*OFFICIAL* September 2012 ACT Reading Section Discussion

[GoodDocGoneBad]

<p>No it’s not. The three questions that were used in the test come in consecutive order in the actual interview:

SHAPIRO: Have you made sacrifices to pursue this work?</p>

<p>LOPEZ: Choosing the life I did, I’ve lost some things that from time to time cause me the deepest kind of anguish. Foremost among those are my social relations with other people. No one is comfortable exploring this topic with a stranger, but the truth is, if you’re devoted to your work your family is going to pay a price. How you cope with that—opting for the work or opting to maintain the long-term stability of a marriage, a family—is a singular measure of character.</p>

<p>I’ve lived in this house for almost thirty-four years, but I know relatively few people here. I’m not involved in the fabric of day-to-day life on the McKenzie, in part because my work is not local. My life is not working in the woods. If it were, I’d be logging every day with people whose lives I shared and whom I went to church with. I don’t have that. I’ve chosen to do work that takes me a long way away. And when I come home, what I really crave is privacy.</p>

<p>I’ve chosen a life that has made it impossible or very difficult for me to remain fully engaged in the life of a family. As a consequence, there have been times in my life when I’ve been very lonely. I can’t look at paying this price, though, as having made a sacrifice. Because you choose one thing, you don’t get another. I miss the pleasures of daily human contact and company. I’m in close touch with a community of people spread all over the country, all over the world, but I don’t see them every day. I love my work. It’s the good I have to offer. I don’t regret what I’ve done, but I have gone through times when I wondered what it would have been like if I had chosen community over being the kind of outrider that I am. If I had chosen a monastery or a community of people to stay with, if I had chosen a conventional family life where I married somebody and had children. But those were choices I did not make.</p>

<p>My sense of self-worth comes from meeting my own expectations and from an acknowledgment from strangers that the work I have done has been useful to them. I am as ordinary as the next fellow, so an award or formal recognition gives me a sense of accomplishment, but you can’t really get a sense of self-worth out of an award, an honorary doctorate, or something like that. Self-worth comes from the acknowledgment of other people, a letter from a stranger, unsolicited, that says your work has meant something.</p>

<p>I see my life in a very traditional way. I live in a modern era, but my sense of obligation and responsibility is traditional. You use your gift to help people achieve what they’re trying to do, to go where their imaginations are leading them.</p>

<p>SHAPIRO: Is there one quotation in literature that stands out, that has been a guidepost for you?</p>

<p>LOPEZ: There’s nothing I would use to summarize my beliefs, but in Moby-Dick there’s a chapter called “The Quarter-Deck” in which Ahab gives his reasons for pursuing the white whale. There’s a line in there about breaking through the pasteboard mask. That line has occurred to me repeatedly. In some way I see my life as trying to break through a pasteboard mask, to destroy an illusion, to get at an important reality, because it’s the reality, not the illusion, that should be trusted. The thing I am most fearful of in my culture is self-delusion: the self-delusion that deifies progress, the self-delusion that supports the superiority of one culture over another, and the self-delusions of righteousness.</p>

<p>So, breaking through that pasteboard mask is what I’m after. That’s why I pull the truck over and get out and get the animal off the road. The pasteboard mask obscures a deeper meaning. It leads you to believe it doesn’t make any difference. I just want to keep pushing through, to make sure I don’t get trapped. It’s important to say that I don’t stop for every animal—there’s something in a particular animal that calls me and I pull over. Sometimes it’s so strong that I’ll drive two or three miles down the road and can’t shake it off. I’ll make a turn, go all the way back, and take care of it.</p>

<p>The cultivation of insensitivity, of indifference, is a component of our culture. It’s easy to become remote and detached, to be reinforced in that behavior. It’s okay not to love. That’s a very strong message in American advertising, which tells you: Don’t worry about other people, take care of yourself—and here’s a little secret: other people are too complicated for you to be wasting your time on. So if you just have this beer, this car, this vacation, then the world will be under your control. You’ll get the things you need, to get you where you’re going.</p>

<p>No one breaks that pasteboard mask to destroy the illusion you’re actually going anywhere. You’re in a little box, eating the popcorn consumer culture throws at you. You have one piece of tasty popcorn and you want another. I go back to Moby-Dick. That novel begins, “Call me Ishmael.” That means: we’re going to be on a first-name basis. I am going to be your companion. You’re going to be in this with me. I want your trust. I’ll try to earn it. We’ll look at this thing together. Never in that novel are you held prisoner by the limits of Melville’s imagination. The best kind of writing opens up a place sufficient to the reader’s imagination.</p>

<p>My saying I want to be the reader’s companion instead of the reader’s authority—implicit in that is my knowing there are many readers far more imaginative than I am. I want to make the place where they can fully exercise their imagination. Not to do that is to cooperate in the building of this pasteboard world. It would be like saying, OK, Michael, look around the room, anything you want to look at is OK, but you can’t go outside, into the environment I don’t control.</p>

<p>One way I work with my house is to leave the doors and windows open for weeks on end during the summer. I want a sense of animals moving through it, that these walls are temporary. I want to be able to go out the window into the world. I want things to pass back and forth.</p>

<p>SHAPIRO: We’ve covered some dark subjects in this interview but I recall that you’ve referred to your body of work as a literature of hope. Do you feel hopeful and can you distinguish between hope and optimism?</p>

<p>LOPEZ: I’m not optimistic. Optimism for me is about examining the evidence on the table, and the evidence on the table is bad. The way we are conducting ourselves as a world culture around limited supplies of fresh water is bad. Federal initiatives to address global warming, heavy metals pollution, corporate avarice? Bad. The degree to which we are dependent on prescription drugs as a culture? Bad. So optimistic, no way.</p>

<p>Hopeful, yes. The reason is the staggering power of the human imagination to circumvent every kind of roadblock. I have to believe that imagining a story will somehow help people to imagine a way around difficulty. And that by encouraging a sense of hope, some woman, some man, will exercise their imagination in a way we could not have foreseen and that will be our blessing and our release from pessimism. Somebody will see a different way to do things. Stories, in some way, work as blueprints for the imagination.</p>

<p>I believe in the power of the human imagination to triumph over all these issues, like the two-hundred-some-year failure of the United States to realize the dream of a Jeffersonian republic. We fail again and again and again, but we are still at it. We are still determined to create a society that is equitable and just and opens the door for all people to imagine their lives in ways that will create a sense of possibility. So when I say a literature of hope, I mean a literature that gives you the opportunity to be hopeful about your own circumstances or circumstances for your family or your larger community.

</p>

[Siddysidsid]

<p>Guys, can someone confirm that the answer was to “use imagination to escape difficulties” rather than for the “greater good”.</p>

[saidu10]

<p>i got imagination too</p>

[GoodDocGoneBad]

<p>Any key words for the Seeds passage?</p>

[Siddysidsid]

<p>Alright awesome. “For the greater good” sounded way to general and out of theme with the rest of the passage.</p>

[2redpartyhats]

<p>oh thanks @gooddoc for the links!</p>

<p>I can hope you guys up with the 2nd passage, about agriculture. It’s a pretty good read actually.</p>

<p>[Sowing</a> for Apocalypse](<a href=“Sowing For Apocalypse | PDF | Plant Breeding | Agriculture”>Sowing For Apocalypse | PDF | Plant Breeding | Agriculture)</p>

<p>Hopefully it will trigger some memories of questions!</p>

<p>It starts here:
Agriculture is thought to have begun around8000 B.C., in the semi-arid mountains of Mesopotamia. Flint sickles and grinding stonesdiscovered in the region suggest that the firstfarmers collected wild grains, which weredeveloped over time into wheat and barley. Plantswere also domesticated by other civilizations inother parts of the world, almost certainlyindependently. In Southeast Asia, farming beganwith the domestication of rice, around 6500 B.C.;in Mesoamerica, maize and squash weredomesticated between 8000 and 5000 B.C. In eachcase, a legume was domesticated along with agrain or cereal: lentils with wheat in theMediterranean; beans with maize in SouthAmerica; soybeans with rice in Asia. Eating both together provided early humans with the right balance of protein and fat. Of the two hundred and fifty thousand known plant species in theworld, only about two hundred are cultivated for food, and the vast majority of the world’s foodcomes from just twenty crops, in eight plant families. It is a measure of the skill of the earlyfarmers that almost all the plants we use in agriculture today were domesticated beforehistorical times.From the beginning, farmers must have realized that by saving a certain portion of the seedsfrom the previous year’s crop they could insure themselves of a future harvest. (In Jarmo, Iraq,archeologists have found seed deposits that date from 6750 B.C.) Seed saving was one of themost important acts that a farming community performed. Seeds had to be protected fromweather and animals—insects as well as mammals. One early method of preservation was to pack seeds and ash inside baskets, and then bury the baskets in the ground. Seeds were alsosealed inside adobe structures, and kept in elevated thatched huts. When the community moved,it took its seeds along, too.Biologically, a seed is an embryo of a plant. Around the embryo is usually a layer of endosperm, where the food for the embryo is stored, and around that is the seed coat, which protects the embryo until its moisture and heat sensors say that it is time to germinate. Theembryo can survive for many years, under the right conditions, but not forever. In the eighteen-nineties, when the tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs were being opened by archeologists,hucksters tried to promote what were said to be ancient Egyptian wheat seeds—the idea beingthat after such a long rest the seeds would be especially productive. But there’s no evidence thatany of these seeds germinated.A seed is also a plant’s legs. Wind and water spread seeds, as do birds, bears, foxes, andmany other animals, but man has proved to be the longest-distance distributor. When Columbus</p>

<p>B
arrived in the New World in 1493, on his second voyage, he brought the seeds of plants knownonly in the Old World, among them wheat, onions, citrus, melons, radishes, olives, grapes, andsugarcane, and he took away seeds of plants known only in the New World, including corn, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins, squash, pineapples, and sweet potatoes. During thecolonial period, the world’s ecological boundaries were redrawn, as domesticated plants werecarried far afield, and used to establish agricultural economies in other parts of the world. TheRoyal Botanic Gardens, at Kew, outside London, was the headquarters of Great Britain’s botanical empire; from there, administrators coördinated the efforts of plant collectors atregional botanical stations from Jamaica to Fiji. As Lucile Brockway explains in her classic book “Science and Colonial Expansion,” published in 1979, cash crops, taken mostly fromLatin America, where labor was scarce, were planted in Asia, where labor was abundant. Thecinchona tree, from whose bark quinine is made, was transported from the Andes, and then planted in India by the British; the antimalarial treatment then enabled the colonization of Africa. The British also took natural rubber from Brazil, where the plant was first domesticated,and created a rubber industry in Southeast Asia that by the nineteen-twenties had greatlydiminished Brazil’s share of the rubber business. Sugarcane, which probably originated in India,went west, and became the main plantation crop of the West Indies. Coffee from Ethiopia wasdomesticated and introduced to India by the Arabs, and then cultivated by the Dutch in Java.Most of the coffee that grows in Latin America today traces its ancestry to a single coffee plantfrom Java that was taken to the Amsterdam Botanic Garden in 1706.</p>

[Chlowhee]

<p>@Imdad1 I can’t tell if you’re joking…but I thought it was WAS the junk and laundry one even though nobody else does. That was the only answer that came to mind immediately, and I double checked it…</p>

[GoodDocGoneBad]

<p>@2redpartyhats Thanks! Updated:</p>

<p>LINKS
This should clear some confusion. Please add any more that you find.</p>

<p>1.
2. [Sowing</a> for Apocalypse](<a href=“Sowing For Apocalypse | PDF | Plant Breeding | Agriculture”>Sowing For Apocalypse | PDF | Plant Breeding | Agriculture)
3. [The</a> Big Rhythm: A Conversation with Barry Lopez on the McKenzie River](<a href=“http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0044.405;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mqrg]The”>http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0044.405;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mqrg)
4. [It’s</a> time to stop reporting on the “wind chill.” - Slate Magazine](<a href=“http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2007/02/wind_chill_blows.html]It’s”>It's time to stop reporting on the "wind chill.")</p>

<p>Any help in finding the first passage would be appreciated!</p>

[kevyuuuu]

<p>So…Agricultural crops were planted before recorded history? Not between 8000 and 5000 BC?</p>

<p>Can anybody elaborate?</p>

[FullMetalx]

<p>kevyuu</p>

<p>in the first paragraph of that passage it stated exactly that that the first crops were planted before recorded history.</p>

[kevyuuuu]

<p>“Agriculture is thought to have begun around8000 B.C., in the semi-arid mountains of Mesopotamia. Flint sickles and grinding stonesdiscovered in the region suggest that the firstfarmers collected wild grains, which weredeveloped over time into wheat and barley. Plantswere also domesticated by other civilizations inother parts of the world, almost certainlyindependently. In Southeast Asia, farming beganwith the domestication of rice, around 6500 B.C.;in Mesoamerica, maize and squash weredomesticated between 8000 and 5000 B.C”</p>

<p>Either I’m ■■■■■■■■ or I’m just not seeing where it says “before recorded history” or variation of that…Then again i glanced at the 8000 to 5000 and assumed it was one of the questions that was straight from the text.</p>

[GoodDocGoneBad]

<p>@kevyuuuu, Here:

Of the two hundred and fifty thousand known plant species in theworld, only about two hundred are cultivated for food, and the vast majority of the world’s foodcomes from just twenty crops, in eight plant families. It is a measure of the skill of the earlyfarmers that almost all the plants we use in agriculture today were domesticated beforehistorical times

</p>

[rxllrn]

<p>Last sentence of the first paragraph:</p>

<p>It is a measure of the skill of the earlyfarmers that almost all the plants we use in agriculture today were domesticated before historical times.</p>

[kevyuuuu]

<p>MOOOTHERR GOD DAM AGDSFDSAFDAS I DIDNT READ THAT FAR </p>

<p>Okay so im at -2…possibly 35? :)?</p>

[actstudent3]

<p>There was a question in the second passage (about seeds) giving four facts and asking which can best be supported by the passage. What did everyone put?</p>

[miamiheat305]

<p>are you guys sure about that longing answer when it was like what the narrator meant by those feelings at the cellular level? when she said cellular i thought of the nervous system and put she felt a nervous rush, but longing sounds like it could fit too</p>

[FullMetalx]

<p>@miamiheat (Dallas 2011!!! :))</p>

<p>it was definitely longing. I thought it was nervous rush too but in context that doesn’t really fit at all. Why would the narrator have a nervous rush when she is reflecting, in a rather surreal way, on her life?</p>

[feedback411]

<p>^^ I put longing. Remember, all throughout the passage, the narrator kept thinking about how she’s so far away from home and remembering the past things she did in the island. Longing would be the most appropriate explanation for the “twinge” she felt. </p>

<p>Any resolution for question 1 yet? I had like 10 minutes remaining for the Reading section and spent a good portion of it staring at that question, trying to see if the test creator was referring to the chronological order of the narrator’s life as limited in the passage or her entire life in the past. I put the singer’s voice screeching as the answer, but it confused me how so incredibly obvious that seemed… I know riding the horses definitely came before but the question was ambiguous, no? All the other choices were what the narrator did in the present state of riding off to Texas while the horse riding one was something way in the past, briefly mentioned as a memory. It just seemed wrong to me.</p>

[Adezar1]

<p>this curve is going to be horrible i think:
40 = 36
39 = 34
38=33
37=32
36= 30</p>

[kevyuuuu]

<p>i felt that question 1 was decently straightforward. It asked for the chronological events of her life - so her riding a horse had to be the right answer. As you said, the other events, including the screeching voice, all were happening in the present.</p>