Oneida didn't go to school with the rest of us. She went to a girls' school, a private school. Even in the summers she was not around much. I believe the family had a place on Lake Simcoe.

 Oneida was an unusual name. Her father, I believe, called her Ida. Ida's father ran the bank. Even in those days bankers came and went, I suppose to keep them from ever getting too cozy with the customers. But the Jantzens had been having their way in town for too long for any regulations to matter, or that was how it seemed. Horace Jantzen had certainly the look of a man born to.be in power. A heavy white beard and a ponderous expression.

 In the hard times of the Thirties people were still coming up with ideas. You can be sure, men were nursing a notion bound to make them a million dollars. A million dollars in those days was a million dollars.

It wasn't any railway bum, however, who got into the bank to talk to Horace Jantzen. Who knows if it was a single person or a cohort. Maybe a stranger or some friends of friends. Well dressed and plausible looking, you may be sure. Horace set store by appearances. He wasn't a fool, though maybe not as quick as he should have been to smell a rat.

 The idea was the resurrection of the steam-driven car, such as had been around at the turn of the century. Horace Jantzen may have had one himself and had a fondness for them. This new model would be an improved version, of course, and have the advantages of being economical and not making a racket.

I'm not acquainted with the details, having been in high school at the time. But I can imagine the leak of talk and the scoffing and enthusiasm and the news getting through of some entrepreneurs from Toronto or Windsor or Kitchener getting ready to set up locally. Some hotshots, people would say. And others would ask if they had the backing.

They did indeed, because the bank had put up the loan. It was Jantzen's decision and there was some con-40 fusion that he had put in his own money. He may have done so, but he had also dipped improperly into bank funds, thinking no doubt that he could pay 1t back with nobody the wiser. Maybe the laws were not so tight then. There were actually men hired and the old Livery Stable was cleared out to be their place of operations. And here my memory grows shaky, because I graduated from high school, and I had to think about earning a living if that was possible. I settled for bookkeeping, and that meant going out of town to apprentice to an outfit in Goderich. By the time I got back home the steam-car operation was spoken of with scorn by the people who had been against it and not at all by those who had promoted it. The visitors to town who promoted it had disappeared.

The bank had lost a lot of money. There was talk not of cheating but of mismanagement. Somebody had to be punished. Any ordinary manager would have been out on his ear, but given that it was Horace Jantzen this was avoided. What happened to him was almost worse.

He was switched to the job of bank manager in the little village of Hawksburg, about six miles up the highway. Prior to this there had been no manager there at all, because they didn't need one. There had just been a head cashier and an underling cashier, both women. 

Surely he could have refused, but pride, as it was thought, chose otherwise. Pride chose that he be driven every morning those six miles to sit behind a partial wall of cheap varnished boards, no proper office at all. There he sat and did nothing until it was time for him to be driven home. The person who drove him was his daughter. Sometime in these years of driving she made the transition from Ida to Oneida. At last she had something to do.

If I picture Oneida and her father on these journeys to and from Hawksburg, I see him riding in the back seat, and her in front, like a chauffeur. It may have been that he was too bulky to ride up beside her. I don't see Oneida looking downtrodden or unhappy at the arrangement, nor her father looking actually unhappy. Dignity was what he had, and plenty of it. She had something different. When she went into a store or even walked on the street there seemed to be a little space cleared around her, ready for whatever she might want or greetings she might spread. She seemed then a bit flustered but gracious, ready to laugh a little at herself or the situation. Of course she had her good bones and bright looks, all that fair dazzle of skin and hair. So it might seem strange that I could feel sorry for her, the way she was all on the surface of things, trusting.

SOCIAL SCIENCE: Passage A is adapted from Plastic:  A Toxic Love Story by Susan Freinkel (©2011  by  Susan Freinkel). Passage B is adapted from American Plastic: A Cultural History by Jeffrey L. Meikle (©1995 by Jeffrey L. Meikle).

Passage A by Susan Freinkel

Designers were enthralled by the universe of possibility from plastics' earliest days. They loved the design freedom that synthetics offered and the spirit of modernity the materials embodied.   To furniture designer Paul T. Frankl, a material like Bakelite, the world's first synthetic plastic, spoke "in the enabler of the twentieth century the language of mvent10n, of synthesis," and he urged his fellow designers to u e their full imaginative powers to explore the new maternal' frank artificiality. As interpreted  by Frankl and other designers working with Bakelite in the '30s and '40s, that was the language of streamlining, a lingo of curves and dashes and teardrop shapes that created a feeling  of  speed  and  motion  in  everyday  objects. Streamline a fountain pen and even that stolid item declared: we're hurtling toward the future here!

There was another reason designers embraced plastics. From the mid-twentieth century on, modern design has been guided by an egalitarian gospel, a belief that good design needn't cost a lot of money, that even the most mundane items could be things of beauty. "Get the most of the best to the most for the least" was the way Ray and Charles Eames put it in their famous tongue-twisting credo. Plastics were the ideal medium for that mission: malleable, relatively inexpensive, and made for mass manufacture. Yet, as in any new relationship, there were risks. It was all too easy to exploit plastics' powers of mimicry to produce the kinds of imitations-pseudo-wood. Cabinets and faux-leather recliners-that contributed to the growing reputation of plastic as an inferior material. Plastics' adaptability and glibness undermined their capacity to achieve "dignity" as legitimate materials worthy of being taken seriously, one critic wrote.

This impression was exacerbated by people's unfortunate experiences with plastics in the immediate postwar years. There were plastic plates that melted in hot water, plastic toys that cracked on Christmas morning, plastic raincoats that grew clammy and fell apart in the rain. Polymer technology improved during the 1950s as manufacturers figured out how to make better plastics and, even more important, how to match the right polymer with the right application. But the damage to plastic's reputation had been done·.

Passage B by Jeffrey L. Meikle

 Worrying about the image of plastic made sense in 1945 when unfamiliar new materials confronted wary consumers. By the mid-1950s, however, no one was ignorant of plastic because it surrounded everyone. 

 Sidney Gross, who joined Modern Plastics in 1952 and became editor in 1968, recalled that he had "agitated a lot" over the years to get SPI, the trade association for the plastics industry, to quit trying to convince people "that plastic is not bad." It was a waste of money because plastic’s image-good or bad-did not really matter. The key to plastic's success, as he saw 1t, was always "selling the manufacturer." One plastic products filled the stores, people had no choice but to consume what they were offered. Most of the time, Gross maintained, after the industry had solved postwar quality problems, plastic objects did work better. Things made of plastic were better designed and lasted longer. People intuitively recognized that fact even if they retained an intellectual notion that plastic was bad or shoddy. In short, nothing succeeded like success.

 Often plastic did offer a significant improvement on whatever it replaced. A sleepy householder had to watch only once in disbelief as a polyethylene juice pitcher bounced off the kitchen floor to begin accepting plastic in a practical way no matter how strong the conceptual disdain for it. Even plastic toys, despite the rittle polystyrene items that broke on Chnstmas morning, proved superior in many ways. A toy soldier of molded polyethylene could not scratch the furniture as readily as an old-fashioned lead soldier.  Most people who expressed negative attitudes about plastic used it anyway without thinking about it, either because a particular use had proven itself or because an inexpensive trouble-free alternative no longer existed. As House Beautiful observed in 1955, "the news is not that la - 80 ticks exist, but [that] they have already been so assimilated into our lives.'·' The average person was "conditioned to plastics."  They had penetrated so far into the material fabric of everyday life that their presence could not be denied no matter how many people considered them second-rate substitutes or a sad commentary on modern times.

Passage III (All questions with lines or quotes are in red)

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the article "The Myth of Gabriel Garcia Marquez: How the Colombian Writer Really Changed Literature" by Michael Wood (©2009 by Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC).

Many years later, and many times over, the writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez was to remember the day he discovered how to set about writing his great novel. He was driving from Mexico City to Acapulco when the illumination hit him. He turned the car around, went home, and locked himself away for 18 months. When he reappeared, he had the manuscript of One Hundred Years of Solitude in his hands.

When Gerald Martin, around the middle of his rich 1o and resourceful biography of Garcia Marquez, starts to tell this story, the reader may be a little surprised, even disappointed. "He had not been driving long that day when ...Garcia Marquez, as if in a trance, turned the Opel around, and drove back in the direction of Mexico City. And then ...  " Up to this point, Martin has not been challenging what he calls his subject's "mythomania"-how  could  he, since it's the basis of  the writer's art and fame-but he has not been retelling the myths, either. He has been grounding them, laying out the pieces of what became the puzzles.  And that’s what he's doing here, too.

After "and then," Martin writes in mock apology, "It  seems a pity to intervene in the story  at this point but the biographer feels constrained to point out that there have been many versions of this story ... and that the one just related cannot be true." The truth was no doubt less "miraculous," to use Martin's word. The writer probably continued to Acapulco.  He didn't live in total seclusion for 18 months. And Garcia Marquez wasn't starting a new book; he was reviving an old one.

What Garcia Marquez found was a way of telling it. He would combine, as he frequently said, the narrative tone of his grandmother with that of the author Franz Kafka. She told fantastic stories as if they were true, because for her, they were true. Kafka told them that way because he was Kafka. After his moment of illumination Garcia Marquez came more and more to look for (and often to find) the truth in the fantastic, to pursue whatever truth was lurking in the nonliteral reading of literally presented events.

Just because the miracle didn't happen as the story says it did doesn't mean there wasn't a miracle. One Hundred Years of Solitude changed Garcia Marquez's life entirely, and it changed literature. When he got into the car to set out for Acapulco, he was a gifted and hardworking writer, certainly. When he got out of the car, he was on his way to the Nobel Prize, which he won in 1982.

Garcia Marquez made many jokes about his fame of 50 over the years. These jokes are witty and complicated acts of gratitude for a destiny the writer was sure could have been quite different. One of his finest sentences, written in an article in 1983, concerns a dream of the life he might have led if he had stayed in his isolated birthplace of Aracataca, Colombia. "I would not perhaps be the same person I am now but maybe I would have been something better: just a character in one of the novels I would never .have written."

The term "mythomania" certainly covers Garcia Marquez's stories about his life and plenty of his journalism. But his fiction is different. It takes pieces of already thoroughly mystified reality-there is scarcely an extravagant incident in his novels and stones that doesn't have some sort of basis in specific, local fact or legend-and finds the perfect, unforgettable  literary home for them. But Garcia Marquez neither copies nor further mythifies these facts and legends. He honors them, to borrow a well-placed word from Martin:

[O]ver the dark story of conquest and violence, tragedy and failure, he laid the other side of the continent, the carnival spirit, the music and the art of the Latin American people, the ability to honor life even in its darkest corners. To honor life, I take Martin as saying, is to celebrate dignity, courage, and style wherever they are found and in whatever forms they take. It is not to deny darkness or even to believe it has its compensations. Martin's biography is itself rather a dark affair appropriately since he is telling the life of a man whose autobiography is an elaborate historical myth. In Garcia Marquez's own accounts, his life is both hard and magical. But it's never sad, and Martin evokes the sorrow that must lurk in such a life. There is perhaps a slight imbalance in Martin's insistence on the writer's sadness, an excess of melancholy; but it's a good corrective to Garcia Marquez's own joking cheerfulness and elaborate ironies, and we can return to the master if we get too depressed. 

NATURAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the essay "Our Place in the Universe" by Alan Lightman (©2012 by Harper's Magazine Foundation).

One measure of the progress of human civilization is the increasing scale of our maps. A clay tablet dating from about the twenty-fifth century B.C. found near what is now the Iraqi city of Kirkuk depicts a river valley with a plot of land labeled as being 354 iku (about thirty acres) in size. In the earliest recorded cosmologies, such as the Babylonian Enuma Elish, from around 1500 B.C., the oceans, the continents, and the heavens were considered finite, but there were no scientific estimates of their dimensions. The early Greeks, including Homer, viewed Earth as a circular plane with the ocean enveloping it and Greece at the center, but there was no understanding of scale. In the early sixth century B.C., the Greek philosopher Anaximander, whom historians consider the first mapmaker, and his student Anaximenes proposed that the stars were attached to a giant crystalline sphere. But again there was no estimate of its size.

The first large object ever accurately measured was Earth, accomplished in the third century B.C. by Eratosthenes, a geographer who ran the Library of Alexandria. From travelers, Eratosthenes had heard the intriguing report that at noon on the summer solstice, in the town of Syene, due south of Alexandria, the sun casts no shadow at the bottom of a deep well. Evidently the sun is directly overhead at that time and place: (Before the invention of the clock, noon could be defined at each place as the moment when the sun was highest in the sky, whether that was exactly vertical or not.) Eratosthenes knew that the sun was not overhead at noon in Alexandria. In fact, it was tipped 7.2 degrees from the vertical, or about one fiftieth of a circle-a fact he could determine by measuring the length of the shadow cast by a stick planted in the ground. That the sun could be directly overhead in one place and not another was due to the curvature of Earth. Eratosthenes reasoned that if he knew the distance from Alexandria to Syene, the full circumference of the planet must be about fifty times that distance. Traders passing through Alexandria told him that camels could make the trip to Syene in about fifty days, and it was known that a camel could cover one hundred stadia (almost eleven and a half miles) in a day. So the ancient geographer estimated   that Syene and Alexandria   were about 570 miles apart. Consequently, the complete circumference of Earth he figured to be about 50 x 570 miles, or 28,500 miles. This number was within 15 percent of the modern measurement, amazingly accurate considering the imprecision of using camels as odometers.

As ingenious as they were, the ancient Greeks were not able to calculate the size of our solar system. That discovery had to wait for the invention of the telescope, nearly two thousand years later. In 1672, the French astronomer Jean Richer determined the distance from Earth to Mars by measuring how much the position of the latter shifted against the background of stars from two different observation points on Earth. The two points were Paris and Cayenne, French Guiana. Using the distance to Mars, astronomers were also able to compute the distance from Earth to the sun, approximately 100 million miles.

A few years later, Isaac Newton managed to estimate the distance to the nearest stars. (Only someone as accomplished as Newton could have been the first to perform such a calculation and have it go almost unnoticed among his other achievements.) If one assumes that the stars are similar objects to our sun, equal in intrinsic luminosity, Newton asked, how far away would our sun have to be in order to appear as faint as nearby stars? Writing his computations in a spidery script, with a quill dipped in the ink of oak galls, Newton correctly concluded that the nearest stars are about 100,000 times the distance from Earth to the sun, about 10 trillion miles away. Newton's calculation is contained in a short section of his Principia titled simply "On the distance of the stars."

Newton's estimate of the distance to nearby stars was larger than any distance imagined before in human history. Even today, nothing in our experience allows us to relate to it. The fastest most of us have traveled is about 500 miles per hour, the cruising speed of a jet. If we set out for the nearest star beyond our solar system at that speed, it would take us about 5 million years to reach our destination.  If   we traveled in the fastest rocket ship ever manufactured on Earth, the trip would last 100,000 years, at least a thousand human life spans.