LITERARY  NARRATIVE: This passage is adapted from the novel The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje (©2011 by Michael Ondaatje).

The ship Oronsay is departing from Colombo, Ceylon (a city in what Is today Sri Lanka), in the early 1950s.

Michael was eleven years old that night when green as he could be about the world he climbed aboard the first and only ship of his life. It felt as if a city had seen added to the coast, better lit than any town or village. He went up the gangplank, watching on y the path of his feet- nothing ahead of him existed-and continued till he faced the dark harbor and sea. There were outlines of other ships farther out, beginning to turn on lights. He stood alone smelling everything, then came back through the noise and the crowd to the side that faced land. A yellow glow over the city. Already it felt there was a wall between him and what took place there. Stewards began handing out food and cordials. He ate several sandwiches and after that he made his way down to his cabin undressed and slipped into the narrow bunk. He'd never slept under a blanket before, save once in Nuwara Eliya. He was wide awake. The cabin was below the level of the waters, so there was no porthole. He found a switch beside the bed and when he pressed it his head and pillow were suddenly lit by a cone of light.

He did not go back up on deck for a last look or to wave at his relatives who had brought him to the harbor. He could hear singing and imagined the slow and then eager parting of families taking place in the thrilling night air.  I do not know, even now, why he chose this solitude. Had whoever brought him onto the Oronsay already left? In films, people tear themselves away from one another weeping, and the ship separates from land while the deported hold on to those disappearing faces until all distinction is lost.

I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was. Perhaps a sense of self is not even there in his nervous stillness in the narrow bunk, in this green grasshopper or little cricket, as if he has been smuggled away accidentally, with no knowledge of the act, into the future.

What had there been before such a ship in my life? A  dugout canoe on a river journey? A launch in Trincomalee harbor? There were always fishing boats on our horizon. But I could never have imagined the grandeur of this castle that was to cross the sea". The longest journeys I had made were canards to Nuwara Eliya and Horton Plams, or the train to Jaffna, which we boarded at seven a.m. and disembarked from in the late afternoon. We made that journey with our egg sandwiches, a pack of cards, and a small Boy's Own adventure. 

But now it has been arranged I would be traveling to England by ship, and that I would be making the Journey alone. No mention was made that this might be an unusual experience or that it could be exciting or dangerous, so I did not approach it with any joy or fear. I was not forewarned that the ship would have seven levels, hold more than six hundred people including a captain, nine cooks, engineers, a veterinarian, and that it would contain a small jail and chlorinated pools that would actually sail with us over two oceans. The departure date was marked casually on the calendar by my aunt, who had notified the school that I would be leaving at the end of the term. The fact of my being at sea for twenty-one days was spoken of as having not much significance, so I was surprised my relatives were even bothering to accompany me to the harbour. I had assumed I would be taking a bus by myself and then change onto another at Borella Junction.

There had been just one attempt to introduce me to the situation of the journey. A lady named Flavia Prins, whose husband knew my uncle, turned out to be making the same Journey and was invited to tea one afternoon to meet with me. She would be travelling in First Class but promised to keep an eye on me. I shook her hand carefully, as it was covered with rings and bangles and she then turned away to continue the conversation had interrupted. I spent most of the hour listening to a few uncles and counting how many of the trimmed sandwiches they ate.

 On my last day, I found an empty school examination booklet, a pencil, a pencil sharpener, a traced map of the world, and put them into my small suitcase.

As I got into the car, it was explained to me that after I'd crossed the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea, and gone through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, I would arrive one morning on a small pier in England and my mother would meet me there. It was not the magic or the scale of the journey that was of concern to me, but that detail of how my mother could know when exactly I would arrive in that other country. And if she would be there.

Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: Passage A is adapted from "The Unified Theory of Gumbo" by Lolis Eric Elie (©2012 by Smithsonian Institution). Passage B is adapted from "The Borscht Belt" by Julia loffe (©2012 by Conde Nast).

Passage A by Lolis Eric Elie

As the Cajun craze had its way with America in the 1980s, I began to hear tourists, visitors and transplants to New Orleans praising this or that gumbo for its thickness and darkness. This was strange to me. Gumbo was supposed to be neither thick nor dark. Even more important, "dark" and "thick" were being used not as adjectives, but as achievements. It was as if making a dark gumbo was a culinary accomplishment on par with making a feather-light biscuit or a perfectly barbecued beef brisket. Naturally, I viewed these developments with suspicion and my suspicion focused on the kitchen of Commander's Palace and its celebrated chef, Paul Prudhomme.

Prudhomme hails from Cajun Country, near Opelousas, Louisiana. He refers to his cooking not so much as Cajun, but as "Louisiana cooking," and thus reflective of influences beyond his home parish. For years I blamed him for the destruction of the gumbo universe. Many of the chefs and cooks in New Orleans restaurants learned under him or under his students. Many of these cooks were not from Louisiana, and thus had no homemade guide as to what good gumbo was supposed to be. As I saw it then, these were young, impressionable cooks who lacked the loving guidance and discipline that only good home training can provide.

My reaction was admittedly nationalistic, since New Orleans is my nation. The Cajun incursion in and of itself didn't bother me. We are all enriched immeasurably when we encounter other people, other languages, other traditions, other tastes. What bothered me was the tyrannical influence of the tourist trade. Tourist trap restaurants, shops, cooking classes, and at times it seemed the whole of the French Quarter, were given over to providing visitors with what they expected to find. There was no regard for whether the offerings were authentic New Orleans food or culture. Suddenly andouille sausage became the local standard even though most New Orleanians had never heard of it. Chicken and andouille gumbo suddenly was on menus all over town. This was the state of my city when moved back here in 1995.

Passage B by Julia loffe

As a self-appointed guardian of authentic Russian fare, Maksim Syrnikov, who has spent the past two decades studying traditional Russian cuisine, has a problem: Russians don't hold Russian food in, particularly high esteem. When they eat out, they favor more exotic cuisines, like Italian or Japanese. The tendency to find foreign food more desirable is a prejudice that goes back centuries- to a time when the Russian aristocracy spoke French, not Russia n. Russian food is pooh-poohed as unhealthy and unsophisticated.

             Among the many things that annoy Syrnikov is the fact that a good number of the despised Russian dishes aren't even Russian. "I did an informal survey of eighteen- to twenty-five-year olds in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and asked them, 'Name some traditional Russian dishes, " Syrnikov told me. " What they named was horrible: borscht, which is Ukrainian, and potatoes, which are an American plant. In the middle of the eighteenth century, there were riots because people didn't want to grow potatoes." He insists that real Russian food contained no potatoes, no tomatoes, few beets, and little meat. Instead, there were a lot of grains, fish, and dairy, as well as honey, cucumbers, turnips, cabbage, apples, and the produce of Russia's vast forests- mushrooms and berries. Because of the climate, little of this was eaten fresh; it was salted, pickled, or dried for the long winter. Most of Russia ate this way until the twentieth century.

By exploring the Russian food that existed before potatoes, Syrnikov hopes to help Russians react by quaint themselves with the country’s agrarian roots, and to convince them that their national cuisine can be just as flavorful as anything they might find in a sushi bar. He spends his time traveling through the countryside in search of old recipes, trying them himself, and blogging about his experiences. Often, he is brought in as a consultant on projects to make a restaurant authentically Russian. Recently, he hatched a plan for a user-generated database of folk recipes. " My idea is to send out a call across all of Russia," he told me. "If you have a grandmother who makes shanishki "- disk -shaped pastries-" take a picture of them, write down the recipe. To me, it's absolutely obvious that, if we don' t wake up and find out from these old women and set it down on paper, in twenty years we won't have anyone to ask . Russian culture will lose a very significant part of itself.

Passage III - Humanities: This passage is adapted from the article “An Interview with CE Morgan”

All the living is C.E. Morgan’s debut novel.  Set in rural Kentucky in the 1980s, her novel follows a young couple's struggles as they take responsibility for a family farm.

Thomas Fabisiak: In what way does the fact that your descriptive work in All the Living focuses on landscape make it a political act?

C. E. Morgan: I think it's akin to the moral force that's there in fiction in the presentation of character. Fiction asks us to bring sustained attention to the other; when a reader has to continue reading a novel, regardless of the ability of a character, the sustained attention to that character has moral ramifications. Landscape writing--most especially when it's done at length and in a style that deviates from prose norms, so that its very presentation interruptive or "estranging" as the formalists light have said--encourages the reader to stop, read, hasten, imagine, reconsider, admire, appreciate the newness. The reader might complain that this kind of wanting draws attention to itself, but this kind of writing doesn't merely draw attention to its own aesthetic strategies-it also draws attention to land. The land is imperiled; we know that. Land is always imperialized wherever the human puts his or her foot. The attention paid to landscape in a narrative is, I believe, attention that’s paid to land itself, not just to marks on a page. Deep appreciation can result from an engagement with that kind of beauty, and that can manifest in action. That is how it might be seen as a political act to do this kind of writing (particularly about a region, such as this one, rural Kentucky, that is continuously being ravaged by corporations that consumers unwittingly feed).

Thomas Fabisik: In addition to landscape, though, All the Living also involves a sustained focus on work and specifically on work on the land, farming, taking care of mammals, etc. Together these suggest an overarching pastoral quality. Without wanting you to interpret the Living or readers, because you’ve told me that you hate imposing yourself into people's encounters with the book, I'm wondering if you could say something about your focus on work, and whether and to what extent it is related to the focus on landscape more generally. One thing that occurred to me repeatedly as  I was reading the book was that, as a writer, you work very meticulously, and take "your work" as seriously, perhaps, as "the work" itself in the sense of the finished book, etc. Would I be wrong to think that there may be a latent ethical, if not political, component to this aspect of your writing as well, both in your own commitment to hard work and in the ongoing presence of the theme of work in the novel?

C. E. Morgan: Well, while there are many novels I admire that depict working-class labor (Anna Karenina and In the Skin of the Lion and Germinal are the first that spring to mind), the presence of work--agrarian or domestic--in All the Living was not a self-conscious choice. For that matter, even though I conceptualize landscape writing as overtly political, that doesn't mean I self-consciously insert it in a text where it doesn't belong. With All the Living, I don't feel I made choices in the first draft of the novel. It felt like the book just came, and it came with an inborn temperament, tenor, and set of characters and concerns. I obeyed the book. Or perhaps, because a text is not a willful or sentient being (though it sometimes feels like it!), it might be more accurate to say I obeyed the hazy, deepest part of the brain, which bypasses the intellect as it constructs meaning via image, myth, poetry: our essential languages.

For myself, though you’re right that I work intensely on any project when I have one, I don’t think of my writing as a job. I think of it as a vocation, and as such, there's a huge gulf between what I do and capitalist notions of productivity, though the work is disseminated in the marketplace through a capitalist framework. I'm very wary of rigorous work ethic for the sake of rigorous work ethic-this idea that a writer should produce a novel every year or two years, that they should be punching a clock somehow. A lot of people seem to buy into that; it’s hard not to in this culture. But I don't want to produce just to produce. I don't want to write just to write, or publish just to get a paycheck. I see no value in that. Frankly, the world doesn't need more books; it needs better books. Vocation is tied up with notions of service, and as an artist, you serve people by giving them your best, the work you produce that you truly believe to be of value, not just what you're capable of producing if you work ten hours a day every day for forty years.

Passage IV

As the twentieth century began, Robert Millikan was fast approaching forty. All around him, physics was at its most exhilarating, yet Millikan had done practically nothing. So he decided to measure the charge on the electron.

Millikan’s idea was simple. A droplet of water that had been given an electric charge would be attracted to a metal plate which carried an opposite charge. He arranged his apparatus so that the electrical attraction pulled the droplet up, while gravity pulled it down. This gave him a way to measure. First he would find the mass of the droplet. Then he would measure the voltage needed for the attraction to the metal plate to cancel out the downward pull of gravity. From those two pieces of information he could get a measure of the charge on the droplet.

The experiment was far from simple to carry out, however, finding that the water droplets tended to evaporate before any measurements could be made, Millikan set to the task of trying the same trick with oil droplets.

In 1910, at the age of forty-two, he finally published a value for e. It was meant to be his career defining publication. Eventually, it was- but Millikan still had years of difficult and dirty work ahead of him.

The Austrian physicist Felix Ehrenhaft refuted Millikan's results with a similar set of experiments that seemed to show that electrical charge can be infinitely small. There is no fundamental, minimum unit of charge, Ehrenhaft said; there is no 'electron'.  The series of experiments the desperate Millikan then performed were to cast a lasting shadow over his scientific integrity.

(6) According to biologist Richard Lewontin, Millikan went out of his way to hide the existence of inconvenient data'. David Goodstein, a physics professor, says Millikan certainly did not commit scientific fraud'. So where does the truth lie?

The debate hangs on a phrase in Millikan's 1913 paper refuting Ehrenhaft and showing that every measurement of electric charge gives a value of e or an integer multiple of e. In his 1913  paper, Millikan says that his data table 'contains a complete summary of the results obtained on all of the 58 different drops upon which a complete series of observations were made. The statement is written in italics as if to give it special weight. The notebooks for the 1913 paper show that Millikan actually took data on l 00 oil droplets. Did Millikan cherry-pick the data in order to confirm his original result and crush Ehrenhaft underfoot?

He certainly had a motive. In Millikan's 1910 paper heads made the ' mistake' of full disclosure with statements such as, ‘Although all of these observations gave values of within  2 percent of the final mean, the uncertainties of the observations were such that I felt obliged to discard them. This admirable honesty about the selection of data points had given Ehrenhaft ammunition that he used enthusiastically in his long feud with Millikan. Perhaps, with the italicized statement, Millikan was making sure that he gave his foe no more.

(9) That would certainly explain something that is otherwise inexplicable. Millikan aborted the experimental run on twenty-five of the droplets in the work reported in the 1913 paper. According to Goodstein, Millikan preferred to use droplets that showed a change in charge, gaining or losing an electron (as he saw it) during the measurement. Millikan may also have judged some droplets to be too small or too large to yield reliable data, Goodstein says. If they were too large, they would fall too rapidly to be reliably observed. Too small, and their fall (and thus the charge result) would be affected by random collisions with air molecules. Goodstein interprets the italicized statement as an assertion that there were only fifty-eight 'complete enough' sets of data.

But Goodstein undoes his defense by stating that in order to make the ' too large' or ‘too small' distinction, all the data would need to have been taken in the first place. 

Millikan certainly did not convince his peers straight away.  The arguments with Ehrenhaft rumbled on long enough for Millikan’s Nobel Prize to be delayed for three years- it eventually came in 1923.

     But here's the point: Millikan was right about the electron and its charge. Few laboratories managed to replicate Ehrenhaft's results, but students now replicate Millikan's results all across the world. No one now believes that the fundamental unit of charge is anything other than Millikan's. 

     To get his Nobel Prize, Millikan had to play hard and fast with what we might call 'accepted practice'.