SAT passages

 This passage is adapted from Jane Austen, Emma, originally published in 1815 . Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. She was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent father, and had, in consequence of her sister’s marriage, been mistress of his house from a very early period. Her mother had died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses, and her place had been supplied by an excellent woman as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection. Sixteen years had Miss Taylor been in Mr. Woodhouse’s family, less as a governess than a friend, very fond of both daughters, but particularly of Emma. Between them it was more the intimacy of sisters. Even before Miss Taylor had ceased to hold the nominal office o...

 This passage is adapted from Patrick Tucker, “The Over-Mediated World.” ©2007 by The World Future Society. The average American spends more time using media—an iPod, computer, radio, television, etc.—than in any other wakeful activity, almost nine Line hours a day. Ubiquitous news, e-mail, and  entertainment are facts of modern life and, not surprisingly, most of us feel that convenient and consistent access to the digital world is a good thing. But what if our new “connected age” is actually pushing us further apart, making us not more  informed, but less so? This is the concern of Michael Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University and author of Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in the Technological Age  (Oxford, 2005). “Family time at the dinner table used to be sacrosanct. Nutritionists and psychologists will tell you that having dinner together uninterrupted ...

 This passage is adapted from Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. ©2011 by Joshua Foer. In 2000, a neuroscientist at University College London named Eleanor Maguire wanted to find out what effect, if any, all that driving around the labyrinthine streets of London might have on cabbies’ brains. When she brought sixteen taxi drivers into her lab and examined their brains in an MRI scanner, she found one surprising and important difference. The right posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain known to be involved in spatial navigation, was 7 percent larger than normal in the cabbies—a small but very significant difference. Maguire concluded that all of that way-finding around London had physically altered the gross structure of their brains. The more years a cabbie had been on the road, the more pronounced the effect. The brain is a mutable organ, capable—within limits—of reorganizing itself and readapting to new kinds of sensory inpu...

  This passage is adapted from Daniyal Mueenuddin, “Nawabdin Electrician.” ©2009 by Daniyal Mueenuddin. Another man might have thrown up his hands—but not Nawabdin. His twelve daughters acted as a spur to his genius, and he looked with Line satisfaction in the mirror each morning at the face of a warrior going out to do battle. Nawab of course knew that he must proliferate his sources of revenue—the salary he received from K. K. Harouni for tending the tube wells would not even begin to suffice. He set up a little one-room flour mill, run off a condemned electric motor—condemned by him. He tried his hand at fish-farming in a little pond at the edge of his master’s fields. He bought broken radios, fixed them, and resold them. He did not demur even when asked to fix watches, though that  enterprise did spectacularly badly, and in fact earned him more kicks than kudos, for no watch he took apart ever kept time again. K. K. Harouni rarely went to his farms, but lived mostly in Lah...