LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is adapted from the book Flower Confidential by Amy Stewart (©2007 by Amy Stewart).

"Holland" and "the Netherlands" refer to the same country.

 I woke up at 5 a.m. and stared at the ceiling of my Amsterdam hotel room. Outside, the canal boats, which were rented to rowdy college students, had just gone quiet. This was a city of late risers. I got stressed and walked gingerly through the lobby, not wanting to wake the innkeeper who slept on the ground floor and stepped into the dark, empty streets. The fact is if you want to go see someone in the flower trade, this 1s the hour at which you must rise. Even then, when you finally show up at 6 or 7 a.m., blinking in the sudden daylight and trying to remember why you scheduled the meeting in the first place, the person you've gone to meet will look impatient, as though half the day 1s wasted already.

I was on my way to Aalsmeer to see the famous Dutch flower auction. It's known around the world as a remarkably high-tech, high-speed way to sell flowers, but it had modest beginnings: In a cafe outside of Amsterdam in 1911 some growers came up with the idea of holding an auction to give them more control over how their flowers were priced and sold. They called their auction Bloemenlust. It was not long before a competing auction sprang up nearby-the history of flower markets everywhere is that as soon as there is one, there are two-and each day as the auctions ended, flowers were piled onto bicycles and boats to be delivered along Holland's narrow canals and even narrower streets. This arrangement continued until 1968, the two auctions thriving nearly side by side until they finally merged and became what is known today as Bloemenvellmg Aalsmeer, the largest of a handful of major flower auctions going on year-round in the Netherlands.

The bus to Aalsmeer took me through the shuttered streets of Amsterdam and headed south, past the airport. The world seemed to be coming to life at last, and on the road, we passed dozens of trucks-some of them plastered with the same grower and wholesaler logos you'd see in  Miami-carrying flowers to and from the auction. This next phase of a flower's life, after it leaves the grower and before it settles into a vase on someone's hall table, is remarkable for both its duration and its complexity. A flower can spend a week making its way through a maze of warehouses, airports, auctions, and wholesale markets, and it will emerge from this exhausting journey looking almost as fresh as the day it was picked.

The existence of this auction highlights one major difference between flowers destined for the European market and those sold in the United States. The flowers that I saw arriving in Miami were headed in every direction at once: they were going by truck, rail, road plane to wholesale markets, distribution centers, bouquet makers, retailers, and even directly to customers. There is not a single, centralized market for flowers in the United States. But the flowers that come into Schiphol Airport outside of Amsterdam, the major port of entry for European flowers, are almost all going to Aalsmeer. This is the very center of the flower trade, handling most of the flowers sold on the  European market and some of the goods going to Russia, China, Japan, and even the United States. The flowers going up for auction come from Kenya, Zimbabwe, Israel, Colombia, Ecuador, and European countries, making this a sort of global stopping-off point for most of the industry. Every flower market around the world watches the Dutch auction, which acts as a sort of engine for the trade, setting prices and standards worldwide. If you want to follow a flower to market, you will end up here eventually.

By the time the bus pulled into the large circular driveway at the public entrance to the auction, the day really was half over. Flowers and plants had been arriving since midnight, and bidding started before dawn. I stepped off the bus into a kind of floral rush hour: trucks roaring past, people racing from one end of the complex to another, the morning sun glaring down. This place is a behemoth in the small town of Aalsmeer. It employs ten thousand people in a town of just twenty thousand and occupies almost 450 acres, an area larger than Walt Disney World's Magic Kin depot theme parks combined. In fact, the auction is like a city in itself one that runs twenty-four hours a day. All the major growers and wholesalers keep an office, and maybe a warehouse and a loading dock, at Aalsmeer. A full 20 percent of the cut flowers in the world are sold at this very spot, and about half of the world's cut flower supply moves through the Dutch auction system.

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article "The Reluctant President" by Ron Chernow (©2011 by Ron Chernow).

 On February 4, 1789, the 69 members of the Electoral College made George Washington the only president to be unanimously elected, but Congress was unable to meet until April to make the choice official.

 The Congressional delay in certifying George. Washington's election as president only allowed more time for his doubts to fester as he considered the herculean task ahead. He savored his wait as a welcome "reprieve," he told his former comrade in arms and future Secretary of War Henry Knox, adding that his "movements to the chair of government will be accompanied with feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going  to the  place of  his  execution."  His "peaceful abode" at Mount Vernon; his fears that he lacked the requisite skills for the presidency, the "ocean of difficulties" facing the country-all gave him pause on the eve of his momentous trip to New York. In a letter to his friend Edward Rutledge, he claimed that, in accepting the presidency, he had given up "all expectations of private happiness in this world."

 The day after Congress counted the electoral votes, declaring Washington the first president, it dispatched Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress, to bear the official announcement to Mount Vernon. The legislators had chosen a fine emissary. A well-rounded man, known for his work in astronomy and mathematics, the Irish-born Thomson couldn't have relished the trying journey to Virginia, which was "much impeded by tempestuous weather, bad roads, and the many large rivers I had to cross." Yet he rejoiced that the new president would be Washington, whom he venerated as someone singled out by Providence to be "the savior and father" of the country. Having known Thomson since the Continental Congress, Washington esteemed him as a faithful public servant and exemplary patriot.

 Around noon on April 14, 1789, Washington flung open the door at Mount Vernon and greeted his visitor with a cordial embrace. Once in the privacy of the mansion, he and Thomson conducted a stiff verbal minuet, each man reading from a prepared statement. Thomson began by declaring, "I am honored with the commands of the Senate to wait upon your Excellency with the information of your being elected to the office of President of the United States of America" by a unanimous vote. He read aloud a letter from Senator John Langdon of New Hampshire, the president pro tempore. "Suffer me, sir, to indulge the hope that so auspicious a mark of public confidence will meet your approbation and be considered as a sure pledge of the affection and support you are to expect from a free and enlightened people." There was something deferential, even slightly servile, in Langdon's tone, as if he feared that Washington might renege on his promise and refuse to take the job.  Thus was greatness once again thrust upon George Washington.

 Any student of Washington's life might have predicted that he would acknowledge his election in a short, self-effacing speech full of disclaimers. "While I realize the arduous nature of the task which is conferred on me and feel my inability to perform it," he replied to Thomson, "I wish there may not be reason for regret ting the choice. All I can promise is only that which can be accomplished by an honest zeal." This sentiment of modesty jibed so perfectly with Washington's private letters that it could not have been feigned: he wondered whether he was fit for the post, so unlike anything he had ever done. The hopes for republican government, he knew, rested in his hands. As commander in chief of the Continental Army, he had been able to wrap himself in a self-protective silence, but the presidency would leave him with no place to hide and expose him to public censure as nothing before. 

 Because the vote counting had been long delayed, Washington, 57, felt the crush of upcoming public business and decided to set out promptly for New York on April 16, accompanied in his elegant carriage by Thomson and aide David Humphreys. His diary entry conveys a sense of foreboding: "About ten o'clock, I bade adieu to Mount Vernon, to private life, and to domestic felicity and, with a mind oppressed with more anxious and painful sensations than I have words to express, set out for New York ... with the best dispositions to render service to my country in obedience to its call, but with less hope of answering its expectations." Waving goodbye was Martha Washington, who wouldn't join him until mid-May. She watched her husband of 30 years depart with a mixture of bittersweet sensations, wondering "when or whether he will ever come home again." She had long doubted the wisdom of this final act in his public life. "I think it was much too late for him to go into public life again," she told her nephew, "but it was not to be avoided".

Passage III

HUMANITIES: Passage A is adapted from the article "A Million Little Pieces" by Andrea K. Scott (©2012 by Conde Nast Publications). Passage B is adapted from the article "Everything in Its Right Place" by Karen Rosenberg (©2011 by The New York Times).

 Passage A by Andrea K. Scott

 The artist Sarah Sze stood in the foyer on the second floor of the Asia Society, on the Upper East Side, amid dozens of crates, plastic storage bins, plastic tubs, and plastic bags. It was a late afternoon in December, and she and six assistants were completing the installation of eight new sculptures. The process was so labor-intensive that it had taken more than three weeks. 

 Sze arranges everyday objects into sculptural installations of astonishing intricacy. She joins things manufactured to help build other things (ladders, levels, winches, extension cords) with hundreds of commonplace items (cotton swabs, push-pins, birthday candles, aspirin tablets), creating elaborate compositions that extend from gallery walls,  creep into corners,  and surge toward ceilings. Duchamp paved the way for Sze's work when he made a sculpture by mounting a bicycle wheel on a wooden stool. But her virtuosic creations are equally indebted to the explosive energy of Bernini’s Baroque masterpiece “The Ecstasy of St. Teresa," a marble statue that seems to ripple with movement. 

 Sze's show was about the relationships between landscape and architecture, and sculpture and line. She walked from the foyer into the galleries and stood by a floor-to-ceiling window that had been concealed by a wall for a decade-the museum had uncovered it at her request. She began to confer with her studio manager, Mike Barnett. Sze was wondering about a branch that she had placed in the installation by the window, after pruning it from her roof-top garden, m downtown Manhattan. It rose from the floor like a sapling emerging from a crack in the sidewalk. Twilight had turned the window into a mirror, but in daylight, the branch would compete with a view of Park Avenue median greenery, traffic, and apartment buildings.

 "There’s a nighttime view and a daytime view," she said to Barnett. "I want that to be a plus, not a minus. Is this getting lost?"

Barnett said, "I think it works."

There was a pause so long that it should have been awkward. Sze finally said, "Even if it's a loose end, that could be interesting. I like that it looks like a fragment-like it could just drift away."

 Passage B by Karen Rosenberg

 "Infinite Line," Sarah Sze's mid-career solo show at Asia Society Museum, promised a new angle on Ms. Sze's mesmerizing, minutely detailed installations. And it delivers one, though the art-much of it made for the occasion-doesn't always rise to the challenge.

 The show makes the case that Ms. Sze, who is Chinese-American, has been profoundly influenced by many ferries of Asian art. It also emphasizes her drawings, which have rarely been exhibited, and encourages you to see her three-dimensional artworks as drawings in space.

 Implicitly, it de-emphasizes the prosaic nature of her art materials: the cotton swabs, toothpicks, bottle caps, and other throwaway objects that she fashions, with gee-whiz structural ingenuity, into rambling landscapes and galactic spirals. Over the years viewers (myself included) have had a tendency to focus on all of this stuff to see Ms. Sze's art embodies quintessentially American consumerism.

 "Infinite Line" presents a more nuanced, intellectual, and worldly artist: one who talks about space like an architect and vision like an ophthalmologist, who rhapsodizes about the shifting perspectives in the Chilean painting and makes her own Asian-inspired drawings on long scrolls of paper.

 But while Ms. Sze says some fascinating things in a catalog interview, she's not at her best in these galleries. Nothing here is quite up to the level of her solo at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery last year, which used cantilevered shelves laden with rocks, plants and office supplies to evoke a topsy-turvy greenhouse or curiosity cabinet.

 That's especially true of the works on paper, which are installed in a separate room and look physically and spiritually cut off from Ms. Sze's signature installations. Most of them find her in doodle mode, drawing clusters of architecture and tiny figures that can be expanded or contracted to suit any scale or purpose.

 Pure drawing, as a medium, does not seem to excite Ms. Sze. It takes a hint of found objects, or a flirtation with the third dimension, to bring out her imagination, as in the collage "Guggenheim a Ruin," which envisions a crumbling, entropic version of that museum or the pop-up drawing "Notepad," whose laser-cut and folded pages from a sense of  cascading fire escapes.

Passage IV

NATURAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article "The Strangest Bird" by R. Ewan Fordyce and Daniel T. Ksepka (©2012 by Scientific American).

 That the earliest penguins have turned up in New Zealand is probably no coincidence. Until humans arrived, less than 1,000 years ago, the islands there formed a temperate seabird paradise on the margins of the South Pacific and Southern oceans. The region was free of terrestrial predatory mammals and afforded space for breeding colonies, with abundant food in the surrounding seas.

 Geologic evidence suggests that the area would have been equally conducive to the seabird way of life at the end of the Cretaceous. New Zealand today is the largest exposed area of a submerged mini continent known as Zealandia that broke off from the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana perhaps 85 million years ago. Thus liberated, Zealandia drifted northeast into the Pacific, carrying plants and animals, including dinosaurs, to its resting spot about halfway between the South Pole and tropics. As Zealandia drifted, it cooled and sank. Shallow seas flooded the land, and a broad continental shelf formed around its perimeter. Despite its isolation from other landmasses, Zealandia did not emerge from the end-Cretaceous extinction unscathed. Many of its marine and terrestrial organisms perished in that die-off. Yet what was bad for those creatures was good for penguins. With marine reptiles such as mosasaurs and plesiosaurs out of the picture, early penguins could swim the waters around Zealandia free of competition or predation.

 Having gotten their sea legs in Zealandia, penguins soon expanded their domain dramatically, dispersing across thousands of miles and into new climate zones. Fossils of Perudyptes devriesi from Peru show that penguins arrived close to the equator about 42 million years ago, settling in one of the hottest places on earth during one of the hottest times in the planet's history.  By 37 million years ago the birds had spread to almost every major landmass in the Southern Hemisphere.

 Yet why, after restricting themselves to Zealandia for millions of years, did penguins suddenly start spreading across the Southern Hemisphere around a million years ago? Recently Daniel T. Ksepka discovered an important clue to this mystery: a long overlooked feature on the surface of fossil flipper bones. The humerus bears a series of grooves that are easy to miss among the markings associated with tendons and muscles.

 Those grooves form at the spot where a cluster of arteries and veins presses against the humerus. These blood vessels make up a countercurrent heat exchanger called the humeral arterial plexus, which allows penguins to limit heat loss through the flippers and to maintain their core body temperature in cold water. In live penguins, hot blood leaving the heart gets cooled by the plexus before reaching the flipper tip, and cold blood returning from the flipper gets warmed before approaching the heart.

 The identity of the grooves on the fossil flipper bones shed some surprising light on the origin of penguin thermoregulation. One of the most amazing aspects of modern penguin biology is the birds’ ability to tolerate extreme cold. One would logically assume that the plexus evolved as an adaptation to frigid environments. But fossils suggest otherwise. Penguins such as the Delphinornis from Antarctica show that this feature evolved at least 49 million years ago. The early Waimanu penguins from Zealandia show no hint of the trait 58 million years ago, however. The plexus therefore must have evolved in the intervening time, when the earth was far warmer than it is today. Back then, Antarctica lacked permanent ice sheets and instead offered a temperate forested environment; Zealandia was even toastier.

 What use did early penguins have for a heat-conserving plexus in this greenhouse world? Although sea-surface temperatures were high, early penguins probably foraged in cool upwelling regions, which are rich in nutrients and thus support a bounty of prey, including fish and squid. But because heat is lost more quickly in water than air, a warm-blooded animal such as the penguin risks going into hypothermia even in warm seas if the water is below core body temperature. Reducing heat loss through the flipper would have helped them conserve body heat on long foraging swims in chilly waters.

 The humeral plexus may have also allowed penguins to survive the long open-water journeys by which they initially dispersed from Zealandia to other continents. Only much later would modern penguins co-opt this mechanism to invade the sea ice shelves that formed when the planet cooled.