LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is adapted from the essay "The Public Father" by Daphne Merkin (©2000 by The New York Times Company).

The narrator's father was Hermann Merkin, a widely known New York City philanthropist, who died in 1999.

I rarely visited my father at his office, where he worked as an investment banker, but I knew that its ongoing affairs were more crucial to him, in many ways, than the life he led at home just as I knew that his public face as a philanthropist was easier to read than his private face as a father or husband. My father was an Orthodox Jew who had grown up in Leipzig, Germany; he remained committed to Jewish causes until his death, and  his knowledge of the dizzying intricacies of Israeli politics was impressive.  Throughout his life my father supported Jewish scholarship; he also helped endow the kosher kitchen at Mount Sinai  as well as the Merkin Concert Hall on West 67th Street (which is silent from Friday at sundown to Saturday at sundown in observance of the Sabbath).

I consider him to have been something of an enigma-to himself, and certainly to his children.  He was constitutionally secretive, and it would have been nice to be let in on the secret, to know what was going on in his busy, obsessive mind.

He wasn't the kind of father I would have ideally wished for, an image cobbled together from the paternal figures I warmed to on television or in the movies attentive and playful and full of wise counsel.  He wasn't invested in the homely details of my existence or those of my five siblings: I don't think he ever knew the name  of  any  of  my  teachers,  and  he  couldn't  tell  my friends apart. He didn’t teach me to ride a bike (he couldn't ride one himself) or drive a car (he couldn't drive one himself). He didn't, in other words, lend himself to helping me master the world, the role often attributed to fathers in the developmental histories of daughters. He hadn't much use for feelings, which were what mastered me the most, then as now. I couldn't go to  him  with  my  problems  or  my  passions,  partly because he spoke the language of businesslike resolution  while specialized in the articulation  of  finely honed conflict. On those infrequent times when I would officially meet with him in his study-a room that bordered on the sacrosanct-to discuss some childhood difficulty, I  would  invariably  find  myself  cut  off  at the pass  by his decisiveness. My   habit of questioning everything wilted before his focus on the bottom line. Later I would  and  some of my relationship with him , expressed in the writer Franz Kafka’s famous  importuning letter to his father, with its futile wish for a communion that doesn’t exist.

These days I find myself looking for my father, as though now that he is gone I might still get to know him better. There are superficial associations: I saw a movie in which the Savoy Hotel in London was briefly featured, and I was immediately reminded of my father's fondness for 1t when he traveled on business. And there are deeper ones, as well: When I’m around people, especially men-who seem too obvious in their thought processes, think with affection of my father's utterly idiosyncratic, curvy mind. I keep wondering what has happened to all the bits of information he stored in his head,  the  phrases   he   wrote  down-in   English,   or Hebrew, or German, or French- with his ubiquitous, freshly   sharpened   No, 2   pencils   on   little    white note ads: I found the combinations of things he scribbled in his  vertical, almost mathematical handwriting  practical reminders mixed in with cerebral notations, isolated  vocabulary   words mixed in with stock quotes and dollar signs reasonably intriguing. Language meant a lot to him, and though I never shared his fondness  for  punsters  or  a  certain  kind of  briskly witty columnist, I could see that he liked words to crackle on the page.

Since he wasn't given to communicating his emotions, I had to guess at them much of the time. In the end, and I think he was genuinely different from other people, put together from strange and incongruous parts. I know he took pride in my being a writer, and I always enjoyed it when he came to literary gatherings, where he greeted everyone with relish, acting perfectly obvious to anything ungenerous about him or my family that I might have written. He didn't, in fact, care much about what other people thought of him which struck me as both annoying and admirable but made him socially embarrassing. I miss his impersonal yet oddly reassuring presence  in the world,  sitting  in a chair in his study filled with his scholarly books, his round bald head covered  with a flat black crocheted yarmulke. Write about me, he said, shortly before he died, squeezing my hand, which was his version of a hug. Did he mean it? And would he have recognized himself on the page?

Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article "Raiders or Traders?" by Andrew Curry (© 2008 by the Smithsonian Institution).

Norsemen have traditionally been seen as intrepid seafarers and fierce warriors. They traveled thousands of miles to the east and south: across the Baltic, onto the rivers of modern-day Russia and across the Black Sea to menace Constantinople.

All that wandering would have been impossible without ships. For most of the 20th century archaeologists assumed that all Viking ships resembled a vessel excavated in Norway in 1880. Known as the Gokstad to ship, for the farm on which it was found, it dated to the year 900. A replica was sailed across the Atlantic, from Norway to Chicago, for the 1893 World’s Fair. But a discovery in 1962 forced researchers to abandon the idea that the Vikings had only one kind of ship.

At the bottom of a fjord near the Danish town of Roskilde, archaeologists found remnants of five Viking ships piled one atop the other. Dubbed the Skuldelev ships, for a nearby town, each had a specialized role. One had been a fishing boat; two were cargo ships, so easy to handle that a crew of eight could move 20-ton loads; and one was a warship that could carry about 30 people. The fifth ship, a raider known as Skuldelev 2, was the biggest.

It was 98 feet long but 12 feet wide. Its keel reached just three feet below the surface, and its masts and sail could be lowered to approach fortifications and settlements with stealth.

Because only 20 percent of the Skuldelev 2 could be recovered, the only way to determine its capabilities for certain was to somehow resurrect and sail it.  In 2000, researchers at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde began working with scientists to build an accurate replica. They used thousand-year-old methods and replicas of Viking tools, which meant carving each of the ship's 90 oak planks with axes, wedges, and hammers. After four years, the eight builders had their replica. They called it Sea Stallion from Glendalough for the Irish village where Vikings used to find oak for their ships. With its narrow beam (width) and shallow draft (the depth a ship extends below the waterline), the Sea Stallion could have navigated nearly any river in Europe. But how would it fare on the open sea?

In the summer of 2006, the Sea Stallion sailed under sunny skies and gentle winds from Roskilde to Norway and back in four weeks  a virtual pleasure cruise. A test sail in May 2007 around the Roskilde fjord enjoyed similar conditions. A tougher, six-week test was planned for July 2007, with the crew sailing from Roskilde north to Norway, west to Scotland and south to Dublin.  Fully  loaded,  the ship  weighed 24 tons-eight of ship, eight of rock for ballast (the weight used to steady a ship) and eight of crew and gear in ideal conditions the Sea Stallion could travel 160 nautical miles a day; it could sprint at 13 knots , or almost 15 miles an hour. (A high-tech America’s Cup racer might hit 20 knots.) "It ranks as one of the fastest warships in history," says Anton Englert, an archaeologist at the ship museum.

The ship set sail for Dublin on July 1st 2007, under dark skies that presaged Northern Europe's coldest and wettest summer in decades. Nighttime temperatures plunged below freezing. Three days into the voyage, two crew members had been treated for hypothermia; weak winds forced the Sea Stallion to take a 24-hour tow across part of the North Sea to stay on schedule.

After the six-week test, archaeologists at the ship museum in Roskilde began analyzing data generated during the voyage. High speeds over long distances pushed the ship to its limits - and challenged some assumptions about how the Skuldelev 2 had been put together. “The sails are very stable and can take a lot of wind, but problems with the rudder come up again and again, and haven't been solved yet” Englert says.

Information from the crew proved as valuable as technical data. Exhausted sailors told researchers that the close quarters made sleeping nearly impossible. Between the rough water, constant rain and their nautical duties, it was all crew members could do to nap for an hour or two during their rest periods. "That indicates the ship must have had an amphibious behavior; they had to land often just to get some rest," Englert says. Crossing the North Sea in a narrow ship like this one would have stretched a Viking crew almost to the breaking point, and crossing the Atlantic would have been inconceivable. A ship like this would have been used for coastal raiding.

HUMANITIES: Passage A is adapted from the article ''The Animated Worlds of Basil Twist" by Eileen Blumenthal (©2005 by Theatre Communications Group). Passage B is adapted from the article "Dancing 'Like a Fish' in Underwater Puppet Theater" by Robert Greskovic (©2003 by Dow Jones and Company, Inc.).

Passage A by Eileen Blumenthal

"I feel like I'm a little old-fashioned," says master puppeteer Basil Twist. 

Old-fashioned? Twist staged Symphonie Fantastique (1998) in a 1,000-gallon tank of water. For Red Beads (2005), he animated the scenery with electric fans, while live actors played the human characters. His puppets for both Symphonie Fantastique and Petrushka (2001) included unadorned lengths of fabric.

 Actually, the contradiction is only skin-deep. Whatever techniques Twist uses for a particular show, the core for him is the age-old basis of puppetry: as he puts it, “animating - giving breath and soul-to something inanimate."

Thinking back to a festival he attended on the theme "music  and  puppetry,"  Twist  recalls,  "There  was a lot of Baroque music  played  on strange  instruments, but it wasn't a puppet show."

Twist decided he would create a visual equivalent of a musical work using totally abstract puppets- pieces of fabric, feathers, tinsel, poles, on-figurative cutouts. Light of varying color and intensity, sometimes smooth, sometimes in bursts, would underscore the emotion in the music. And -    the  clincher -he  would  get a  sense  of  otherworldliness and  (literal)  fluidity  by staging the show underwater in a giant tank. To animate this world, hidden puppeteers would work from the sides of the tank and suspended above it in harnesses.

Twist did temper the abstraction, in a way, by choosing Hector Berlioz's programmatic Symphonie Fantastique, which tells in music a story of a pianist's obsession with a woman. But Twist chose the work despite rather than for its story. He liked the music's emotional richness and dramatic structure. And even for viewers who knew the "plot" (not mentioned in Twist's program), objects refused to have clear identities. The silk that swirled and swooped to a violin melody could be an image of the protagonist's beloved, or it could be his mood, or it could be a breeze. Or all of them the rigid vertical forms could be a vision of prison bars, or a feeling of being pursued, or of being doomed. Or all of them.

Passage B by Robert Greskovic

In an attempt to define music-inspired choreography, George Balanchine suggested that "it was like an aquarium: music was all around and the dancer was like a fish." Symphonie Fantastique, Basil Twists enchanting, underwater presentation of Puppet Theater to Hector Berlioz's famed composition of the same name, takes such a thought at face value and swims to glory with it. 

It's hard to suggest with words just what Twist's Svmphonie does with the music and within the 1,000- gallon tank. Connections to Disney 's 1940 animated film Fantasia come readily to mind,  but  the  one-to one, note-for-note Mickey Mouse emphasis favored by Disney's gifted animators isn’t Twist's way;  he works for a less literal, more free-spirited vision.

The cast of floating and swirling "character" ranges from geometric, flat shapes to anthropomorphic figures, in the form of whisked lengths of fabric, unfurled sheets of cloth, and a variety of fringed pieces reminiscent of feathers, cheerleader pom poms or angel hair-like curtains of filament.

Berlioz’s 1830 symphonic composition comes down to us shot through with impetuous passion.  Its five movements each have poetic headings, "A Ball" and "Dream of a Witches' Sabbath'' for example, and were further elaborated by the composer with specific program notes. Berlioz didn’t insist on publishing the individual episodes he imagined, but he did want his movement titles printed whenever his symphony was played. Twist uses Berlioz's title, but not the program notes. His fantastical symphony is story-less but by no means lacking in character, or even characters. Whenever  the  music's  recurring  theme is  heard, suggesting the compelling beloved of the original narrative , Twist brings in his most gracefully swimming swath of white fabric, which variously takes the shape of an eel, a stingray or a wisp of smoke potent enough to cut through watery depths.

The aquatic world through which Symphonic current white figure winds, slips and streaks inch with musically motivated activity. Sometimes, especially in the little pauses between movements' you can hear some sloshing from puppeteers readying the laborers. Rather than distracting from the dreamlike nature of the silken proceedings, these signs of human activity help give the show an added gravity. His symphonic achievements were created by carefully edited animation; it would be remarkable enough, but the fact that it's done live, by unseen manipulators working through water, makes his theatrical marvels all the more amazing.

NATURAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article "The Magic Forest: Where Poplars Are Purifying the Planet" by Dava Sobel (©200 9 by Discover Media LLC).

A legacy of the Argonne National  Laboratory 's early foray into atomic energy lies buried here on its campus, about 25 miles southwest of Chicago. Although solid wastes from all sorts of experiments have been sealed in a landfill, certain liquids, mostly chlorinated solvents like trichloroethane, still taint the water that runs under the site. The ongoing attempt to remove these contaminants occupies an enormous experimental facility that covers four acres and looks like a forest.

"I  Like  to  brag  that  I  have  the  biggest  lab  at Argonne," says agronomist Cristina  Negri , indicating an expanse of  900 poplars  and  willows  growing  in rows. The trees stand about 30 feet high. More important, their roots extend 30 feet down, where they tap the contaminated aquifer and literally pull pollutants out of the ground.

Under normal circumstances, tree roots prefer to sip water from sources as close as possible to the surface. But these trees don’t have that option. They are set into plastic-lined pits that force their roots to tunnel deep for drinking. The  roots lift the contaminated  water into the tree trunks, where transport tissues conduct  it on  up  to  the  branches  and  leaves .  From there, as droplets transpire through leaf pores, the water evaporates and sunlight breaks down the dissolved solvent molecules, rendering them harmless.

Before the willows and poplars took over the job of wastewater management, Argonne was using extraction wells to pump contaminated water to a treatment plant. But the static mechanical pumps could not chase after groundwater that continually changed course through the complex terrain. The natural pump of a willow or poplar, on the other hand, is not only self-sustaining but  so  water-loving  that  it  will  snake  down or fan out as far as need be to reach moisture.

Negri’s trees each pump as much as 26 gallons of water per day at their summer peak. She measures the daily flow through the trunks by inserting probes that transmit data to solar-powered recorders mounted on tripods nearby.

In summer, trichloroethane levels generally run high (several thousand parts per billion), but in winter, after the leaves fall, the roots stop pumping and the bare branches bear no sign of contamination. Since the trees don't accumulate any permanent residue of pollution, they can eventually be chopped down and chipped, their remains distributed around other plantings for soil enrichment.

The technical term for this green, and increasingly prevalent, form of environmental cleanup is phytoremediation. At Argonne it will give way, over the next 20 to 30 years, to ecological restoration, as the pollutants are removed and the worker trees replaced by bur oaks and other hardwoods native to the Great Lakes region.

A second experimental forest, in Murdock, Nebraska, is helping the U.S. Department of Agriculture address the mess that it made in corn-belt communities during the J 960s, when storage drums full of grain were routinely fumigated with carbon tetrachloride to control pests. The colorless liquid seeped into the ground and continue s even now to foul the local water supply.

When members of the Argonne team arrived at Murdock in 2004 for an initial assessment, they found trace levels of "carbon test" in the resident vegetation. Their solution, implemented the next year, was to create an instant forest. Most of the 2,000 planted saplings were poplars and willows, the same types that had demonstrated their effectiveness in Illinois.

By 2007, two years after planting, the exact location of the underground plume of contamination could be mapped from the surface by examining the trees. Even in summer, trees in some areas tested clean while those in others were steadily bringing up carbon tetrachloride. Meanwhile. All the trees seemed to have enjoyed unusually rapid growth thanks to another pollutant in the Murdock soil:  nit rate, possibly from fertilizers applied in the surrounding cornfields.

The compatibility of the forest and the fields conjures another popular dream of combining remediation with energy production. Negri’s colleagues have looked to the poplar s as a possible source of ethanol for biofuel. The trees' need for plentiful water seemed at first to make them a poor choice, since water itself is likely to become scarce. But if the trees can slake their thirst with polluted water, and if they can grow on marginal land ill-suited for crops, then their promise as an alternate energy source grows doubly green.