Passage I

LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is adapted from the novel Bitter Grounds by Sandra Benftez (©1997 by Sandra Benftez).

Alvaro Tobar gripped the wheel of his convertible and leaned into the approaching curve. He loved the sense of power he experienced when he was in the driver's seat. He'd owned the car since before the war, and maybe now that the war had ended, he would buy a newer model. This convertible he would not sell, however. He patted the wheel as if reassuring the vehicle of his loyalty.

It was a late afternoon in early November. The air was heavy with coming rain, surely one of the last downpours before the dry season. Alvaro would wait for the first drops to fall before he stopped to raise the car's top. He was only a few kilometers from San Salvador and, once inside the city limits, only minutes from home.

Alvaro's thoughts turned to his cotton harvest. For the past week, he'd been on the eastern coast, at his plantation outside Usulutan. On this trip, he had helped ready the hacienda for the harvest, which would start at month's end. Much was riding on his cotton. He always referred to it as "mi algodon." My cotton, a venture that he, and not his mother, controlled. He pictured his mother's strong, handsome face. Eugenia Herrera de Tobar. At seventy-three, dona Eugenia was still the undisputed ruler of the Tobar family. As the doyenne, she controlled her business and private affairs with as much vigor as she had since her husband's death. Because she had Alvaro and his four older sisters to raise, she took over the reins of her husband’s cattle-ranching operation and his vast property holdings and never relinquished them. Under her control, her husband's enterprises prospered. Oh, there were moments when she cried out against the fate that had sent her down a path strewn with so much responsibility, "It's a heavy burden life has handed me," she liked to say. "A burden I long to have lifted from my shoulders." Even as a youngster, however, when Alvaro heard his mother's lamentations, he had glimpsed into her heart as if her chest were made of glass. In her heart, he has seen the pleasure the burden gave her.

     It was power that obsessed her. And could he blame her? He had had a whiff of the heady scent of power himself. He smelled it in his cotton. He'd been in the business for four years. The first three years were hopeful ones. There was a world war, and unlike coffee, cotton prices rose steadily, thanks to the growth of the local textile industry.

From the start, his mother had not encouraged him to strike out on his own. "Only fools go into cotton when there's cattle to be raised or coffee to be grown," she said, compelling him to work all the harder to prove her wrong. He had spent months scouting for the right land among the family's properties on the flat coastal plain. When he found it, he had lovingly sown the best seed himself. And he had kept a vigil on the growing plants. Lying in a hut next to the field, he was present at the moment the buds broke into flowers.

Once Alvaro reached Avenida Cuscatlan, he accelerated, weaving in and out of traffic. Cotton. A man took a risk growing it, for cotton might never make the money coffee would, but Alvaro did not allow this thought to perturb him. He had various means of making a living: There was real estate to be bought and sold, a seat on the bank board, the shrimping business on the coast. He had disbanded his law practice years ago, although, at times, he took a case or two on a consulting basis. But it was in the cotton business that he'd placed his heart and money. Last year, so sure was he of a better-than-ever yield, that he'd invested his wife’s money in it as well.  It was the inheritance from her grandfather, bequeathed to her twelve years before. Magda had entrusted it to Alvaro, and he had carefully managed the money, seeing to its growth. When the time was right, she would use her inheritance for her own business scheme: a gift shop named Tesoros.

The disaster of last year's harvest flooded his mind. He sank back against the seat, remembering his cotton, the bolls swollen and soon to burst into a cloud of white, infested malevolently with weevils.

But this year would be different. He had taken measures. He had spent the better part of the week stockpiling insecticides that would insure this crop against failure. He had not told Magda any of this, of course. Why cause her concern? It was all a matter; of cash flow, of money transferred from one account to the other, of bank loans and promissory notes. This year, because of insecticides, would bring his first bumper crop.

Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell (©2002 by Malcolm Gladwell).

There is a concept in cognitive psychology called the channel capacity, which refers to the amount of space in our brain for certain kinds of information. Suppose, for example, that I played you a number of different musical tones, at random, and asked you to identify each one with a number. If I played you a really low tone, you would call it one, and if I played you a medium tone you would call it two, and a high tone you would call three. The purpose of the test is to find out how long you can continue to distinguish among different tones. Most people can divide tones into only about six different categories before they begin to make mistakes and start lumping different tones in the same category. This is a remarkably consistent finding. If, for example, I played you five very high pitched tones, you'd be able to tell them apart. And if I played you five very low pitched tones, you'd be able to tell them apart. You'd think, then, that if I combined those high and low tones and played them for you all at once, you'd be able to divide them into ten categories. But you won’t be able to. Chances are you’ll still be stuck at about six categories.

As human beings, we can only handle so much information at once. Once we pass a certain boundary, we become overwhelmed. What I’m describing here is an intellectual capacity-our ability to process raw information. But if you think about it, we clearly have a channel capacity for feelings as well.

Take a minute, for example, to make a list of all the people whom you would consider yourself truly close to. The average answer is 12 names. Those names make up what psychologists call our sympathy group. Why aren't groups any larger? Partly it’s a question of time. If you look at the names on your sympathy list, they are probably the people whom you devote the most attention to. If your list was twice as long, would you still be as close to everyone? Probably not. To be someone's friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. At a certain point, somewhere between 10 and 15 people, we begin to overload, just as we begin to overload when we have to distinguish between too many tones.

Perhaps the most interesting natural limit, however, is what might be called our social channel capacity. The case for a social capacity has been made, most persuasively, by the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar. Dunbar begins with a simple observation. Primates- monkeys, chimps, baboons, humans- have the biggest brains of all mammals. More importantly, a specific part of the brain of  humans and  other  primates the region known as the neocortex, which deals with complex thought and reasoning- is huge by mammal standards. For years, scientists have argued back and forth about why this is the case. One theory is that our brains evolved because our primate ancestors began to engage in more sophisticated food gathering: instead of just eating grasses and leaves they- began eating fruit, which takes more thinking power. You travel much farther to find fruit than leaves, so you need to be able to create mental maps. You have to worry about ripeness. You have to peel parts away in order to eat the flesh of a fruit, and so on. The problem with that theory is that if you try to match up brain size with eating patterns among primates, it doesn’t work. So- what does correlate with brain size? The answer, Dunbar argues, is group size. If you look at any species of primate-at every variety of monkey and ape- the larger their neo cortex is, the larger the average size of the groups they live with.

Dunbar's argument is that brains evolve, they get bigger, in order to handle the complexities of larger social groups. If you belong to a group of five people, Dunbar points out, you have to keep track of ten separate relationships:  your relationships with the four others in your circle and the six other two-way relationships between the others. That’s what it means to know everyone in the circle. You have to understand the personal dynamics of the group. If you belong to a group of twenty people, however, there are now 190 two-way relationships to keep track of: 19 involving yourself and 171 involving the rest of the group. Even a relatively small increase in the size of a group creates a significant additional social and intellectual burden. Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement.

Passage III

HUMANITIES: Passage A is adapted from the essay "On Miniatures" by Lia Purpura (©2006 by Lia Purpura). Passage B is adapted from the article "When the Virtual Trumps Reality: 'The Prayer Book of Claude de France'" by James Gardner (©2008 by TWO SL LLC).

Passage A by Lia Purpura

Why are miniature things so compelling? The miniature is mysterious. We wonder how all those parts work when they're so small. It's why_ we linger over an infant's fingers and toes, those astonishing  replicas: we can't quite believe they work. Chihuahuas work. Birds and bonsai trees work. Miniatures are improbable, unlikely. Causes to marvel .Surprises. Feats of engineering. Products of an obsessive detailer.

Miniatures offer changes of scale by which we measure ourselves anew. On one hand, miniatures posit an omniscient onlooker, able to take in the whole at once. Consider yourself in relation to dollhouses, snow globes, frog spawn, aquariums, souvenir key chains you look through to see a picture of the very spot you're visiting, stilled. You are large enough to hold such things fully in hand. On the other hand, miniatures issue invitations to their realm, and suggest we forget or disregard our size. In dollhouse land, you can walk through the kitchen, living room, bedroom with your three inch high friend and, face pressed to the window, feel the cushions of the thumb nail loveseat hold you. Fit inside the miniature, we experience certain states of being or belief: worlds in a grain of sand; eternities in wildflowers. Regions beyond our normal-sized perception. Where we are, in relation to them, omniscient or companionably small beings, miniatures invite us to leave our known selves and perspectives behind.

Miniatures encourage attention-in the way whispering requires a listener to quiet down and incline toward the speaker. Sometimes we need binoculars, microscopes, view masters to assist our _looking, but mediated or not, miniatures suggest there is more there than meets the eye easily. They suggest there is much to miss if we don't look hard at spaces, crevices, crannies. 

The miniature, a working, functioning complete world unto itself, is not merely a "small" or "brief'' thing or a "shortened" form of something larger. Miniatures transcend their size. Most strangely to me, miniatures are radically self-sufficient. The beings who inhabit fairylands, those elves and sprites, pixies and trolls, don’t usually strive to be our pals. They don't need us. Their smallness is our problem, or intrigue, or desire.

Passage B by James Gardner

Without meaning to do so, the Morgan Library has created a triumph of conceptual art: the smallest art exhibition in the world. "The Prayer Book of Claude de France" as the exhibition is called, consists of nothing other than "The Prayer Book of Claude de France." At 2 3/4 by 2 inches, the exhibition and the book are both so small that they can fit in the palm of your hand. That may not sound like much until you realize that this illuminated miniature contains 132 scenes from the lives of Christ, the Virgin, the apostles, and sundry saints. As such, it is a gallery unto itself.

In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin's overrated essay of 1936, the author famously asserted that no one would feel the need to stand before the original when one could own a reproduction. The folly of this idea will be self-evident to anyone with the remotest sensitivity to visual art. No matter how good a reproduct10n, you have to bear physical witness to each pucker and weave of canvas, each splash of puddled ink in an Old Master drawing. Only then can you truly say that you have seen the work of art.

It was with such convictions that I rushed over to the Morgan to see the tiny commodity in question. What a waste of time! Not because the object is lacking in worthiness, but because the Morgan's own. Website offers a means of examining the book that, in this case, far surpasses any direct encounter. Every page of the manuscript is there in living color, and the zoom mechanism is so powerful and so precise that you can get him closer than if you were hunched over the real thing with a strong magnifying glass. Zoom in to one of the figures, scarcely the size of a fingernail, and you see the tiny head in perfect focus. Zooming in deeper, you see the beard on the head, then the hairs on the beard, then the point at which the whole thing dissolves into abstract art, as the strokes of the artist's single-hair brush merge with the warped and mottled surface of the vellum.

The miniature in question was commissioned for Queen Claude of France. Nearly three generations after the invention of printing, there was no practical: ease in to commission this work. Rather, it was the delight in luxury itself, as well, perhaps, as the spirit of sacrifice that brought this work into existence.

Passage IV

NATURAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article "Back to the Future" by J. Madeleine Nash {©2008 by J. Madeleine Nash). · ·

     The Sand Creek Divide is a high point in Wyoming's Big Horn Basin. From it you can see the emerald patchwork of irrigated sugar beet and malt barley fields that hug the Bighorn River as well as the jagged mountain ranges that define the edges of this harsh mid-latitude desert.

     But between 55 and 56 million years ago, says Scott Wing, a paleo-botanist at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History, the Bighorn Basin was a balmy, swampy Eden, teeming with flora and fauna that would be at home in today's coastal Carolinas. And then, all of a sudden, things got a whole lot warmer. In a geological eye blink-less than 10,000 years, some think-global mean temperatures shot up by around 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

     The Big Red, a sinuous ribbon of rose-colored rock, is the most vivid marker of this exceptionally torrid time-the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, as most paleontologists call it. Even before it had a name, the PETM was starting to fascinate Wing. For some time, it had been clear to paleontologists studying the evolution of mammals that the transition between the Paleocene and the Eocene was marked by the kind of innovative burst that implies sweeping ecological change. Yet no hint of such a change had appeared in any of the fossil leaves Wing had collected. He would stare at leaves from the Paleocene and leaves from the Eocene, but see almost no difference between them. "It was getting to be annoying," he recalls.

     The Paleocene is the geological epoch that started 65 million years ago. At the time, mammals were rather simple, general-purpose creatures with few specializations. Then, barely IO million years later, at the dawn of the Eocene, the first relatives of deer abruptly appear, along with the first primates and first horses.

     "You can literally draw a line in the rock," says Philip Gingerich, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Michigan. "Above it there are horses; below it there aren't." In fact, where Gingrich works-at Polecat Bench, in the northern sector of the Bighorn Basin- you can actually see the line, in the form of a band of light gray sandstone. Oddly enough, many fossil mammals commonly found above this line, including those first horses, were abnormally small. Typically, Gingerich says, Eocene horses grew to the size of modern-day cocker spaniels, but these horses were "about the size of Siamese cats." In 1991, as Gingerich and others were marveling over the miniature mammals of Polecat Bench, oceanographers James Kennett and Lowell Stott investigated a major extinction of small, shelly creatures that, during the late Paleocene, lived on the sea floor off the coast of Antarctica. This massive die-off, they found, coincided with a steep rise in deep-ocean temperatures and a curious spike in atmospheric carbon.

     Less than a year later, paleontologist Paul Koch and paleo-oceanographer James Zachos teamed up with Gingerich to show that this geochemical glitch had also left its calling card on land. The trio established this indirectly by measuring the carbon content of fossilized teeth and nodules plucked from the Big Horn Basin's 55.5-million-year-old rocks.

     To Wing, it began to seem increasingly implausible that plant communities could have segued through the PETM unaffected. So in 1994, he started a methodical search for the fossils, returning year after year to the Bighorn Basin.

     At first, he found just a smattering of leaves, too few to suggest any pattern. Then, in 2005, at the end of a long day, he slid his shovel into a grayish mound and pulled out a tiny leaf. "I knew immediately that this was totally different from anything I'd seen before."

     From that one site, Wing went on to extract more than 2,000 leaf fossils representing 30 different species. Missing from the mix are the cypresses and other conifers that were so common during the Paleocene; gone also are the distant cousins of broadleaf temperate zone trees. In their place are the legumes, a family of plants, shrubs and trees that thrive today seasonally in dry tropical and subtropical areas.

     "What you see is almost a complete changeover from what was growing here before," Wing marvels. "What this means is that you could have stood in this one spot in Wyoming, surrounded by a forest, and everything would have looked pretty much the same for millions of years. And then, over a few tens of thousands of years, almost all the plants you’re familiar with disappear and are replaced by plants you've never seen before in your life."