Two main ideas and how they shape each other
Grade 11 Reading Worksheet
Circle the best answer.
Read this first
What a Map Must Forget (essay)
[1] A map that showed everything would have to be as large as the territory it described, and it would therefore be of no use to anyone trying to find a way across that territory. [2] Every useful map is, in this sense, an act of deliberate forgetting: the surveyor decides that the creek matters and the fence does not, that the highway deserves a red line and the footpath deserves nothing at all. [3] We rarely notice these decisions, because a well-made map is designed to look less like a collection of choices than like a window onto the land.
[4] The Flemish mapmaker Gerardus Mercator published his famous projection in 1569 for sailors, who needed a chart on which a straight line would hold a steady compass bearing across an entire ocean. [5] To keep those bearings true, Mercator stretched the lands near the poles, so that Greenland appears roughly as large as Africa, a continent about fourteen times its size. [6] For a navigator plotting a course, the trade was excellent; for a schoolchild facing a classroom wall, it quietly taught a lesson about which parts of the world were large and which were small. [7] Nothing on the chart announced that its sizes were the price of its angles.
[8] It would be easy to conclude from this history that maps deceive, and that the cure is a map without distortion. [9] No such map can exist, since a curved surface cannot be flattened onto paper without stretching, tearing or squeezing something, and every alternative projection simply chooses a different thing to sacrifice. [10] Mapmakers who favor projections that keep areas equal have not escaped the problem; they have exchanged distorted sizes for distorted shapes, and their maps, too, will mislead the reader who mistakes them for the earth.
[11] The difficulty, then, lies less in the stretching than in its silence. [12] A highway map that omits footpaths serves drivers well, and it misleads only the walker who believes that the omission describes the land rather than the purpose of the person who drew it. [13] What a map can honestly offer is not completeness but candor: a legend that names its projection, and a note that says what was left out and for whom the sheet was drawn. [14] Read that way, a map stops being a window and becomes an argument about what matters, one that a careful reader is free to accept, to question or to redraw.
Kira reads the whole essay. How does the idea that maps mislead change the idea that a useful map must leave things out?
- It excuses it: since a flat map must sacrifice something, the essay treats each distortion as the fair price of being useful.
- It limits it: leaving things out serves a map's purpose, and misleads once the reader loses sight of that purpose.
- It overturns it: because each omission misleads some reader, the essay concludes that a map should leave out as little as it can.
- It sits beside it: maps must leave things out, and, as a separate point, Mercator's chart misled readers about the size of lands.
Luz follows the idea that maps mislead. How does the final paragraph change that idea's weight in the essay?
- It moves the fault from the map to its silence: distortion cannot be avoided, but an omission misleads when no legend names it.
- It stays the essay's main warning to the end, from Mercator's chart to the highway map: readers should distrust what maps show.
- It hardens into a charge against maps in general, since sentence 9 shows that no flat map can avoid some distortion.
- It moves from the creek kept and the fence dropped, to poles stretched for true bearings, to sacrifice as the cost of any flat map.
Milo needs an objective summary of the essay. Which one is accurate without overstating how its two ideas relate?
- Maps are useful because they leave things out, and those omissions can mislead; the essay asks maps to say what they omit, and for whom.
- Mercator published a projection for sailors in 1569 that enlarged Greenland, and later mapmakers chose equal-area projections that distort shapes.
- Because maps must leave things out, any map deceives its readers, so the essay tells readers to trust no map without a confessing legend.
- Maps leave things out to be useful and can mislead; Mercator's chart was a careless choice that equal-area maps have rightly corrected.
The Day of Two Noons (history essay)
[1] Before the autumn of 1883, an American who traveled from Boston to New York had to reset a watch, not because the trip was long but because noon itself had moved. [2] Each town kept its own time by the sun, and since the sun stands highest over Boston about twelve minutes before it does over New York, the two cities' clocks could not agree. [3] Railroads managed the confusion by keeping their own times, so that a large station might display several clocks, each correct for a different company and none correct for the street outside. [4] On November 18, 1883, the railroads of the United States and Canada replaced this tangle with a few broad zones, each an hour apart, and telegraph signals told stations when to reset their clocks. [5] In many eastern towns the clocks were turned back at midday, and newspapers called the occasion the day of two noons.
[6] The benefits were obvious to anyone who had ever missed a connection. [7] A schedule printed in Chicago could now be read in Omaha without arithmetic, and a dispatcher could trust that two engineers on one track meant the same thing by the same hour. [8] Yet the change also asked people to accept that the time on their clocks no longer described their own sky: in the western part of a zone, the sun might stand highest well after twelve. [9] Some towns refused for years, and local editors complained that the railroads had taken noon away from the people who lived under it.
[10] Those complaints, sincere as they were, idealized what had come before. [11] Local time had never been a simple reading of nature, since jewelers, banks and city halls in a single town could disagree by a minute or two, and each town's noon was itself an agreement about whose clock to trust. [12] What the railroads replaced was not the sun but a smaller convention, one that a town could see, check and argue about.
[13] The new convention was larger and much harder to argue with. [14] Congress did not write standard time into law until 1918, which meant that for thirty-five years the hour most Americans lived by had been set by private companies for the convenience of their own timetables. [15] The clocks had been made to agree, and the question of who should decide what time it is had been settled before most people thought to ask it.
Pia follows what the essay says standard time cost Americans. How does that cost change from paragraph 2 to the final paragraph?
- It moves from a sky the clock no longer matched, to a local agreement given up, to a decision about who sets the hour.
- It stays a cost in accuracy: from sentence 8 to the end, the trouble is clocks that no longer match the sky above a town.
- It shrinks to almost nothing, since sentence 12 shows that the towns simply traded one convention for another of the same kind.
- It moves from missed connections, to schedules read without arithmetic, to an hour that engineers on one track could trust.
What the Archive Throws Away (essay)
[1] Visitors to a national archive tend to imagine a building that keeps everything, a vast memory in which no scrap of the past is ever lost. [2] The reality is closer to the opposite: the National Archives of the United States estimates that only one to three percent of the records created by the federal government are important enough to be kept permanently. [3] The rest are scheduled for destruction once their legal and practical uses expire, and archivists spend much of their working lives deciding which category a box of papers belongs to. [4] An archive that refused to make those decisions would soon be unusable, its important documents buried under millions of routine forms that no one could index, store or search.
[5] Yet the decision about what counts as routine is made by people who cannot know what later readers will ask. [6] Historians of ordinary life have built entire books from records that their creators considered trivial: ship passenger lists, household account books, the daily logs of lighthouse keepers. [7] Questions about weather, diet and illness that no clerk in 1850 would have thought to put to a ledger can now be answered from the ledgers that happened to survive. [8] Every box an archivist discards, in this sense, is a wager that the questions of the future will resemble the questions of the present.
[9] It does not follow that the answer is to keep more. [10] Storage costs money, but the larger problem is attention, because a record that survives in a warehouse no one can search is lost almost as thoroughly as one that was shredded. [11] An archive that tried to save every page from a single busy office could find that researchers, faced with the mass, simply went somewhere else.
[12] The more accurate description of an archive, then, is not a memory but a record of judgments about what deserved remembering. [13] Those judgments are documents in their own right: the schedules that list what each agency may destroy, and when, are themselves preserved and can be read. [14] A historian who wants to know what a government considered unimportant in 1950 can find the answer in the very rules that sent its papers to the shredder. [15] The archive's gaps, read this way, are not simply losses but evidence, and sometimes the most revealing evidence that the archive holds.
Tala reads paragraphs 1 and 2. How does the idea that later readers' questions cannot be known complicate the case for discarding records?
- It adds a separate point: apart from keeping archives usable, old ledgers have helped historians study weather, diet and illness.
- It turns each discard into a risk: discarding still keeps the archive usable, but each choice bets on questions no one can foresee.
- It defeats it: since no one can know which records later readers will need, archivists should stop discarding records altogether.
- It runs the other way: discarding shapes later questions, because historians must ask their questions of whatever happens to survive.
Zee follows the idea that discarded records are a loss. How does the final paragraph change that idea's weight?
- It ends as the essay's warning: each discard is a wager, and sentence 10 adds that records no one can search are lost too.
- It is partly turned around: the gaps remain losses, but the rules that caused them become evidence of what an era thought unimportant.
- It moves from a building that keeps everything, to one to three percent kept, to boxes that archivists must sort.
- It stays a plain loss to the end: from routine forms to the archive's gaps, the essay regrets each box that goes to the shredder.
Ari needs a summary of the essay for a class discussion. Which one is accurate without overstating how its two ideas relate?
- About one to three percent of federal records are kept permanently, because an archive that saved routine forms could not be searched.
- Archivists sort boxes into categories, historians write books from passenger lists, and researchers avoid archives too large to search.
- Archives must discard to stay usable, but discards destroy what historians need, so the essay finds the gaps matter more than what survives.
- Archives discard most records to stay usable; each discard bets on future questions, and the discard rules become evidence themselves.
Two Readers of One Word (essay)
[1] When Noah Webster published his American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828, he included spellings meant to make words look more like they sound, such as “color” without its British u and “center” with its final letters reversed. [2] To Webster, spelling that followed speech was both practical and patriotic, a way for a new nation to teach its children to read without memorizing centuries of accidents. [3] Many of his changes lasted, and anyone who has watched a child struggle with “though,” “through” and “tough” can understand why the cause still attracts reformers.
[4] What the reformers tend to undervalue is what an unphonetic spelling preserves. [5] The g in “sign” is silent, but it is heard in “signal” and “signature”, and its presence on the page lets a reader see at once that the three words belong together. [6] Spell the first as “sine” and the family resemblance disappears, along with a clue to meaning that fluent readers use constantly without noticing it. [7] In this sense English spelling records not only how words sound but where they came from and which words are related, information that a strictly phonetic system would throw away.
[8] The history it records, however, is not always true. [9] The b in “debt” was inserted by scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who wished to display the word's Latin ancestor, debitum, although English had borrowed the word from French without one. [10] The s in “island” is a similar invention, added by analogy with “isle,” a word with which “island” has no historical connection at all. [11] Spellings like these preserve a history of learned guesses, which is to say that they preserve the beliefs of their spellers rather than the past of the words.
[12] Webster's reforms and his opponents' objections, then, were answering two different readers. [13] The beginner, sounding words out letter by letter, gains from spellings that match speech, while the practiced reader, who recognizes whole words at a glance, gains from spellings that stay the same across a family of related words. [14] No spelling system can fully serve both, and English, with its silent letters and its occasional false ancestors, has for the most part chosen the experienced reader over the beginner. [15] Whether that choice was wise depends less on the letters themselves than on whose difficulty a society decides to treat as the problem.
Esme rereads paragraph 3. How do sentences 8 to 11 change the case for spellings that preserve a word's history?
- They add a separate fact: besides “sign,” a few other English words, such as “debt” and “island,” also contain silent letters.
- They overturn it: because spellings such as “debt” record a false history, the essay finally sides with Webster and with spelling by sound.
- They show reform causing false history, since spelling reformers such as Webster inserted letters like the b in “debt.”
- They narrow it: spelling keeps real families such as “sign” and “signal,” but some letters record scholars' guesses, not the past.
Kira follows the idea that spelling should match speech. How does the final paragraph change that idea's weight?
- It moves from silent letters that link word families, to letters added by scholars, to the practiced reader who sees whole words.
- It loses ground for good, since sentences 5 to 7 show that spelling by sound would hide word families that fluent readers use.
- It stays the essay's goal throughout: from Webster's “color” to the beginner in sentence 13, the essay argues for reform.
- It becomes one reader's need, the beginner's, a difficulty that English spelling has mostly set aside for the practiced reader's.
Pia writes a summary of the essay for a study guide on spelling. Which one is accurate without overstating how its two ideas relate?
- Silent letters in words like “sign” link whole families of related words, though letters like the b in “debt” were scholars' inventions.
- Spelling by sound helps beginners; spelling that keeps history, sometimes false history, helps fluent readers, whom English mostly favors.
- Webster's 1828 dictionary made spelling match sound. English spelling also shows word families, as in “sign” and “signal.”
- Spelling can serve beginners or fluent readers, and the essay shows English chose wrongly by keeping invented letters like the b in “debt.”