Two main ideas and how they shape each other
Grade 11 Reading Worksheet - Challenge Me
Circle the best answer.
Read this first
Roads Into the Wild (history essay)
[1] When Congress set aside Yellowstone in 1872, it created a national park before anyone had decided what a national park was for, and for decades the answer depended mostly on who could afford a long railroad journey to see one. [2] The law that created the National Park Service in 1916 tried to settle the question by giving the new agency two duties at once: to conserve the parks' scenery and wildlife, and "to provide for the enjoyment of the same" in a way that would leave them "unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." [3] Stephen Mather, the Service's first director, read the second duty as the key to the first. [4] He courted railroads and automobile clubs, encouraged roads and hotels, and argued that a park nobody visited was a park nobody would defend when a dam or a mine came looking for it.
[5] Mather's wager largely succeeded. [6] Visitors who had driven through a valley became voters who wrote to Congress about it, and the parks gained a public that treated them as a shared inheritance rather than a distant government holding. [7] Yet the same success brought the crowds that the first duty was meant to guard against: traffic on narrow roads, trampled meadows, and wildlife that learned to beg at car windows. [8] In recent years several of the busiest parks have required visitors to reserve a time to enter, a policy that limits enjoyment in the name of the parks' condition.
[9] Critics of Mather sometimes argue that he betrayed the parks by inviting the automobile into them, and the evidence of noise and damage gives that charge real force. [10] It is harder, however, to imagine how the parks would have survived the twentieth century without the public he built, since the land was valuable and the pressure to use it was constant. [11] The roads that wore down the meadows also carried the voters who later helped keep dams out of the parks.
[12] Seen whole, the two duties in the 1916 law describe less a contradiction to be resolved than a balance to be adjusted. [13] Enjoyment created the public that demanded conservation, and conservation, by keeping the parks worth seeing, created the crowds that now require enjoyment to be rationed. [14] A reservation system is therefore not a retreat from Mather's idea but its latest revision: the public he recruited is now being asked to protect the parks partly from itself.
Bo covers sentences 9 to 11, the essay's concession. What would the argument lose without them?
- Its reckoning with the damage: without it, the essay would praise Mather's roads without granting or weighing their cost.
- Its main claim: without these sentences, the essay could not argue that enjoyment and conservation shaped each other.
- Very little: the critics' charge is raised so that it can be set aside, and the argument about the two duties would stand unchanged.
- The point that timed entry limits enjoyment for the parks' sake, which the essay makes about its busiest parks.
Ren traces how the 1916 law's two duties act on each other across the essay. Which account fits the essay best?
- Enjoyment and conservation turned out to be one goal, since the visitors who loved the parks and the parks' protection were the same.
- Neither shaped the other: the law simply listed both duties side by side, and the Service has favored one or the other in different decades.
- Enjoyment served conservation: Mather's roads and hotels built a public that later defended the parks against dams and mines.
- Enjoyment built the public that secured conservation; conservation kept the parks worth visiting, and the crowds now limit enjoyment.
A student claims the essay shows that Mather's roads saved the parks. Milo weighs that claim against the essay. What is the best verdict?
- Contradicted: sentences 7 and 9 show that the roads brought noise, crowds and damage, so the roads harmed the parks they reached.
- Partly: sentences 6 and 11 credit his visitors, but sentence 10 claims only that the parks' survival is hard to imagine without them.
- Shown: sentence 5 says that Mather's wager largely succeeded, which is the essay's own verdict on the roads he built.
- Shown: sentence 11 says the voters the roads carried helped keep dams out of the parks, so the roads are what saved the parks.
Faithful to What? (essay)
[1] An old Italian saying, “traduttore, traditore,” holds that the translator is a traitor, and the saying demonstrates its own point the moment it is put into English, where the near-rhyme that made it memorable disappears. [2] A translator who keeps the words loses the play on them, while one who keeps the play must invent new words, and so must decide which of the two the original was really made of. [3] Most arguments about translation are, at bottom, arguments about that decision. [4] In 1813 the German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher described the choice as a matter of direction: a translator can leave the author in peace and move the reader toward the foreign text, or leave the reader in peace and move the author toward the reader's language. [5] The first approach keeps the strangeness of the original visible, with its unfamiliar idioms and its unexpected order of thought, while the second aims for a version that reads as though it had been written in the reader's own language.
[6] The case for the second approach rests on effect. [7] If a proverb makes a Russian reader smile, a translation that leaves an English reader puzzled has been accurate about the words and inaccurate about the proverb, which existed in order to be understood. [8] Yet effect cannot be pursued without close attention to the words, since a translator who has not grasped exactly what a phrase says is in no position to judge what it does. [9] The more ambitious the rewriting, the more it depends on the very literal understanding it appears to leave behind.
[10] Defenders of literal translation are right that effect can become a license, a way for a translator to replace whatever is difficult with whatever is familiar. [11] A reader who meets a strange metaphor in a faithful version at least learns that the original thought in a different way, a fact that a smoothly domesticated version conceals. [12] Strangeness, in other words, can itself be part of what a foreign book gives its readers, and removing it changes the book.
[13] The two fidelities are less rival creeds than mutual corrections: attention to the words keeps the pursuit of effect honest, and attention to effect keeps the words from becoming a museum of themselves. [14] The translator's real obligation may be less to choose one fidelity than to let the reader see, in a preface or a note, which one was chosen where.
Noah covers sentences 10 to 12, the concession to literal translation. What would the essay's argument lose without them?
- Its conclusion: without these sentences, nothing in the essay would suggest that the two fidelities correct each other.
- An example of a strange metaphor, one more case of what a literal version keeps that a smoother one hides.
- The second arrow: strangeness can itself be an effect, so literal fidelity serves effect too, and the corrections run both ways.
- Very little: sentences 8 and 9 already show that effect depends on close attention to the words, so the case for literal care is made.
Tala traces how fidelity to the words and fidelity to effect shape each other in the essay. Which account fits the essay best?
- Effect depends on the words: no translator can judge what a phrase does without first grasping exactly what it says.
- They stay rivals to the end: Schleiermacher's two directions cannot be combined, so each translator must take one road or the other.
- Words and effect turn out to be one fidelity, so a careful translator does not really have to choose between them.
- Effect depends on a close grasp of the words, and literal fidelity can keep a strangeness that is part of a book's effect.
A student claims the essay favors literal translation over translating for effect. Jun weighs that claim. What is the best verdict?
- Weakly: sentences 10 to 12 give literal translation real credit, but sentence 13 makes the two correct each other.
- Shown: sentence 10 says the defenders of literal translation are right, and that settles which approach the essay favors.
- Supported: sentences 6 and 7 build the case for effect, the approach that a careful translator should prefer.
- Contradicted: sentence 9 shows that literal understanding exists to serve the rewrite, so the essay favors translating for effect.
One Banana (science essay)
[1] The banana in a supermarket in Ohio is almost certainly the same banana as the one in a supermarket in Germany, and not merely the same kind of banana. [2] Nearly every banana in the export trade is a Cavendish, and every Cavendish is a genetic copy of every other. [3] Commercial bananas have no viable seeds, so growers plant pieces cut from an existing plant, and each new field repeats the old one exactly. [4] For a business that ships fruit across oceans, the advantages of this arrangement are difficult to exaggerate. [5] A plantation of identical plants ripens on a predictable schedule, survives the same handling, and arrives at ripening rooms where every box responds to the same treatment. [6] Customers, for their part, learned to expect a banana of one size, one color and one taste, and grocers learned to sell nothing else.
[7] The weakness of the arrangement is the same fact seen from the other side. [8] A disease that can infect one plant can infect them all, since no plant in the field differs enough from its neighbors to resist it. [9] This has happened once already: the variety that dominated the trade before the Cavendish, the Gros Michel, was devastated by a soil fungus called Panama disease, and by the 1960s exporters had replaced it. [10] They replaced it with the Cavendish because the Cavendish resisted that strain of the fungus, and they planted it in exactly the same way, as a single clone across whole regions. [11] A newer strain, known as Tropical Race 4, now attacks the Cavendish and has spread from Asia to Latin America.
[12] It is tempting to conclude that the answer is simply more variety, and hundreds of banana varieties do exist. [13] Most of them, however, ripen at different rates, bruise differently in shipping, or taste unfamiliar to customers who have known one banana all their lives, and a supply chain built around a single fruit cannot easily absorb a dozen.
[14] The banana's problem, then, is not only that uniformity invites disease but that disease, so far, has been answered with a new uniformity. [15] The market's demand for one reliable fruit produced the vulnerable crop; the crop's collapse produced a demand for another reliable fruit; and unless the trade learns to value difference, the next replacement may repeat the pattern a third time.
Bo covers sentences 12 and 13, the concession about variety. What would the essay's argument lose without them?
- The point that a single clone ripens and ships on a predictable schedule, which is why the trade chose uniformity in the first place.
- Little: sentence 15 still says the trade must learn to value difference, so the claim and its remedy both remain.
- The essay's main claim, that disease has been answered with a new uniformity, which no other sentence in the essay ever explains.
- Why the pattern persists: without them, valuing difference would seem easy, and two clonal crops would look like mere carelessness.
Zee traces how the demand for one reliable fruit and the crop's weakness to disease act on each other. Which account fits best?
- Weakness created the demand: the losses to disease taught customers to want one reliable banana in the first place.
- Demand and disease form one cycle in which neither comes first, so the essay cannot say which drives the other.
- Demand for one reliable fruit made a vulnerable clone, and the clone's collapse renewed the demand, which another clone met.
- Uniformity created weakness: because each plant is a copy, one fungus could ruin the Gros Michel and now threatens the Cavendish.
A student claims the essay shows that customers' habits, not the fungus, keep the banana at risk. Jun weighs the claim. What is the best verdict?
- Shown: sentence 14 says the problem is more than disease, so habits, not the fungus, are what keep the crop at risk.
- Supported: sentences 3 and 8 show that copied plants share one weakness, which is what keeps the crop at risk.
- Partly: sentences 13 and 15 make demand for one fruit a cause, but sentences 8 and 11 keep the fungus a cause too.
- Shown: sentence 15 states that the market's demand produced the vulnerable crop, which is the essay's own conclusion.
What the Wall Keeps (science essay)
[1] A seawall is built on a simple promise: whatever stands behind it will still be standing after the next storm. [2] Along many coasts the promise has been kept, and the houses, roads and boardwalks protected by concrete or stone have outlasted storms that would otherwise have carried them away. [3] What the wall cannot promise is a beach. [4] Sandy shorelines survive not by holding still but by moving, shifting inland during storms and rebuilding in calmer seasons, so that a beach is less a place than a process. [5] Barrier islands along the Atlantic coast have migrated toward the mainland in this way for thousands of years, as storms wash sand from their ocean side across to their sheltered side.
[6] A wall interrupts that process at the line where it stands. [7] As the shoreline on either side retreats, the sand in front of the wall has nowhere to go, and the beach narrows until, at high tide, the water reaches the wall itself. [8] Waves striking a vertical wall can rebound rather than spreading their energy across a slope, and the stronger backwash can carry away sand that a sloping beach would have kept. [9] A narrower beach then leaves the wall more exposed, which leads its owners to build it higher, and the higher wall repeats the cycle on a larger scale.
[10] None of this makes retreat an easy alternative. [11] Moving even one structure is costly, and when the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in North Carolina was moved about 2,900 feet inland in 1999, the project required years of study and planning for a single building. [12] For a street of homes, a school or a highway, retreat may be impossible without public money and public agreement, which rarely arrive in time.
[13] The choice a seawall represents, then, is not between protection and loss but between two kinds of loss. [14] A town that builds a wall keeps its shoreline where it is and gives up, over time, the beach that drew people to the shore in the first place, while a town that retreats keeps a beach and gives up the ground it had built on. [15] The wall's success and the beach's disappearance are the same event, recorded in two different places.
A student claims the essay argues that towns should stop building seawalls. Jun weighs the claim. What is the best verdict?
- Supported: sentences 4 and 5 show that beaches and barrier islands move inland, so they should be left free to move.
- Contradicted: sentence 2 says that many seawalls have kept their promise, so the essay is defending them.
- Shown: sentence 15 says the wall's success and the beach's loss are the same event, which is the essay's verdict against walls.
- Weakly: sentences 6 to 9 show a wall's cost to the beach, but sentences 11 to 14 count retreat as a loss too.