Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from the novel The Fisher King by Paule Marshall (©2000 by Paule Marshall).

It was nearing the end of the second set, the jazz show winding down when Hattie heard Abe Kaiser at the microphone call Everett Payne's name. Heard his name and, to her surprise, saw him slowly stand up in the bullpen up front. She hadn't seen him join the other local musicians, including Shades Bowen with his tenor sax, in what was called the bullpen, which was simply a dozen or so chairs grouped near the bandstand. The young locals gathered there each Sunday evening, hoping for a chance to perform. Because toward the end of the final set, the custom was to invite one or two of them to sit in with the band. They sometimes even got to choose the tune they wanted to play.

This Sunday, Everett Payne, not long out of the army, was the one being invited to sit in. 

Breath held, Hattie watched him separate himself from the hopefuls and approach the stand, taking his time, moving with what almost seemed a deliberate pause between each step. The crowd was waiting.

That was his way, Hattie knew. His body moving absentmindedly through space, his head, his thoughts on something other than his surroundings, and his eyes like a curtain he occasionally drew aside a fraction of an inch to peer out at the world. A world far less interesting than the music inside his head.

She watched now as he slowly mounted the band stand and conferred with the bassist and drummer, those two were all he would need. Then, without announcing the name of the tune he intended playing, without in any way acknowledging the audience, he sat down at the piano and brought his hands-large hands, the fingers long and splayed and slightly arched-down on the opening bars of "Sonny Boy Blue."

"Sonny Boy Blue!" That hokey-doke tune!

Around her, the purists looked askance at each other from behind their regulation shades and slouched deeper in their chairs in open disgust.

At first, hokey though it was, he played the song straight through as written, the rather long introduction, verse, and chorus. And he did so with great care, although at a slower tempo than was called for and with a formality that lent the Tin Pan Alley tune a depth and thoughtfulness no one else would have accorded it. 

Quickly taking their cue from him, the bassist reached for his bow, the drummer for his brushes, the two of them also treating the original as if it were a serious piece of music.

Everett Payne took his time paying his respects to the tune as written, and once that was done, he hunched closer to the piano, angled his head sharply to the left, completely closed the curtain of his gaze, and with his hands commanding the length and breadth of the keyboard he unleashed a dazzling pyrotechnic of chords (you could almost see their colors), polyrhythms, seemingly unrelated harmonies, and ideas-fresh, brash, outrageous ideas. It was an outpouring of ideas and feelings informed by his own brand of lyricism and lit from time to time by flashes of the recognizable melody. He continued to acknowledge the little simple-minded tune, while at the same time furiously recasting and reinventing it in an image all his own. 

A collective in-suck of breath throughout the club.

Where, Hattie wondered, did he come by the dazzling array of ideas and wealth of feeling? What was the source? It had to do, she speculated, listening intently, with the way he held his head, angled to the left like that, tilted toward both heaven and earth. His right side, his right ear directed skyward, heating up there, in the Upper Room among the stars Mahalia sang about, a new kind of music: splintered, atonal, profane, and possessing a wonderful dissonance that spoke to him, to his soul-case. For him, this was the true music of the spheres, of the maelstrom up there. When at the piano, he kept his right ear tuned to it at all times, letting it guide him, inspire him. His other ear?  It remained earthbound, trained on the bedrock that for him was Bach and the blues.

     Again and again he took them on a joyous, terrifying roller coaster of a ride it seemed  to Hattie, and BO when he finally deposited them on terrafirma after close to twenty  minutes, everyone in  Putnam  Royal could only sit there as if they were in church and weren't supposed to clap. Overcome. Until finally Alvin Edwards, who lived on Decatur Street and played trumpet in the school band, leaped to his feet and renamed him.

Alvin brought everyone up with him. Including the purists who normally refused to applaud even genius. They too stood up in languid praise of him.

Passage II

SOCIAL STUDIES: This passage is adapted from Richard Moe's article "Mindless Madness Called Sprawl," based on a speech he gave on November 30, 1996, in Fresno, California (©1996 by Richard Moe).

At the time he gave the speech, Moe was president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Drive down any highway leading into any town in the country, and what do you see? Fast-food outlets, office parks and shopping malls rising out of vast barren plains of asphalt.  Residential   subdivisions spreading like inkblots obliterating forests and farms in their relentless march across the landscape.  Cars moving sluggishly down the broad ribbons of pavement or halting in frustrated clumps at choked intersections. You see communities drowning in a destructive, soulless, ugly mess called sprawl.

Many of us have developed a frightening form of selective blindness that allows us to pass by the appalling mess without really seeing it. We've allowed our communities to be destroyed bit by bit, and most of us have shrugged off this destruction as "the price of progress.”

Development that destroys communities isn't progress. It's chaos. And it isn't inevitable, it's merely easy. Too many developers follow standard formulas, and too - any government entities have adopted laws and policies that constitute powerful incentives for sprawl.

Why is an organization like the National Trust for Historic   Preservation   so concerned   about sprawl? We're concerned because sprawl devastates older communities, leaving historic buildings and neighborhoods underused, poorly maintained or abandoned. We've learned that we can't hope to revitalize these communities without doing something to control the sprawl that keeps pushing further and further out from the center.

But our concern goes beyond that, because preservation today is about more than bricks and mortar. There's a growing body of grim evidence to support our belief that the destruction of traditional downtowns and older neighborhoods-places that people care about-is corroding the very sense of community that helps bind us together as a people and as a nation.

One form of sprawl-retail development that transforms roads into strip malls-is frequently spurred on by discount retailers, many of whom are now concentrating on the construction of superstores with more than 200,000 square feet of space. In many small towns, a single new superstore may have more retail space than the entire downtown business district. When a store like that opens, the retail center of gravity shifts away from Main Street. Downtown becomes a ghost town.

Sprawl's other most familiar form-spread-out residential subdivisions that "leapfrog" from the urban fringe into the countryside-is driven largely by the American dream of a detached home in the middle of a grassy lawn. Developers frequently claim they can build more "affordable" housing on the edge of town but "affordable" for whom?

The developer’s own expenses may be less, and the home buyer may find the prices attractive-but who picks up the extra costs of fire and police protection, new roads and new utility infrastructure in these outlying areas? We all do, in the form of higher taxes for needless duplication of services and infrastructure that already exist in older parts of our cities and towns.

People who say that sprawl is merely the natural product of marketplace forces at work fail to recognize that the game isn't being played on a level field. Government at every level is riddled with policies that mandate or encourage sprawl.

By prohibiting mixed uses and mandating inordinate amounts of parking and unreasonable setback requirements, most current zoning laws make it impossible-even illegal-to create the sort of compact walkable environment that attracts us to older neighborhoods and historic communities all over the world. These codes are a major reason why 82 percent of all trips in the United States are taken by car. The average American household now allocates more than 18 percent of its budget to transportation expenses, most of which are auto-related. That's more than it spends for food and three times more than it spends for health care.

Our communities should be shaped by choice, not by chance. One of the most effective ways to reach this goal is to insist on sensible land-use planning. The way we zone and design our communities either opens up or forecloses alternatives to the automobile. Municipalities should promote downtown housing and mixed-use zoning that reduce the distances people must travel between home and work. The goal should be an integrated system of planning decisions and regulations that knit communities together instead -of tearing them. We should demand land-use planning that exhibits a strong bias in favor of existing communities.

Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the essay "My Life with a Field Guide" by Diana Kappel-Smith (©2002 by Phi Beta Kappa Society).

I was seventeen when it started. My family was on vacation, and one day we went on a nature walk led by a young man a few years older than I. Probably I wanted to get his attention-I'm sure I did-so I pointed to a flower and asked, "What's that?"

"Hmmm? Oh, just an aster," he said.

Was there a hint of a sniff as he turned away? There was! It was just an aster and I was just a total ignoramus!

And I remember the aster. Its rays were a brilliant purple, its core a dense coin of yellow velvet. It focused light as a crystal will. It faced the sun; it was the sun's echo.

Later that day, a book with a green cover lay on the arm of a chair under an apple tree. It was the same volume that our guide had carried as he marched us through the woods. The book had been left there, by itself. It was a thing of power. In the thin summer shadow of the tree, quivering, like a veil, the book was revealed, and I reached for it. A FIELD GUIDE TO WILD FLOWERS-PETERSON & McKENNY, its cover said. Its backside was ruled like a measuring tape, its inside was full of drawings of flowers. By the end of that week I had my own copy. I still have it.

Over the next several years this field guide would become my closest companion, a slice of worldview, as indispensable as eyes or hands. I didn't arrive at this intimacy right away, however. This wasn't going to be an easy affair for either of us.

I'll give you an example of how it went. After I'd owned the Peterson's for about a week, I went on a hike with some friends up a little mountain, taking the book along. Halfway up the mountain, there by the trailside was a yellow flower, a nice opportunity to take my new guide for a test drive. "Go on ahead!" I said to my hiking companions, ''I'll be a minute ...” Famous last words.

I had already figured out the business of the book's colored tabs. I turned in an authoritative way to the Yellow part and began to flip through. By the time the last of my friends had disappeared up the trail, I'd arrived at a page where things looked right.  Five petals? Yes. Pinnate leaves? Whatever. Buttercup? There are, amazingly, eleven buttercups. Who would have thought? However hard I tried to make it so, my item was not one of them. Next page. Aha! this looked more like it. Bushy cinquefoil? Nope, leaves are not quite right, are they? As the gnats descended, I noticed that there were six more pages ahead, each  packed  with five-petaled yellow flowers-St. Johnsworts, loose strife’s, and puccoons.

Why I persisted in carrying it around and consulting its crowded pages at every opportunity, I have no idea. The book was stubborn; well, I was stubborn, too; that was part of it. And I had no choice, really, not if I wanted to get in. A landscape may be handsome in the aggregate, but this book led to the particulars, and that's what I wanted. A less complete guide would have been easier to start with, but more frustrating in the end. A more complete book would have been impossible for me to use. So I persisted in wrestling with the Peterson's, and thus by slow degrees the crowd of plant stuff in the world became composed of individuals. As it did, the book changed: its cover was stained by water and snack food, the spine grew invitingly lax, and some of the margins sprouted cryptic annotations.

By the time the next summer came, I had fully discovered the joy of the hunt, and every new species had its trophy of data-name and place and date-to be jotted down. If I'd found a flower before, I would be happy to see it again. I often addressed it with enthusiasm: Hi there, Solidago hispida! I discovered early on that a plant's Latin name is a name of power by which the plant can be uniquely identified among different spoken tongues, across continents, and through time.  The genus name lashes it firmly to its closest kin, while its species name describes a personal attribute-rubrum meaning red, officinale meaning medicinal, odoratus meaning smelly, and so on. It all makes such delightful sense!

My friend Julie and I identified individual plants in our rambles, but from the particulars we began to know wholes. Bogs held one community, mountain forests held another, and the plants they held in common were clues to intricate dramas of climate change and continental drift. So from plant communities it followed that the grand schemes of things, when they came our way, arrived rooted in real place and personal experience:  quaternary geology, biogeography, evolutionary biology all lay on the road that we had begun to travel.

Passage IV

NATURAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article "When Research Is a Snow Job" by Sarah Boyle (©2002 by National Wildlife).

The figure is beyond comprehension: Every year, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 <1 septillion snowflakes fall worldwide . As the crystals fall, they encounter different atmospheric conditions that ·produce flakes with unique attributes. The more complex those conditions are, the more elaborate the crystals.

Kenneth Libbrecht is a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. Along with the work of scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural   Research   Service   (ARS),   his research is uncovering new information about the magical world of snow crystals-information that has practical applications in such diverse areas as agriculture and the production of electricity.

Snow crystals are individual crystals-usually in a hexagonal form-while snowflakes are collections of two or more snow crystals. Beginning as condensed water vapor, a crystal typically grows around a nucleus of dust. Its shape depends on how the six side facets-or faces-grow in relation to the top and bottom facets. If they grow relatively tall, the crystal appears column like; if the side facets are short compared to the length of the bottom and top facets, the crystal looks plate like. 

Currently Libbrecht is trying to crack the problem of why the crystal facets' growth varies with temperature. He believes this may have something to do with the ice surface's "quasi-liquid" layer, which affects how water molecules stick to the surface.

By manipulating the temperature and humidity within an incubation chamber (and by adding an electric current or various gases at times), Libbrecht creates "designer" snowflakes in his lab. Such experiments are helping him determine how crystals form.

William Wergin, a retired ARS research biologist, and a colleague, Eric Erbe, were using scanning electron microscopy to look at biological problems relating to agriculture. To avoid the laborious procedure that using such equipment usually entails, the two scientists decided to freeze the tissue they were working with and look at it in the frozen state.

"One day it happened to be snowing,” says Wergin, "and we were looking for a specimen. We imaged some snowflakes and were very surprised to see what we did." It was the first time anyone had attempted to image snow crystals with scanning electron microscopy, which provides precise detail about the crystals' shape, structural features and metamorphosed conditions (crystals often change once on the ground depending on the surrounding environment).

Wergin called another ARS colleague, hydrologist Albert Rango, to see if the snow crystal magnifications had any applications for his research. Rango now uses Wergin’s electron microscopy data, along with microwave satellite data, in the Snowmelt Runoff Model to predict the amount of water available in a winter snowpack. For western states such as Colorado, Montana, Utah and Wyoming, about 75 percent of the annual water supply comes from snowmelt. Snowmelt water is critical to crop irrigation and hydroelectric power, as well as recreation and domestic water supplies, fisheries management and flood control.

Before employing the scanning electron microscopy results, the forecasted amounts of snowpack water were inaccurate whenever the size and shape of the snow crystals varied much from the norm. "The more we know about crystals,” notes Rango, "the easier it will be to use microwave satellite data for predictions of the snow water equivalent."

Currently, forecasts using the model are about 90 percent accurate. A 1980 study estimated that improving the prediction by I percent would save $38 million in irrigation and hydropower in the western United States.

Rango is also looking ahead at climate change predictions. "Following the estimates that have been made about what will happen by 2100, things are definitely warming up," he says. Temperature increases will likely result in a reduction in stream flow as overall snow accumulation decreases, winter precipitation runs off as rain, and water evaporates at a quicker rate. The gap between water supply and demand will magnify even more, greatly increasing water's economic value, anticipates Rango.

Not only does the crystal research help gauge snowmelt, it is also useful in predicting avalanches, designing artificial snow, and, perhaps in the near future, examining air pollution. "You can put snow in a scanning electron microscope and tell which elements are present, such as sulfur and nitrogen," says Wergin.”You can then see what kind of pollution is in the area and possibly track the source."