-
69 art paper. Horn's "Expulsion from the Garden" brings to
70 mind the early-Renaissance artist Massacio's fresco
71 of Adam and Eve, and Michelangelo's "The Fall and
72 Expulsion from the Garden of Eden," with the entice-
73 ment of the snake and the fall occurring simultane-
74 ously in the same painting. What is memorable about
75 these Renaissance-era paintings is the artists' ability
76 to express real emotional turmoil in the figures--Adam
77 and Eve feel fear, shame, guilt, sadness, and despair.
78 But in Horn's tongue-in-cheek interpretation, the expul-
79 sion reveals a Humpty-Dumpty apple figure looking for-
80 lornly in the distance, as a bewildered Homer Simpson
81 in his underwear and a smiling "dime-store Barbie"
82 march in single file away to oblivion.

83 In another series, Horn's "Man with Ring" and "Woman
84 with Ring" evoke Rembrandt's use of chiaroscuro**
85 and his ability to bring a naturalness to his subjects to
86 highlight their personalities. Horn's realistic style
87 brings to mind the 19th-century realist Henri Fantin-
88 Latour, who painted traditional portraits with great
89 detail in austere, understated compositions. However,
90 in Horn's portraits, both the man and woman are wear-
91 ing rings not on their fingers, as they might have in a
92 Fantin-Latour portrait, but in their noses. Dressed in a
93 New York Yankees T-shirt, the young African-American
94 man carries an expression of intelligence, serious-
95 ness, and wonderment at the same time. Although the
96 young woman is wearing only a nose ring, her coun-
97 tenance tells us that she is strong, smart, outgoing,
98 and playful. Welcome to Bob Horn's world.

Please Note:

*Manga is a Japanese print cartoon.
**Chiaroscuro is using light and shadow for dramatic effect.

Question: In the context of line 28, the word "story" is most interchangeable with which of the following?

Because Ned's car was in a state of ________, and there was a national car shortage, he had to be ________ about finding transportation.

Select the words that best complete the sentence.

Read the Passage and Answer the Question below:

The following passage is taken from the New York Herald. It was written two days after President Abraham Lincoln's assassination.

1 The appalling tragedy at Washington, like a sudden
2 and profound eclipse, darkens all the land. Its hide-
3 ous details seem more the inventions of a morbid
4 imagination than the stern realities which they are. In
5 the midst of our rejoicings and congratulations over
6 the downfall of the rebellion, and the cheering pros-
7 pects of a glorious peace, under the generous and
8 forgiving policy of restoration foreshadowed by
9 President Lincoln, the dreadful tidings of his death by
10 the hands of an assassin carry their heavy weight of
11 anguish through the length and breadth of the land.
12 This startling intelligence has created a keener sor-
13 row, a deeper, broader and more universal sense of
14 the public loss, than we dare say, has been
15 experienced in any age, in any country, or by any
16 people, over the death of one man. The simple,
17 genial, generous hearted, Honest Abe had taken a
18 closer hold upon the affections of the masses of the
19 American people than any one of their chosen
20 favorites since the time of Washington. Prematurely
21 and violently cut off, however, as President Lincoln
22 has been, he lived long enough to realize the crown-
23 ing success of his great mission, and has died in the
24 fullness of his glory. Second only to Washington in
25 the hearts of his countrymen, the name of Abraham
26 Lincoln will go down to future ages.
27 Steadily following the drift of events and the develop-
28 ments of public opinion through all the progressive
29 changes of this gigantic war of ideas, President
30 Lincoln, we can all now comprehend, pursued the
31 paths of safety, wisdom and success. In this masterly
32 policy that plain, unpretending man exhibited a
33 breadth of sagacity which, though perplexing to
34 politicians of one idea, has given us the practical
35 results of the highest statesmanship in reference to
36 both our domestic and foreign affairs.

37 In the death of President Lincoln, we feel the pres-
38 sure of a heavy national calamity; but the great and
39 irrevocable decree of the loyal States that Union must
40 and shall be preserved; it will lose nothing of its force,
41 but will be immensely if not terribly strengthened. In
42 striking at Abraham Lincoln and his ever kindly
43 disposed Secretary of State, the assassins struck at
44 the best friends in the government to the prostrate
45 rebels of the South. The policy of these men was
46 forgiveness and conciliation to the fullest admissible
47 extent; and the public mind everywhere was strongly
48 inclined in the same direction. But the dark and
49 shocking events of a single night have wrought in a
50 few hours a fearful reaction. There is an ominous
51 muttering in the streets; a general feeling is abroad
52 that the lives of the wretched assassin or assassins
53 in this horrid business will not meet the requirements
54 of justice, and that justice should now take its course
55 against treason and traitors wherever found.

56 Andrew Johnson, under this condition of the public
57 mind of the loyal States, succeeds to the office of
58 Abraham Lincoln. What will be the policy of President
59 Johnson? We predict that it will be more strongly
60 tinctured with the inflexible justice of Andrew Johnson
61 than with the prevailing tenderness of Abraham
62 Lincoln. The mind and character of Andrew Johnson
63 have been largely developed and fixed from his
64 twenty years of warfare as "a poor white" against the
65 opposing slaveholding aristocracy in Tennessee
66 and the South. How he has survived this long struggle
67 and safely passed the manifold dangers of this war is
68 very remarkable. Against his impediments no man,
69 unless possessed of great natural qualities, self-
70 reliance, high moral courage and a resolute will,
71 could possibly have succeeded as he has done.
72 Learning to read after he became a married man -
73 and from his wife as his teacher - and for ten years
74 before the war standing among the most powerful
75 democratic leaders of Tennessee, there is something
76 more in this "Andy Johnson" than the common would
77 believe.

78 Nor do we, from the unfortunate circumstance of the
79 4th of March*, believe that he is familiar with that
80 weakness. We have convincing testimony to the
81 contrary from his most intimate friends. We anticipate
82 from him a wise, energetic and efficient administra-
83 tion of the public affairs at home and abroad. As
84 Joshua was to Moses**, so we expect Andrew
85 Johnson to be as the successor of Abraham Lincoln.
86 We expect him to take up the mantle of the great
87 leader of Israel, and to conduct his people trium-
88 phantly into the occupation of the promised land. He
89 has been brought to the border, like Joshua, and has
90 only to enter in and take possession. It is the will and
91 the purpose of the people.

Please Note:

*On March 4, 1865, Andrew Johnson gave what the public considered to be a "drunken" acceptance speech as vice president.
**According to the Bible, Joshua was appointed by Moses to succeed him as the leader of the Israelites and subsequently led the conquest of Canaan.

Question: With which of the following statements would the author most likely disagree?

Although the show's lyrics were ________, the sublime musical score ________ the audience from start to finish.

Select the words that best complete the sentence.

Read the Passage and Answer the Question below:

1 We shall not understand what a book is, and why a
2 book has the value many persons have, and is even
3 less replaceable than a person, if we forget how
4 important to it is its body, the building that has been
5 built to hold its line of language safely together
6 through many adventures and a long time. Words on
7 a screen have visual qualities, to be sure, and these
8 darkly limn their shape, but they have no materiality,
9 they are only shadows, and when the light shifts they'll
10 be gone. Off the screen they do not exist as words.
11 They do not wait to be reseen, reread; they only wait
12 to be remade, relit. I cannot carry them beneath a tree
13 or onto a side porch; I cannot argue in their margins;
14 I cannot enjoy the memory of my dismay when,
15 perhaps after years, I return to my treasured copy of
16 Treasure Island to find the jam I inadvertently smeared
17 there still spotting a page precisely at the place where
18 Billy Bones chases Black Dog out of the Admiral
19 Benbow with a volley of oaths and where his cutlass
20 misses its mark to notch the inn's wide sign instead.

21 My copy, which I still possess, was of the cheapest.
22 Published by M. A. Donohue & Co. of Chicago, it bears
23 no date, and its coarse pages are jaundiced and brit-
24 tle, yet they've outlived their manufacturer; they will out-
25 live their reader--always comforting yet a bit sad. The
26 pages, in fact, smell their age, their decrepitude, and
27 the jam smear is like an ancient bruise; but like a scar
28 recalling its accident, I remember the pounding in my
29 chest when the black spot was pressed into Billy
30 Bones's palm and Blind Pew appeared on the road
31 in a passage that I knew even then was a piece of
32 exemplary prose.

33 That book and I loved each other, and I don't mean
34 just its text: that book, which then was new, its cover
35 slick and shiny, its paper agleam with the tossing sea
36 and armed, as Long John Silver was, for a fight, its
37 binding tight as the elastic of new underwear, not
38 slack as it is now, after so many openings and clos-
39 ings, so many dry years; that book would be borne off
40 to my room, where it lived through my high school
41 miseries in a dime-store bookcase, and it would
42 accompany me to college too, and be packed in the
43 duffel bag I carried as a sailor.

44 Should we put these feelings for the object and its
45 vicissitudes down to simple sentimental nostalgia?
46 I think not; but even as a stimulus for reminiscence,
47 a treasure more important than a dance card, or the
48 photo that freezes you in at the edge of the Grand
49 Canyon, because such a book can be a significant
50 event in the history of your reading, and your reading
51 (provided you are significant) should be an essential
52 segment of your character and your life. Unlike the
53 the love we've made or meals we've eaten, books
54 congregate to form a record around us of what they've
55 fed our stomachs or our brains. These are not a
56 hunter's trophies but the living animals themselves.

57 In the ideal logotopia, every person would possess
58 his own library and add at least weekly if not daily to it.
59 The walls of each home would seem made of books;
60 wherever one looked one would only see spines;
61 because every real book (as opposed to dictionaries,
62 almanacs, and other compilations) is a mind, an
63 imagination, a consciousness. Together they com-
64 pose a civilization, or even several.
65
A few of us are fortunate enough to live in Logotopia,
66 to own our own library, but for many this is not possi-
67 ble, and for them we need a free and open public
68 institution with a balanced collection of books that it
69 cares for and loans, with stacks where a visitor may
70 wander, browse, and make discoveries; such an insti-
71 tution empowers its public as few do. In fact, it has no
72 rival, for the books in the public library are the books
73 that may take temporary residence in yours or mine.
74 We share their wealth the way we share the space of a
75 public park. My high school had no library worthy of
76 the name "book," so I would walk about a mile down-
77 town to the public one to borrow, in almost every case,
78 a new world. That's what a library does for its patrons.
79 It extends the self. It is pure empowerment.

80 The sciences, it is alleged, no longer use books;
81 neither do the professions, since what everyone
82 needs is data, data day and night, because data, like
83 drugs, soothe the senses and encourage us to think
84 we are, when at the peak of their heap, on top of the
85 world. Of course, libraries contain books, and books
86 contain information, but information has always been
87 of minor importance, except to minor minds. What
88 matters is how the information is arranged, how it is
89 understood, and to what uses it is put. In short, what
90 matters is the book the data's in.
91
Frequently, one comes across comparisons of the
92 electronic revolution with that of writing and printing,
93 and these are usually accompanied by warnings to
94 those suspicious of technology that objections to these
95 forward marches are both fuddy-duddy and futile. But
96 Plato's worries that writing would not reveal the writer
97 the way the soul of a speaker was exposed; that
98 spontaneity would be compromised; that words would
99 be stolen, and words would be put in other mouths
100 than those of their authors; that writing does not hear
101 its reader's response; that lying, hypocrisy, false
102 borrowing, ghostwriting, would increase so that the
103 hollow heads of state would echo with hired words;
104 and that, oddly, the advantages and powers of the book
105 would give power and advantage to the rich, who would
106 learn to read and would have the funds to acquire
107 and keep such precious volumes safe: these fears
108 were overwhelmingly realized.

109 The advent of printing was opposed (as writing was)
110 for a number of mean and self-serving reasons, but
111 the fear that it would lead to the making of a million
112 half-baked brains, and cause the illicit turning of a
113 multitude of untrained heads, as a consequence of the
114 unhindered spread of nonsense was a fear that was
115 also well founded. The boast that the placement of
116 books in many hands would finally overthrow supersti-
117 tion was not entirely a hollow hope, however. The gift
118 gave a million minds a chance at independence.

Question: The phrase "like drugs," as used in lines 82-83, suggests that:

Darren's overly idealistic nature led him to espouse ________ plans built only on dreams, with no foundation for real-world success.

Select the word that best completes the sentence.

When Randolph was first learning to play the flute, the noise he made was more like ________ than actual music; however, after years of ________ practice, he is now part of the local symphony.

Select the words that best complete the sentence.

Tim, a(n) ________ boy, loved school events because they provided an opportunity for him to socialize with others.

Select the word that best completes the sentence.