SAT passages

 This passage is adapted from Lee Billings, “Astronomers Spy  Shadowy Plumes around Europa.” ©2016 by Scientific  American, a division of Nature America, Inc. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope  have found new evidence that a subsurface ocean  within Jupiter’s icy moon Europa may be  intermittently venting plumes of water vapor into  outer space. The finding suggests Europa’s ocean,  thought to be buried beneath perhaps 100 kilometers  of ice, may be more amenable to life—and accessible  to curious astrobiologists—than previously believed. “If there are plumes emerging from Europa, it is  significant,” says study lead William Sparks, an  astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute  in Baltimore, Maryland. “Because it means we may  be able to explore that ocean for organic chemistry or  even signs of life without having to drill through  unknown miles of ice.” Using Hubble’s Space Telescope ...

 Passage 1 is adapted from Henry Knox, “A Plan for the  General Arrangement of the Militia of the United States,”  presented to Congress in 1790. Passage 2 is adapted from  Wilson Nicholas’s comments in a 1788 session of the  Virginia state convention on the adoption of the US  Constitution. Both passages discuss volunteer militias and  standing armies, or permanent forces of professional  soldiers. Passage 1 [W]hoever seriously and candidly estimates the  power of discipline and the tendency of military  habits will be constrained to confess, that whatever  may be the efficacy of a standing Army in War, it  cannot in peace be considered as friendly to the  rights of human nature. . . . A small Corps of well disciplined and well  informed Artillerists and Engineers, and a Legion for  the protection of the frontiers, and the Magazines  and Arsenals, are all the Military establishment which may be required for...

 This passage is adapted from Erika Ebsworth-Goold, “A Simple Sniff: Nanoparticle Research Tested in Locusts  Focuses on New Drug-Delivery Method.” ©2017 by  Washington University in St. Louis. Delivering life-saving drugs directly to the brain  in a safe and effective way is a challenge for medical  providers. One key reason: the blood-brain barrier,  which protects the brain from tissue-specific drug  delivery. Methods such as an injection or a pill aren’t  as precise or immediate as doctors might prefer, and  ensuring delivery right to the brain often requires  invasive, risky techniques. A team of engineers from Washington University  in St. Louis has developed a new nanoparticle  generation-delivery method that could someday  vastly improve drug delivery to the brain, making it  as simple as a sniff. “This would be a nanoparticle nasal spray, and the  delivery system could allow a therapeutic dose of  m...

 This passage is adapted from Michael Rosenwald, “Print Is  Dead. Long Live Print.” ©2016 by Columbia Journalism  Review. Two decades have passed since newspapers  launched websites, and yet here we are. Big city  papers have gone under, thousands of journalists  have lost their jobs, and the idea that digital news will  eventually become a decent business feels like a  rumor. The reality is this: No app, no streamlined  website, no “vertical integration,” no social network  has come close to matching the success of print in  revenue or readership. And the most crucial  assumption publishers have made about readers,  particularly millennials—that they prefer the  immediacy of digital—now seems questionable, too. I wish I were being hyperbolic, but Iris Chyi, a  University of Texas associate professor and new  media researcher, has been collecting facts to support  these assertions. While pursuing her Ph...

This passage is adapted from Haruki Murakami, 1Q84. ©2009 by Haruki Murakami. Translation by Jay Rubin and  Philip Gabriel. ©2011 by Haruki Murakami. Tengo, a writer,  has just completed a project of editing another author’s  book, Air Chrysalis, for his publisher Komatsu. Tengo had spent ten days reworking Air Chrysalis before handing it over to Komatsu as a newly  finished work, following which he was visited by a  string of calm, tranquil days. He taught three days a  week. The rest of his time he spent doing housework,  taking walks, and writing his own novel. April passed  like this. The cherry blossoms scattered, new buds  appeared on the trees, the magnolias reached full  bloom, and the seasons moved along in stages. The  days flowed by smoothly, regularly, uneventfully.  This was the life that Tengo most wanted, each week  linking automatically and seamlessly with the next. Amid all the sameness, however, one chang...

 This passage is adapted from Thomas W. Schoener and  David A. Spiller, "Trophic Cascades on Islands." ©2010 by  Island Press In the 1970s, one of us visited more than 500  Bahamian islands to survey distributions of  vertebrates, with special emphasis on lizards and  birds. A key objective was to determine the threshold  island area on which vertebrate populations could just  survive. We were astonished to find lizards,  particularly Anolis sagrei, on some tiny islands, a  discovery that multiplied by at least two orders of  magnitude the list of Bahamian islands surmised or  known to have resident populations of vertebrates.  We realized we had to check many quite small islands  to determine such thresholds, and in the course of  that endeavor we came upon a large number of  islands without lizards. This led to a second, even  more exciting discovery: Such islands sometimes had  extraordinarily h...

 This passage is adapted from Jonah Berger, Contagious: Why  Things Catch On. ©2013 by Social Dynamics Group, LLC. Although geography clearly matters in voting—the  East Coast leans Democratic while the South skews  Republican—few people would think that the exact  venue in which they vote matters. But it does. Political scientists usually assume that voting is  based on rational and stable preferences: people  possess core beliefs and weigh costs and benefits when  deciding how to vote. If we care about the  environment, we vote for candidates who promise to  protect natural resources. If we're concerned about  health care, we support initiatives to make it more  affordable and available to greater numbers of people.  In this calculating, cognitive model of voting behavior,  the particular kind of building people happen to cast  their ballot in shouldn't affect behavior. But we weren't so sure. Most people in th...

 Passage 1 is adapted from "'Cloud Seeding' Not Effective at  Producing Rain as Once Thought, New Research Shows."  ©2010 by American Friends of Tel Aviv University. Passage 2  is adapted from Janet Pelley, "Does Cloud Seeding Really  Work?" ©2017 by American Chemical Society. Passage 1 In many areas of the world, including California's  Mojave Desert, rain is a precious and rare resource.  To encourage rainfall, scientists use "cloud seeding," a  weather modification process designed to increase  precipitation amounts by dispersing chemicals into  the clouds. But research now reveals that the common  practice of cloud seeding with materials such as silver  oxide and frozen carbon dioxide may not be as  effective as it had been hoped. In the most  comprehensive reassessment of the effects of cloud  seeding over the past fifty years, new findings from  Prof. Pinhas Alpert, Prof. Zev Levin and Dr. Noam  H...

 This passage is adapted from a speech delivered in 1860 by  John Hossack, "Speech of John Hossack, Convicted of a  Violation of the Fugitive Slave Law, before Judge  Drummond, of the United States District Court, Chicago, IL."  Hossack was tried for aiding an escaped African American  slave, in violation of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. I am a foreigner. I [was born] among the rugged  but free hills of Scotland; a land, Sir, that never was  conquered, and where a slave never breathed. Let a  slave set foot on that shore, and his chains fall off for  ever, and he becomes what God made him—a man.  In this far-off land, I heard of your free institutions,  your prairie lands, your protected canals, and your  growing towns. Twenty-two years ago, I landed in  this city. . . I then opened a prairie farm to get bread  for my family, and I am one of the men who have  made Chicago what it is to-day, having shipped ...

 This passage is adapted from Meg Wolitzer, The Wife.  Originally published in 2003. The narrator, a student at  Smith College, a women's college, is enrolled in a creative  writing class in the 1950s. "Write what you know," Professor Castleman  advised as he sent us off to complete the writing  assignment.  That night after dinner (shepherd's pie, I  remember, for I sat there looking at it and trying to  describe it to myself in a writerly fashion, though the  best I could come up with was, pathetically, "a roof of  mashed potato spread thickly atop a squat house of  meat"), I climbed to the upper reaches of the Neilson  Library. On tall steel shelves around me were ancient  bound volumes of scientific abstracts: Annuls of  Phytochemistry, Sept.-Nov. 1922; International  Journal of Haematology, Jan.-Mar. 1931. I wondered  if anyone would ever again open any of these books  again, or whether they'd...

 Passage 1 is adapted from The University of Auckland,  “Naming Species before Extinction.” ©2013 by The  University of Auckland. Passage 2 is adapted from Geoffrey  Giller, “Are We Any Closer to Knowing How Many Species  There Are on Earth?” ©2014 by Scientific American, a  division of Nature America, Inc. Passage 1 Claims that most species will go extinct before  they can be discovered have been debunked by  researchers in an article published in Science. The scientists show that the claims are based on  two key misconceptions: an over-estimation of how  many species may exist on Earth, and the erroneous  belief that the number of taxonomists (people who  describe and identify species) is declining. “Our findings are potentially good news for the conservation of global biodiversity,” says lead  author Associate Professor Mark Costello from The  University of Auckland, who published the work  with Professor Nige...