Passage I

LITERARY NARRATIVE: Passage A is adapted from the short story "Leaving Memphis" by Lauren Birden (©2008 by Narrative Magazine, Inc.). Passage B is adapted from the short story "Mandarins" by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (©2006 by Fiction, Inc.).

Passage A by Lauren Birden

You see her first in the Memphis bus station on a two-hour layover. You pretend you haven't because she looks ready to talk. "Stonewashed jeans," you think, watching her tap her platform sandals at the front of the boarding line. When she catches you staring, you pull your lips tight and stare at the floor in front of her. She starts toward you anyway. She plops down in the hard plastic seat next to you, moving her purse to her lap. You motion to your open novel and shrug as if to say, "Can't stop now," but she asks, "Where are you from?" and now you can't shake her.

You're not a bad person. You just wish Greyhound assigned seating. It's not the straw-blond hair teased up around her face, not even the sad, neglected teeth that make you want to turn off the overhead reading lamp and smile at her in the dark. "I have a sneaking suspicion that we're the same person," she says, and you say, "That's funny," because you know you've been inventing yourself this whole time. She smiles and waits for you to agree how similar the two of you are.

She tells you about the man she's taking the bus to see. "Left for a construction job in Palm Beach. Says my eyes are as blue as the Atlantic Ocean. He can't bear to look at the thing but one more time if I’m not there with him. You can't trust a man with a gun or a heart, but he swears he loves me." She waits for you to tell her of a better love. You can't think of a story to compare.

She says, "We're the same person." She's waiting for you to tell her yes, that you both have had the same heartache and know about scars and love the same. But you’re thinking at the window again as a radio tower passes that reminds you of the Eiffel Tower.

Firefly porch lights are perched, fat and throbbing, outside every occasional home you pass. You say, "You know, you're so very right," and then, nothing more. The woman resigns herself to turning away in the quiet. You're telling the truth for once.

Passage B by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Evening was falling one cloud-covered winter's day, as I boarded a Tokyo-bound train departing from Yokosuka. I found a seat in the corner, sat down, and leaned my head back against the window frame, half consciously watching for the station to recede slowly into the distance.  But then I heard coming from the ticket-gate the clattering of dry-weather clogs, followed immediately by the cursing of the conductor. The door of the second-class carriage was flung open, and a 13- or 14-year-old girl came bursting in.

At that moment, with a shudder, the train began to lumber slowly forward. I raised my eyes to look for the first time at the girl seated now on the opposite side. She wore her lusterless hair drawn up into a bun, in the traditional shape of a gingko leaf. Apparently from constant rubbing of her nose and mouth with the back of her hand, her cheeks were chapped and red. A grimy woolen scarf of yellowish green hung loosely down to her knees, on which she held a large bundle wrapped in cloth. To blot her existence, I took out my newspaper, and began to read.

The girl feverishly endeavored   to open   the window, the glass apparently proving to be too heavy for ·her. Gazing coldly at her desperate struggle as she fought with chilled hands, I hoped that she would fail, and at that very moment, the window at last came down with a thud. I would surely have barked at this unknown girl to reclose the window, had it not been for the outside view, which was now growing ever brighter, and for the smell, borne in on  the cold air, of earth, dry grass, and water.

Just then I saw standing behind the barrier of a desolate crossing three red-cheeked boys. Looking up to see the train as it passed, they raised their hands as one and let out with all the strength of their young voices a high pitched cheer. And at that instant the girl, the full upper half of her body leaning out of the window, abruptly extended her hands and began moving them briskly left and right. Five or six mandarin oranges, radiating the color of the warm sun and filling my heart with sudden joy, descended on the children standing there to greet the passing train.

I knew immediately the meaning of it all.  This girl, perhaps leaving home now to go into service as a maid or an apprentice, had been carrying in her bundle these oranges and tossed them to her younger brothers as a token of gratitude for coming to see her off.

Elated, I raised my head and gazed at the girl with very different eyes. For the first time I was able to forget, at least for a moment, my unspeakable fatigue and this tedious life.

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article "Travels with R.L.S." by James Campbell (©2000 by The New York Times Company).

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) preferred to circumnavigate civilization, with its increasing reliance on contraptions, and steer toward the rougher fringes. He self-consciously turned his back on the Victorian idol, progress. In similar spirit, he chose the past more often than the present as a setting for fiction. His most popular novels-Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantraeare set in a semi mythical realm, where the fire of adventure catches on every page. Stevenson loved the sound of clashing swords; he didn't want them getting tangled up in telephone wires overhead.

Stevenson, though, was destined to be a modern man. He was born into a Scottish family of civil engineers, esteemed for its technological genius. His grandfather, also Robert, was Britain's greatest builder of lighthouses, and his graceful towers continue to guide sailors today. Three of Robert's sons followed him into the profession, including Robert Louis Stevenson’s father, Thomas, who made his own mark in the field of optics-his louvre-boarded screens for the protection of thermometers are still in use today.

It was expected that Robert Louis would enter the family business in turn, and a great wringing of hands greeted his announcement to the contrary. He told his father that he wanted to be a writer, which Thomas Stevenson regarded as no profession at all. We can imagine the consternation when Stevenson's letters arrived bearing pleas such as "Take me as I am ...  I must be a bit of a vagabond." And a vagabond was precisely what he set out to be: longhaired, careless about food, walking through France or planning an epic ocean voyage, a far cry from the offices of D. & T. Stevenson, Engineers. He was forging the template for generations of college-educated adventurers to come. "I travel not to go anywhere, but to go," he wrote in ``Travels with a Donkey (1879). "I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."

Stevenson would not be an engineer, but he left his own lights, in Scotland and across the world, by which it is possible to trace his unceasing movement. No other writer, surely, is as much memorialized by the words ``lived here" as he is. There are five houses with Stevenson associations in Edinburgh alone, not to mention the little schoolhouse he attended as a child and the lavish gardens opposite the family home in Heriot Row, where he played and, the fanciful will have you believe, first acted out the quest for Treasure Island. I have shadowed Stevenson up to the northeast of Scotland, where he tried his hand at being an apprentice engineer, back down to the Hawes Inn at South Queensberry, where David Balfour is tricked into going to sea in Kidnapped. There are landmarks in Switzerland, France and on the Pacific Islands where the adventure of his final years took place.

Recently, I stumbled across Abernethy House where Stevenson lived briefly in London when he was. It stands in a secluded corner of Hampstead, high up on a hill, and separated from foggy London by farms and heath. It was while standing on Hampstead Hill one night that he gazed down on London and imagined a technological miracle of the future, "when in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the design of the monstrous city flashes into vision-a glittering hieroglyph." He is

65 anticipating the effects of electricity and a time when the streetlamps would be lighted "not one by one" by the faithful old lamplighter, but all at once, by the touch of a button.  Not  for  him  improvements  in  optics; give  him  the flickering  gas  lamp and  the  "skirts  of civilization" any day.

Lamps occur frequently in Stevenson's writing. There are the essays "A Plea for Gas Lamps" and "The Lantern Bearers," and his poem for children, "The Lamplighter," which celebrates an old custom: "For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door, I And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more." Then there is his memoir in which he describes how, when a child and sick, his nurse would take him to the window, "whence I might look forth into the blue night, starred with street lamps, and see where the gas still burned behind the windows of other sickrooms." And the lights shine again, with a subdued glow, in the obituary he wrote of his father. Thomas Stevenson's name may not have been widely known, yet "all the time, his lights were in every part of the world, guiding the mariner."

A year later, Stevenson chartered a schooner and became a mariner himself, sailing circuitously through the South Seas. He had, in a sense, entered the family business at last.

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the article "Proceed with Caution: Using Native American Folktales in the Classroom" by Debbie Reese (©2007 by the National Council of Teachers of English).

Traditional stories include myths, legends, and folktales rooted in the oral storytelling traditions of a given people. Through story, people pass their religious beliefs, customs, history, lifestyle, language, values, and the places they hold sacred from one generation to the next. As such, stories and their telling are more than simple entertainment. They matter-in significant ways-to the well-being of the communities from which they originate. Acclaimed Laguna Pueblo writer

 Leslie Marmon Silko writes that the oral narrative, or story, was the medium by which the Pueblo people transmitted "an entire culture, a worldview complete with proven strategies for survival." In her discussion of hunting stories, she says:

These accounts contained information of critical importance about the behavior and migration patterns of mule deer. Hunting stories carefully described key landmarks and locations of freshwater. Thus, a deer-hunt story might also serve as a map. Lost travelers and lost pinion nut gatherers have been saved by sighting a rock formation they recognize only because they once heard a hunting story describing this rock formation.

Similarly, children's book author Joseph Bruchac writes,. . . rather than  being  'mere  myths,'  with 'myth' being used in the pejorative sense of 'untruth,' those ancient traditional tales were a distillation of the deep knowledge held by the many Native American nations about the workings of the world around them.

Thus, storytelling is a means of passing along information, but it does not mean there is only one correct version of any given story. During a telling, listeners can speak up if they feel an important fact or detail was omitted, or want to offer a different version of the story. In this way, the people seek or arrive at a communal truth rather than an absolute truth. A storyteller may revise a story according to his or her own interpretation or according to the knowledge of the audience, but in order for it to be acceptable to the group from where the story originated, it should remain true to the spirit and content of the original.

Traditional stories originate from a specific people, and we expect them to accurately reflect those people, but do they? As a Pueblo Indian woman, I wonder, what do our stories look like when they are retold outside our communities, in picture book format, and marketed as "Native American folktales" for children? Are our religious, cultural: and social values presented accurately? Are children who read these folktales learning anything useful about us?

Much of what I bring to bear on my research emanates from my cultural lens and identity as a Pueblo Indian woman from Nambe Pueblo. I was born at the Indian hospital in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and raised on our reservation. As a Pueblo Indian child I was given a Tewa (our language) name and taught to dance. I went to religious ceremonies and gatherings, and I learned how to do a range of things that we do as Pueblo people. This childhood provided me with "cultural intuition." Cultural intuition is that body of knowledge anyone acquires based upon their lived experiences in a specific place. As a scholar in American Indian studies, I know there are great distinctions between and across American Indian tribal nations. For instance, my home pueblo is very different from the other pueblos in New Mexico, among which there are several different language groups.

I draw upon both my cultural intuition and knowledge when reading a book about Pueblo Indians. For example, when I read Gerald McDermott's Arrow to the Sun: A Pueblo  Indian Tale (1974), I wondered  what Pueblo the book is about. There are 19 different Pueblos in New Mexico, and more in Arizona. In which Pueblo did this story originate? That information is not included anywhere in the book, and there are other problems as well. In the climax of the story, the boy must prove himself by passing through "the Kiva of Lions, the Kiva of Serpents, the Kiva of Bees, and the Kiva of Lightning" where he fights those elements. McDermott's kivas are frightening places of trial and battle, but I know kivas are safe places of worship and instruction.

Depictions that are culturally acceptable at one Pueblo are not necessarily acceptable at a different Pueblo. As such, elders at one Pueblo would say the book could be used with their children, while elders at another Pueblo would disagree. This is not a question of cultural authenticity; it is one of appropriateness in teaching, given a specific audience.

NATURAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article "The Asphalt Jungle" by Peter Del Tredici (©2010 by Natural History Magazine, Inc.).

The ecology of the city is defined not only by the cultivated plants that require maintenance and the protected remnants of natural landscapes, but also by the spontaneous vegetation that dominates the neglected interstices. Greenery fills the vacant spaces· between our roads, homes, and businesses; lines ditches and chain-link fences; sprouts in sidewalk cracks and the neglected rooftops. Some of those plants, such as box elder, quaking aspen, and riverside grape, are native species present before humans drastically altered the land. Others, including chicory, Japanese knotweed, and Norway maple, were brought in intentionally or unintentionally by people. And still others-among them common ragweed, path rush (Juncus tenuis), and tufted lovegrass (Eragrostis  pectinacea)-arrived  on their own, dispersed by wind, water, or wild animals. Such species grow and reproduce in many American cities without being planted or cared for. They can provide important ecological services at very little cost to taxpayers, and if left undisturbed long enough they may even develop into mature woodlands.

There is no denying that most people consider many such plants to be "weeds." From a utilitarian perspective, a weed is any plant that grows on its own where people do not want it to grow. From the biological perspective, weeds are opportunistic plants that are adapted to disturbance in all its myriad forms, from bulldozers to acid rain. Their pervasiveness in the urban environment is simply a reflection of the continual disruption that characterizes that habitat-they are not its cause. In an agricultural context, the competition of weeds with economic crops is the primary reason for controlling them. In an urban area, a weed is any plant growing where people are trying to cultivate something else, or keep clear of vegetation altogether. The com plaints of city dwellers are usually based on aesthetics (the plants are perceived as ugly, or as· signs of blight and neglect) or on security concerns (they shield human activity or provide habitat for vermin).

From a plant's perspective, it is not the density of the human population that defines the urban environment, but the abundance of paving (affecting access to soil and moisture) and prevalence of disturbance. In other words, a sidewalk crack is a sidewalk crack whether it is in a city or a suburb. Urbanization is a process, not a place-a process that tends to leave the soil in a compacted, impoverished, and often contaminated state.

The plants that grow and survive in derelict urban wastelands are famous (or infamous) for their ability to grow under extremely harsh conditions. Through a quirk of evolutionary fate, they developed traits in their native habitats that seem to have "pre adapted" them to flourish in cities. One study, by biologist Jeremy T. Lundholm of St. Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and his then student Ashley Marlin, concluded that many successful urban plants are native to exposed cliffs, disturbed rock outcrops, or dry grasslands, all of which are characterized by soils with a relatively high pH. Cities, with their tall, granite-faced buildings and concrete foundations, are in a sense the equivalent of the natural limestone cliff habitats where those species originated. Similarly, as the British ecologist and "lichen hunter" Oliver L. Gilbert noted in his classic book The Ecology of Urban Habitats, the increased use of deicing salts on our roads and highways has resulted in the development of microhabitats along their margins that are typically colonized by calcium-loving grassland species adapted to limestone soils or by salt-loving plants from coastal habitats.

In general, the successful urban plant needs to be flexible in all aspects of its life history, from seed germination through flowering and fruiting; opportunistic in its ability to take advantage of locally abundant resources that may be available for only a short time; and tolerant of the stressful growing conditions caused by an abundance of pavement and a paucity of soil. The plants that grow in our cities managed to survive the transition from one land use to another as cities developed. The sequence starts with native species adapted to ecological conditions before the city was built. Those are followed, more or less in order, by species preadapted to agriculture and pasturage, to pavement and compacted soil, to lawns and landscaping, to infrastructure edges and environmental pollution-and ultimately to vacant lots and rubble.