LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is adapted from the essay "Rough Water" by David McGlynn (©2008 by David McGlynn).

One of my best races could hardly be called a race at all. I was a senior in high school, gunning to qualify for the USA Junior Nationals. The previous summer I had missed the cut by less than a second in the mile, and just the day before, at my high school regional meet, I had come within three-tenths of a second in the 500-yard freestyle. The qualification time was 4:39.69; I swam a 4:39.95. The next day, Sunday, I drove with my mother to the far side of Houston where a time trial was being held-an informal, unadvertised event thrown together at the last minute. The only races swum were those the swimmers requested to swim. Most were short, flapping sprints in which swimmers attempted to shave off a few one-hundredths of a second. I didn't have the courage to face the mile, and since I'd struck out in the 500 the day before, I decided to swim the 1,000-yard freestyle. Forty lengths of the pool. It was a race I'd swum fast enough to believe that given   the   right   confluence   of   circumstances-cold water, an aggressive heat, an energetic meet-I could make the cut. I had fifteen seconds to drop to qualify.

By the time I stood up on the blocks, I was not only the only one in the race, I was practically the only one in the natatorium. The horn sounded and I dove in. I was angry and disheartened at having missed the cut the day before and I had little belief that I could go any faster today. 

About six hundred yards in, my coach started to pace. I stayed steady on, not in a hurry, not about to get my hopes up. In my mind, I had already missed the time. Then a boy from a rival high school, whom I hardly knew, unfolded his legs and climbed down from the bleachers and started to cheer. He squatted low to the water and pointed his finger toward the end of the pool, as if to say, That's where you're going, now hurry up. I thought, If he's cheering, maybe I'm close. 

Sometimes a moment comes along when the world slows down, and though everything else moves around us at the same frenetic speed, we're afforded the opportunity to reflect in real-time rather than in retrospect. It is as though we slip into a worm-hole in the fabric of time and space, travel into the past and then back again to the present in the same instant. That morning, swimming, I remembered a day in late September the year before, the last day my swim team had use of an outdoor pool. All summer long my teammates and I swam under an open sky. After this day we would spend the rest of the season in a dank and moldy indoor pool. 

The triangular backstroke flags were strung across the lanes and the adjacent diving well. My teammates liked to run down the long cement deck, jump out over the diving well, and try to grab hold of the line. Many of them could jump far enough to make it. I could not, though I tried every day. I tried that day, and missed. Since I would not have another shot until May, I decided to try again. I squared up and ran, my feet wet against the pavement, and just as my foot hit the water's edge, one of my teammates called out "Jump!" I bent my knees and pushed off hard and got my hand around the flag line. I pulled the whole thing into the water. Autumn was coming and I wondered if there was a metaphor in what I had just done; a fortune folded inside a cookie: my greatest effort would come when I was down to my last opportunity.

Now it was March and I was down to my last opportunity, thinking about that day and hearing the word "Jump!" as my eyes followed the finger of the boy pointing me onward. What I understood-not later, but right then, in the water-was how little this swim added up to in the world. I had spent more than a year training for this one swim, and when it was finished the world would be no different than before it began. If no one else cared, then the swim was mine alone. It mattered because it was the task before me now, the thing I wanted now. Swimming, I had long understood, is a constant choice between the now and the later: exhaustion now for the sake of fitness later, all those Friday nights spent in the pool in pursuit of an end that seemed always one step farther on. I was out of laters, this was the end, and I made my choice. I cashed in the energy I set aside for climbing out of the pool and unfolding my towel and tying my shoes. I've never sprinted harder in my life, not before and not since. I hit the wall. I knew by instinct, by the spasm of my tendons and the ache my bones, before I ever turned toward the clock or heard my coach scream, that I had made it.

Passage A by Erika Janik

In early September of 1929, Nikolai Vivilov, famed Russian plant explorer and botanist, moved to the central Asian crossroads of Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. Climbing up the Zailijskei Alatau slopes of the Tian Shan mountains separating Kazakhstan from China, Vavilov found thickets of wild apples stretching in every direction, an extensive forest of fruit coloured russet red, creamy yellow, and vibrant pink. Nowhere else in the world do apples grow thickly as a forest or with such incredible diversity. Amazed by what he saw, Vavilov wrote: 'I could see with my own eyes that I had stumbled upon the centre of origin for the apple.'

With extraordinary prescience and few facts, Vavilov suggested that the wild apples he had seen growing in the Tian Shan were in fact the ancestors of the modern apple. He tracked the whole process of domestication to the mountains near Alma-Ata, where the wild apples looked awfully similar to the apples found at the local grocery.  Unfortunately, Vavilov's theory would remain mostly unknown for decades.

Exactly where the apple came from had long been a matter of contention and discussion among people who study plant origins. Vavilov, imprisoned by Joseph Stalin in 1940 for work in plant genetics that challenged Stalin's beliefs, died in a Leningrad prison in 1943. Only after the fall of communism in Russia Vavilov's theory, made more than half a century earlier, become widely recognized. 

As Vavilov predicted, it's now believed that all of the apples known today are direct descendants of the wild apples that evolved in Kazakhstan. Apples do not comprise all of Kazakhstan's plant bounty, however. At least 157 other plant species found in Kazakhstan are either direct precursors or close wild relatives of domesticated crops, including 90 per cent of all cultivated temperate fruits. The name of Kazakhstan’s largest city, Alma-Ata, or Almaty as it is known today, even translates as 'Father of Apples' or, according to some, 'where the apples are'. So this news about the apple's origins was probably no surprise to residents, particularly in towns where apple seedlings are known to grow up through the cracks in the pavements. The apple has been evolving in Central Asia for upwards of 4.5 million years.

Passage B by Gary Nabhan

Nikolai Vavilov is widely regarded as the world's greatest plant explorer, for he made over 250,000 seed, fruit and other collections on five continents. Kazakh conservationist Tatiana Salova credits him with first recognizing that Kazakhstan was the center of origin and diversity for apples. "It is not surprising," she concedes, "that when Vavilov first came to Kazakhstan to look at plants he was so amazed. Nowhere else in the world do apples grow as a forest. That is one reason why he stated that this is probably where the apple was born, this was its birthing grounds."

Discerning where a crop originated and where the greatest portion of its genetic diversity remains extant may seem esoteric to the uninitiated. But knowing where exactly our food comes from-geographically, culturally, and genetically-is of paramount importance to the rather small portion of our own species that regularly concerns itself with the issue of food security. The variety of foods that we keep in our fields, orchards, and, secondarily, in our seed banks is critically important in protecting our food supply from plagues, crop diseases, catastrophic weather, and political upheavals. Vavilov himself was personally motivated to become an agricultural scientist by witnessing several famines during the czarist era of Russia. He hoped that by combining a more diverse seed portfolio with knowledge from both traditional farmers and collaborating scientists, the number of Russian families suffering from hunger might be reduced.

(3) In a very real sense, the forests of wild foragers and the orchards of traditional farmers in such centers of crop diversity are the wellsprings of diversity that plant breeders,  pathologists, and enologists return to every time our society whittles the residence in our fields and orchards down to its breaking point.

And whittle away we have done. Here in North America, according to apple historian Dan Bussey, some 16,000 apple varieties have been named and nurtured over the last four centuries. By 1904, however, the identities and sources of only 7,098 of those varieties could be discerned by USDA scientist W. H. Ragan. Since then, some 6,121 apple varieties-86.2 percent of Ragan's 1904 inventory-have been lost from nursery catalogs, farmers' markets, and from the American table.

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the article "The Quiet Sideman" by Colin Fleming (©2008 by The American Scholar).

Near the end of his eight years as a recording session musician, tenor saxophonist Leon "Chu" Berry landed a short-lived spot with Count Basie's orchestra. Standing in for one .of the Basie band’s two tenor giants, Berry took a lead solo on "Oh, Lady Be Good," the 1924 Gershwin song that Basie had played for years. In the 28 seconds that the solo lasted on February 4, 1939, we are treated to no less than the musical personification of mind and body working together in divine tandem. When you hear the recording for the first time, you're likely to wonder why you've never heard of Chu Berry before.

Why you've never heard of him is pretty simple: a lot of hard-core jazz buffs don't know much about him. Berry was a solid session player who turned up on recordings with Basie, Bessie Smith, Fletcher Henderson, and Billie Holiday. But he did not cut many sessions himself as a leader, and when he soloed, he worked within the recording constraints of the era and the swing genre-fast-moving 78s with solos often lasting for a mere 32 beats.

The people who loved Berry were, not surprisingly, other tenor players, a situation leading to the dreaded "musician's musician" tag. But that's not nearly praise enough to describe Chu Berry, who, when given the opportunity, displayed a musical dexterity that would be envied by future generations of horn men.

Berry faced a lot of other horn players: having to grind it out long and hard until something memorable burst through; the prejudices and expectations of the listening public; and the accepted wisdom of what is and isn't art in a given medium. In this case, swing was fodder for dance parties, not music worthy of study.

Oddly enough, Berry’s geniality might help explain his failure to court history's favor: it wasn’t in his nature to call attention to himself or his playing. Born in 1908 into the black middle class in Wheeling, West Virginia, the laid-back, affable Berry attended West Virginia State in Charleston, where he switched from alto sax to tenor and exhibited the willingness to fit in that characterized his presence in so many dance bands. He was the rare artist who refused to put his interests above those of the band, even if that meant playing ensemble passages rather than taking a healthy allotment of solo breaks.

College proved a training ground for Berry the bandsman, as he teamed up with a number of amateur outfits. He never played simply to show off. Instead, he tried to bring out the positive attributes in any given situation or setting. Later, when Berry is performing with the Calloway ensemble, we hear some ragged, out-of-tune playing until Berry's first few solo notes emerge.

The other players, no longer languidly blowing through their charts, immediately surge up behind him, all fighting-fit. Once Berry finishes his solo, the shenanigans resume.

(7) After making his way to New York, Berry immediately became a presence and soon was in demand. The great jazz orchestras of the swing era were fronted by musical directors/arrangers-Duke Ellington was pre eminent-who drew the acclaim. The sidemen were musical traveling salesmen who sold someone else's wares in the best style they could manage. It was with Fletcher Henderson that Berry began to ditch some of the sideman's subservient trappings. For starters, Henderson wrote in keys that were rare for the jazz orchestras of the day, and his somber, indigo-inflected voicings were ideal for a player of Berry's introspective approach to his instrument:  Berry sounds as if he’s being swallowed by his sax. "Blues in C Sharp Minor," for instance, is odd, haunting, and ultimately relaxing. A Berry solo in it is slightly off-mike, making the listener feel as though he's been playing for some time before we finally hear him. The effect is unnerving as if we weren't paying close attention.

In June 1940, Cab Calloway granted Berry a showcase piece, "A Ghost of a Chance,” the sole recording in Berry's career to feature him from start to finish. It was his “Body and Soul,” a response to Coleman Hawkins's famous recording, intended not as a riposte to a rival, but as the other half of a dialogue. Its rubato lines are disembodied from the music meant to accompany it, which is spartan to begin with. This may be Berry’s one and only instance of indulgence on a record, a cathedral of a solo in its flourishes, angles, ornamentations, and reflexivity. If sunlight could pass through music, "A Ghost of a Chance" would funnel it out in the broadest spectrum of colors.

 NATURAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article "Warp Factor" by Charles Liu (©2003 by Natural History Magazine, Inc.).

Astronomers sometimes describe the shape of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, as a thin-crust pizza with a plum stuck in the middle. The plum is the slightly oblong central bulge, protruding about 3,000 light-years above and below the galactic plane, composed mostly of older stars; it makes up the core of the Milky Way and includes a black hole two and a half million times the mass of the Sun. The crust of the pizza is the galactic disk-the source of most of our galaxy's light. Thin and flat, the disk is 100,000 light-years across, about 1,000 light-years thick, on average, and includes more than 80 percent of the galaxy's hundred billion or so stars.

The plum-and-pizza picture works well enough, but like most simple metaphors, it breaks down if you push it. For one thing, the galactic disk isn't a rigid body, but a loose agglomeration of matter streaming around a common center of gravity. (The swirling pat tern of a hurricane far better resembles our spinning galaxy.) For another thing, our galaxy's disk isn't flat; it's warped. Picture a disk of pizza dough spun into the air by a skilled chef: our galaxy goes through the same kind of floppy, wobbly gyrations, though at a rate best measured in revolutions per hundreds of millions of years.

Why does the Milky Way have such an odd-looking warp? No definitive answer has emerged. One thing we do know: when it comes to warps, our galaxy is hardly unique. About half of all spiral galaxies are warped to some degree. Theoretical and computational models have shown that a number of physical processes can warp a galaxy, so it's a matter of figuring out which scenario applies. An innovative analysis of the problem by Jeremy Bailin, an astronomy graduate student at the University of Arizona in Tucson, has implicated a small satellite galaxy, currently being ripped to shreds by the gravity of the Milky Way.

The Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy was discovered in 1994. It appears to be in a roughly polar orbit around the Milky Way-that is, above and below the galactic disk-about 50,000 light-years from the galactic center. That orbit brings the dwarf galaxy far too close to the huge gravitational tidal forces of the Milky Way for the dwarf to remain intact. As a result, the Sagittarius Dwarf now looks something like strands of spaghetti spilling from the front of a pasta making machine, the galaxy's matter being drawn out over hundreds of millions of years by intergalactic tides.

Gravitational collisions between small satellite galaxies and big spiral galaxies have long been regarded as possible culprits in the warping of a larger galaxy's disk. The best-known satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way-the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds-are too far away, and have the wrong orbital characteristics, to have warped our galactic home. The Sagittarius Dwarf seems a much more likely candidate, simply because it is only a third as far from the center of the Milky Way as the Magellanic Clouds. But in astronomy-unlike in real estate-location isn't everything; to show a direct connection between warp and dwarf, the orbital motion of the Sagittarius Dwarf must be linked to the rotation of the Milky Way's disk.

Bailin's study is the first to find such a link. His analysis of the galactic warp is based on angular momentum-a measure of how much a system is spinning or rotating. Just as objects moving in a straight line have momentum, objects spinning or orbiting around an axis have angular momentum; and just as the momenta of two objects combine when they collide, so too do their angular momenta. Imagine two figure skaters coming together for a combination spin. When they make physical contact, their individual spiraling motions combine to produce a single, unified whirl.

Starting with the latest measurements of the structure and spin of the Milky Way, Bailin deduced the angular momentum of the warped portion of the Milky Way's disk. He then compared that measure with the angular momentum of the Sagittarius Dwarf and found for the first time, within the margins of measurement error, that the two angular momenta are identical in both quantity and direction. Such a coupling of the angular momenta of two bodies almost never happens by chance; usually, it takes place only when two spinning systems; like the skaters, come into contact. The coupling isn't enough to prove cause and effect by itself, but it's solid circumstantial evidence that the interaction of the Sagittarius Dwarf with the Milky Way disk created the warp in our galaxy.