Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 1
Regardless of the utter fierceness of desert winters and summers, the Pony Express
riders, they say, always rode in shirtsleeves; considering the real hazards of the job, that may
be true. The Central Overland California and Pike’s Peak Express (the actual name of the
Pony Express) used to run notices that are models for truth in advertising. An 1860 San
Francisco newspaper printed this one:
WANTED
Young, skinny, wiry fellows not
over eighteen. Must be expert
riders willing to risk death
daily. Orphans preferred.
Despite or because of such ads, never was there a shortage of riders.
The only baggage the boys carried - in addition to the mail knapsack - was a kit of
flour, cornmeal, and bacon, and a medical pack of turpentine, borax, and cream of tartar. Not
much in either one to keep a rider alive. A letter cost $2.50 an ounce, and, if the weather and
horse held out the Indians held off, it might go the two thousand miles from Missouri to
California in ten days, as did Lincoln’s Inaugural Address. But the primary purpose of the
service was not the speedy delivery of news or correspondence; rather the Express comprised
part of the Northern defense strategy during the Civil War by providing a fast, central link
with California that Southern raiders couldn’t cut. For the seventeen months the Pony
Express existed, it helped to hold California in the Union; what’s more, this last of the oldworld means of communication before mechanical contraptions took over left a deep mark on
the American imagination. The riders, going far on little, became touch-stones of courage and
strength.
-William L. H. Moon
1
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 2
The ocean’s legendary mists have long swirled with tales of exotic beasts - sea serpents,
giant squid and a variety of monsters. But the stories, whether based on fact or fantasy, tell of
no creature with as much age-old charm as the mermaid. The idea of near humans-both male
and female inhabiting the sea and inland waters has captured imaginations since people first
ventured seaward, and for a very long time mermaids seemed every bit as real as flying fish.
The folklore of mermaids is ancient and widespread, crossing cultures, continents and
centuries; stories of merfolk and their habits correspondingly traverse every latitude of the
imagination. Mer-people have been called by diverse names-Sirens, nixies, kelpies, Morgan,
nymphs, Tritions, silkies and Nereids, among others. The stories vary more than the names;
some tell of kindhearted beauties who wanted only to introduce their lovers to the rapture of
the deep, while others recount mer-monsters bent on ripping the drowned limb from limb.
Some mermaids had hair of glimmering gold; others sported fishy tresses of blue or green that
matched, in hue, their pointed teeth.
Like all folkloric characters, each group of mer-people has specific traits and habitats,
but there are some features that we have come to associate the generic mermaid. The partwoman, part-fish charmer, with a mirror in one hand and a comb in the other, gives room for
a great deal of artistic variation, but most mermaids tend to merge woman with fish near or
below the waist, where the female torso starts to taper with scaly grace to a fish’s tail. Then
things varymermaids have worn the speckled tails of mackerel, the flukes of dolphins and the
sinewy tails of eels; some are skirted, others snakelike.
-Carroll Fleming
2
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 3
Dameron’s whole boat smelled of independence- a rich blend of independence and
herring bait. When you have your own boat you have your own world, and the sea is
anybody’s front yard. Old Dameron, pulling his living out of the bay at the end of twelve
fathoms of rope, was a crusty, symbol of self-sufficiency. He cared for nobody, no not he, and
nobody cared for him.
Later in the fall he would haul his boat out on his own beach with his own tackle. He
would pull the engine out, take it up through the field to his woodshed, smear it with oil, and
put it to bed in a carton from the grocer’s. On winter evenings he would catch up on his
reading, knit his bait pockets, and mend his traps. On a nasty raw day in spring he would get
the tar bucket out and tar his gear and hang it all over the place on bushes, like the Monday
wash.
Then he would pay the State a dollar for a license and seventy-five cents for an official
measuring stick and be ready for another season of fishing, another cycle of days of fog. wind,
rain. calm, and storm.
Freedom is a household word now, but it’s only once in a while that you see a man who
is actively, almost belligerently free. It struck me as we worked our way homeward up the
rough bay with our catch of lobsters and a fresh breeze in our teeth that this was what the fight
was all about. This was it. Either we would continue to have it or we wouldn’t, this right to
speak our own minds, haul our own traps, mind our own business, and wallow in the wide,
wide sea.
-E.B.White
3
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 4
It was not a governing class that America needed - that ideal cherished by the
Federalists and revived by the civil service reformers - but a people intelligent enough to use
government to prosper the commonwealth, realistic enough to recognize the economic bases of
politics, moderate enough to exercise self-restraint, bold enough to countenance experiments,
mature enough to distinguish between statesmanship and demagoguery, far-sighted enough to
plan for their children and their children’s children. All this was, to be sure, a large order,
and only perfectionists could be disappointed that it was not filled, Yet if Americans remained
politically immature, they revealed as great a competence in the art and science of politics as
any other people, and rather more than most. They were reluctant to modernize their
machinery of government, yet though it needed constant care it never wholly broke down as it
often did in the Old World. They tolerated corruption, yet their political standards were as
high as their business standards, and the contrast between the conduct of the Civil War and
the Second World War suggests some progress in political morality. They clung to the
vocabulary of laissez faire, yet faithfully supplied the money and the personnel for vastly
expanded governmental activities. They frightened themselves with bogies of bureaucracy,
regimentation, and dictatorship, but in fact remained singularly free from bureaucracy in the
Old World sense, avoided political regimentation, and never knew the meaning of dictatorship
as so many people in Europe, Latin America, and the East knew it.
4
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 5
Mist continues to obscure the horizon, but above us the sky is suddenly awash with
lavender light. At once the geese respond. Now, as well as their cries, a beating roar rolls
across the water as if five thousand housewives have taken it into their heads to shake out
blankets all at one time. Ten thousand housewives. It keeps up-the invisible rhythmic beating
of all those goose wings-for what seems a long time. Even Lonnie is held motionless with
suspense.
Then the geese begin to rise. One, two, three hundred then a thousand at a time-in long
horizontal lines that unfurl like pennants across the sky. The horizon actually darkens as they
pass. It goes on and on like that, flock after flock, for three or four minutes, each new
contingent announcing its ascent with an accelerating roar of cries and wingbeats. Then
gradually the intervals between flights become longer, I think the spectacle is over, until yet
another flock lifts up, following the others in a gradual turn toward the northeastern quadrant
of the refuge.
Finally the sun emerges from the mist; the mist itself thins a little, uncovering the black
line of willows on the impoundment’s other side. I remember to close my mouth-which has
been open for some time-and inadvertently shut two or three mosquitoes inside. Only a few
straggling geese oar their way across the sun’s red surface. Lonnie wears an exasperated,
proprietary expression, as if he had produced and directed the show himself and had just
received a bad review. “It would have been better with more light,” he says; “I can’t always
guarantee just when they’ll start moving.” I assure him I thought it was a fantastic sight.
“Well,” he rumbles, “I guess it wasn’t too bad.”
-D. G. Schueler
5
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 6
We streamline our leisure hours for higher production, live by the clock even when time
does not matter, standardize and mechanize our homes and speed the machinery of living in
order that we can go to the most places and do the most things in the shortest period of time
possible. We try to eat, sleep, and loaf efficiently. Even on holidays and Sundays, the efficient
man relaxes on schedule with one eye on the clock and the other on an appointment sheet.
To squeeze the most out of each shining hour we have streamlined the opera, condensed
the classics, put energy in pellets, and culture in pocket-sized packages. We make the busy bee
look like an idler, the ant like a sluggard. We live sixty-miles-a-minute and the great god
Efficiency smiles.
We wish we could return to that pleasant day when we considered time a friend instead
of a competitor; when we did things spontaneously and because we wanted to, rather than
because our schedule called for it. But that of course would not be efficiency; and we
Americans must be efficient.
6
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 7
Too many parents force their children into group activities. They are concerned about
the child who loves to do things by himself, who prefers a solitary walk with a camera to a
game of ball. They want their sons to be “good fellows” and their daughters “social mixers.”
In such foolish fears lie the beginning of the blighting of individuality, the thwarting of
personality, the stealing of the wealth of one’s capital for living joyously and well in a confused
world. What America needs is a new army of defense, manned by young men and women who
through guidance and confidence, encouragement and wisdom, have built up values for
themselves by themselves and away from crowds and companies.
7
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 8
Every panic, or depression, has been preceded by feverish business activity, rising
prices, rising profits and a rapid extension of credit. Each depression has been accompanied
by a lack of business activity, falling prices and a very rapid increase in unemployment. In the
past each has brought financial ruin to may banks and business concerns and to countless
families. As long as these depressions come, we can not have an economy of plenty for any
great length of time. Progressive leaders are trying to increase the buying power of the masses
of our people and to induce them to save so that they may furnish an adequate market for the
products of farm and factory.
8
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 9
The whole atmosphere of the world in which we live is tinged by science, as shown most
immediately and strikingly by our modern conveniences and material resources. A little
deeper thinking shows that the influence of science goes much farther and colors the entire
mental outlook of modern civilized man on the world about him. Perhaps one of the most
telling evidences of this is his growing freedom from superstition. Freedom from superstition
is the result of the conviction that the world is not governed by caprice, but that it is a world of
order and can be understood by man if he will only try hard enough and be clever enough.
This conviction that the world is understandable is, doubtless, the most important single gift of
science to civilization. The widespread acceptance of this view can be dated to the discovery by
Newton of the universal sway of the law of gravitation; and for this reason Newton may be
justly regarded as the most important single contributor to modern life.
9
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 10
Such homely virtues as thrift, hard work, and simplicity appear old-fashioned in these
days. So probably we do well to remember the career of Benjamin Franklin, a true American.
Though he had slight formal education, he became one of the best-educated men of his day, for
he discovered the simple principle that one learns only what he teaches himself. Teachers can
direct and organize the search for skills and information; a few can inspire. There is no
substitute for the drudgery of learning. Franklin learned a trade and began reading
inspirational books. He sought self-reliance and expressed thoughts that have interested more
than one generation of readers. His essays and his Autobiography reveal that his knowledge
was useful.
10
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 11
A poet, if he is to write great, or even good, poetry, must be more alive than other men;
all his sensibilities are keener. You may remember Wordsworth’s definition of the poet which
concluded by describing him as “ a man who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life
that is in him.” But you would hardly guess that to be true by reading many of our more recent
poets. You would be tempted to define a poet as a man who has less feeling for life than other
men, one who is primarily interested in what strange convolutions he can put his mind
through, and how he can best conceal his feelings from his fellow creatures, Our poets today
need anything else, to rediscover themselves as participants in life, to think of themselves as
men first and poets afterward, to step out of their little mutual admiration societies and to
remember that they breathe the same air as the garage mechanic and the bank clerk.
11
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 12
The Eighth Army, in defeat or victory, lived exclusively on the ground. Mobile warfare
provided no time to pitch tents, and the town were uninhabitable. Shells and bombs were
discomforts in comparison with the flies, fleas, scorpions, black spiders, and sand vipers which
demanded a major share of the Tommies’ living space in the Egyptian and Libyan Deserts.
Throughout the green belt around Benghazi there were malarial mosquitoes and typusbearing lice. Tripoli was a synonym for hungry red ants.
12
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 13
When a loon dives, you never know where to look for him next. In what seems no time,
he may break the surface far down the lake, or he may come up where he made his dive. This
one is not about to go far. He is too interested in us. He cruises now with only his head and
neck above the water-his conning tower. If something scares him, he can swim with only his
beak out, a straw in the air—invisible if there’s a ripple on the lake. Now his body is up again,
and he laughs. If the laugh were human it would be a laugh of the deeply insane. The bird’s
lower jaw opens and claps shut five times in each laugh. If, from where you watch, he is
swimming in silhouette, you can count the movements of the jaw. He can laugh two or three
ways, and he can also squeal like a puppy. But is with another sound-a long cry in the still of
the night-that the loon authenticates the northern lake. The cry is made with the neck
stretched forward, and it is a sound that seems to have come up a tube from an unimaginably
deep source- hardly from a floating bird. It is a high, resonant, single unvaried tone that fades
at the end toward a lower register. It has caused panic because it has been mistaken for the
cry of a wolf, but it is far too ghostly for that. It is detached from the Earth. The Crees
believed that it was the cry of a dead warrior forbidden entry to Heaven. The Chippewas
heard it as an augury of death. Whatever it may portend, it is the predominant sound in this
country. Every time the loon cry comes, it sketches its own surroundings - a remote lake under
stars so bright they whiten clouds, a horizon jagged with spruce.
The New Yorker
13
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 14
The fight crowd is a beat that lurks in the darkness behind the fringe of white light shed
over the first six rows by the incandescents atop the ring, and is not to be trusted with pop
bottles or other hardware.
People who go to prize fights are sadistic.
When two prominent pugilists are scheduled to pummel one another in public on a
summer’s evening, men and women file into the stadium in the guise of human beings, and
thereafter become apart of a gray thing that squats in the dark until, at the conclusion of the
bloodletting, they may be seen leaving the arena in the same guise they wore when they
entered...
As a rule, the mob that gathers to see men fight is unjust, vindictive, swept by intense,
unreasoning hatreds, proud of its swift recognition of what it believes to be sportsmanship. It
is quick to greet the purely phony move of the boxer who extends his gloves to his rival, who
has slipped or been pushed to the floor and to reward this stimulating but still baloney gesture
with a pattering of hands which indicates the following: “You are a good sport. We recognize
that you are a good sport, and we know a sporting gesture when we see one. Therefore we are
all good sports, too. Hurrah for us!”
The same crowd doesn’t see the same boxer stick his thumb in his opponent’s eye or try
to cut him with the laces of his glove, butt him or dig him a low one when the referee isn’t in a
position to see. It roots consistently for the smaller man, and never for a moment considers the
desperate psychological dilemma of the larger of the two. It howls with glee at a good finisher
making his kill. The Roman hordes were more civilized. Their gladiators asked them whether
the final blow should be administered or not. The main attraction at the modern prize fight is
the spectacle of a man clubbing a helpless and vanquished opponent into complete
insensibility. The Referee who stops a bout to save a slugged and punch-drunken man from
the final ignominy is hissed by the assembled sportsmen.
-Adapted from Paul Gallicoeb
14
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 15
Next morning I saw for the first time an animal that is rarely encountered face to face.
It was a wolverine. Though relatively small, rarely weighing more than 40 pounds, he is,
above all animals, the one most hated by the Indians and trappers. He is a fine tree climber
and a relentless destroyer. Deer, reindeer, and even moose succumb to his attacks. We sat on
a rock and watched him come, a bobbing rascal in blackish-brown. Since the male wolverine
occupies a very large hunting area and fights to the death any other male that intrudes on his
domain, wolverines are always scarce, and in order to avoid extinction need all the protection
that man can give. As a trapper, Henry wanted me to shoot him, but I refused, for this is the
most fascinating and little known of all our wonderful predators. His hunchback gait was
awkward and ungainly, lopsided yet tireless. He advanced through all types of terrain without
change of pace and with a sense of power that seemed indestructible. His course brought him
directly to us, and he did not notice our immobile figures until he was ten feet away. Obviously
startled, he rose up on his hind legs with paws outstretched and swayed from side to side like a
bear undecided whether to charge. Then he tried to make off at top speed and watch us over
his shoulder at the same time, running headlong into everything in his path.
15
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 16
St. Isaac’s Square in Leningrad is hemmed on one side by a canal stemming from the
Neva, a river that in winter threads through the city like a frozen Seine, and on the other by St.
Isaac’s Cathedral, which is now an antireligious museum. We walked toward the canal. The
sky was sunless grey, and there was snow in the air, buoyant motes, playthings that seethed
and floated like the toy flakes inside a crystal. It was noon, but there was no modern traffic on
the square except for a car or two and a bus with its headlights burning. Now and then,
though, horse-drawn sleds slithered across the snowy pavement. Along the embankments of
the Neva, men on skis silently passed, and mothers aired their babies, dragging them in small
sleds. Everywhere, like darting blackbirds, black-furred school children ice-skated on the
sidewalks. Two of these children stopped to inspect us. They were twins, girls of nine or ten,
and they wore grey rabbit coats and blue velvet bonnets. They had divided a pair of skates
between them, but by holding hands and pushing together, they managed very well on one
skate apiece. They looked at us with pretty brown puzzled eyes, as though wondering what
made us different: Our Clothes? Miss Ryan’s lipstick? The soft waves in her loose blond
hair? Most foreigners in Russia soon become accustomed to this: the slight frown of the
passer-by who is disturbed by something about you that he can’t at once put his finger on, and
who stops, stares, keeps glancing back, even quite often feels compelled to follow you. The
twins followed us onto a footbridge that crossed the Neva, and watched while we paused to
look at the view.
-Truman Capote
16
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 17
The origin of tektites, black-green bits of glass which are found in various parts of the world,
has long been a mystery. Ralph Stair of the National Bureau of Standards presents a
hypothesis in the annual report of the Smithsonian Institution.
According to Stair, there probably once was a glass-skinned planet about as big as the
earth. It moved around the sun in an orbit between Mars and Jupiter. This planet was
shattered in a collision with another planet - perhaps a twin moving in the same vast emptiness
of space - or with one of the moons of Jupiter. The great collision could not have occurred
very long ago in cosmic history, for tektites are not found in old geological strata.
That the glass fragments, weighing from fractions of an ounce to several pounds, are of
extraterrestrial origin is a virtual certainty to Stair. Their chemical composition is quite
different from that of any earthly rocks; they required for fusion more heat than has been
available on our earth in recent geological time; they are unlike any manufactured glass; and
their shapes are such as indicate very rapid passage through the earth’s atmosphere.
17
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 18
Writing, like every other art, is highly personal. It includes certain disciplines - order,
proportion, precision and clarity - and these disciplines are rigorous for all who would learn to
write. Some say writing cannot be taught, that each writer must find his own way, and in a
sense this is true. There is one common philosophy, however, all must accept: to try, to fail, to
revise again. So onward to success which will come when the writer ( not the teacher) is
completely satisfied. “I try to think well, “ said a well-known author, “in order to
communicate effectively,” and indeed writing and thinking are two sides of the Socratic way.
To master either is a long and severe task. Now the teacher is not quite obsolete; however, she
is merely a convenience; she saves time. If wise, she can instruct and not make a nuisance of
herself or take the student’s mind off what he has to say; If foolish, she can substitute false
goals and get the student so diverted by technical trivia that he forgets what he wants to say. I
like to think of a really good teacher as one who succeeds in creating a climate in which writing
well becomes as respectable as playing football well. If a teacher can do that she need do little
else.
18
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 19
Such is the tyranny of words: their influence is subtle and powerful. Because we
recognize men and things by words, words and phrases come to have an independent existence
and mold our thoughts and actions. “ Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone,” said
Robert Louis Stevenson, “ but principally by catchwords.” Phrases exercise fascination and
the printed word seems almost sacred.
All the more reason why words have to be weighed. In dealings between men and
nations, words have attained a value that demands not merely precision in thought but moral
integrity as well. When terms like “peace” and “democracy” mean entirely different things to
different peoples or, at any rate, are defined and interpreted differently, it is wise to be
cautious. There has, indeed, been a somewhat immoderate controversy about the meaning and
implications of a “ moderate policy,” vindicating perhaps Oscar Wilde’s dictum that nothing
succeeds like excess. What we require in the conduct of public affairs, I suppose, is not so
much a lie-detector as an instrument that would test and measure the meaning of words. We
should continuously seek to define our definitions.
19
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 20
Consider the docility with which we go the theater. We do not search out the kinds of
plays we like, particularly. We wait to hear what the critics like. If they like it enough, it will
no doubt do for us. We wait to hear what our friends like, or say they like, or see, to take some
pride in having seen. If enough of our friends mention a play, so that it seems to be in the
conversational air, it is filed in the memory as a possible play to attend. In due time we go to
the play, making arrangements for tickets a mechanically as we make train arrangements for
an unavoidable trip to Boston. On the way into the theater, we glance at the photographs and
the newspaper quotes painted above them with the detachment of a child memorizing the
multiplication tables: we are storing up information about the responses we are expected to
make. In the theater, we attend intelligently, watching what we have heard described and
noticing that at some points the reports and the actuality coincide. Later on, we, too, will be
able to refer to the play in conversation, easily, judiciously. If our response to the play should
vary rather markedly from the response announced by a friend, we shall make whatever
counterstatements we care to make in a tentative already conciliatory, fashion; or we shall
suppress our own views altogether. We are generally co-operative; we perform our social
obligations, including going to the theater, as a preparation for social conversation; we play
along. It does not often occur to us to confess how bored we are or even to notice that we are
bored. Should we expect something better?
20
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 21
The others, who have avoided all of these deaths, get up in the morning and go
downtown to meet “ the man.” They work in the white man’s world all day and come home in
the evening to this fetid block. They struggle to instill in their children some private sense of
honor or dignity which will help the child to survive. This means, of course, that they must
struggle, stolidly, incessantly, to keep this sense alive in themselves, in spite of the insults, the
indifference, and the cruelty they are certain to encounter in their working day. They
patiently browbeat the landlord into fixing the heat, the plaster, the plumbing; this demands
prodigious patience; nor is patience usually enough. In trying to make their hovels habitable,
they are perpetually throwing good money after bad. Such frustration, so long endured, is
driving many strong, admirable men and women, whose only crime is color, to the very gates
of paranoia.
21
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 22
It was raining the next morning when Joey awoke, and he didn’t get up right away. He
couldn’t hear Mr. Ben moving about and thought that probably the old man felt the same way
that he felt himself: Satisfied to lie still, warm and comfortable, and listen to the rain on the
roof for awhile. He fell into a half-dreamy state, and fragments of things that had happened to
him since he had come to the Pond without grownups drifted through his mind; he made a sort
of recapitulation. He had learned some thing. He had been lost in a swamp and had been
frightened and had found his way out again, and now he would keep track of where he was in
the woods; the big bass had shown him an unsuspected meanness in his nature that he would
probably manage better when it appeared again. Sharbee and his raccoon had been another
lesson, and Mr. Ben had helped him there; he still wanted the raccoon, but he understood now
why it wouldn’t be fair to take it. He learned from the Johnson boys as well. His friends at
home were disciplined with an attempt at affection and fairness; they had their rages and
frustrations, but weren’t pushed into such actions as he had seen on the possum hunt. It was
the first time he had encountered and realized that there were ways to life different from his
own and that boys were caught in it.
22
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 23
Almost all experts agree that there is one line no person should ever, under any
circumstances, speak to an adolescent. It is the line that begins, “When I was your age...”
No adolescent has ever heard how this sentence ends because as soon as he hears the
introductory clause, “ When I was your age...” his eyes become glazed, his hearing mechanism
goes dead and his mind, most often, leaps instantly from the scene and goes romping a
thousand miles away. Before it departs, it may pause just long enough to think, in the privacy
of its own lobes, as follows: “But you were never my age!” This should not alarm the parent.
Secretly, all adolescents believe that their parent were born 45 years old. As a matter of fact,
most 45-year-olds secretly believe the same thing about their parents.
“Back in the depression when I was a kid...” will almost invariably turn the adolescent
sulky and uncommunicative. This is because most adolescents suffer poverty-envy. They
blame their parents for denying them the really great poverty of the Depression, so that they
now have to fake the real thing by spending a lot of time and money for shabby work clothes.
They don’t want to be reminded that their parents were overprivileged.
23
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 24
No, education is not the province of any one group or any one type of activity. One does
not automatically become cultured in one trade and uncultured in another. All of us have our
own specialties - otherwise we become mere dilettantes. Every tree must have its trunk, but it
can put out branches in profusion, and the branches will spread and intertwine with one
another to produce the whole specimen. And the purpose of education must be to encourage
that growth.
Despite our mass attendance at college and our mass exposure to culture, education
remains an individual achievement. I am afraid the emphasis, in education as elsewhere, has
been in recent years on the group, with the tendency to obscure the star in the constellation,
the soloist in the ensemble. Yet it will always be true, I am sure, that the individual will
provide the basis for progress. Self-direction is difficult; it is frustrating and often downright
unfashionable. Men of uncommon endowment will always represent a minority group within
the ranks of society, subject to all the sanctions and discriminations which minorities have
always suffered. But it is the uncommon man who will achieve the goal of true education. For,
short of a personal and highly individualistic effort, there is no other way to acquire an
education at all.
24
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 25
The story of words is endlessly fascinating, but the chroniclers of language are usually
content to work their was back to Latin, Greek, and Anglo-Saxon and stop there. There is,
however, an earlier stage to the story - a time when Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon and many
other ancient languages were all one. This parent language is called Indoeuropean because,
eventually, when it speakers had broken up and wandered away from one another, they
covered most of Europe and parts of southwestern Asia as far as northern India.
Precisely when Indo-european was spoken is unknown, because writing has not yet
come into being at the time. We may assume, however, that it flourished perhaps as much as
5,000 years before Christ. Its speakers were probably centered around the shores of the Baltic,
from which they spread out fanwise, in a general southerly direction, to northern India and the
Iranian plateau, and to eastern, central, southern, and western Europe. Their speech diverged
as they went, until it finally assumed many diverse forms.
The diversification of a single tongue into different speech forms resulted from a
process of migration, followed by complete break of communications among the various
migrating groups. When communications are broken, language tends to split into dialect;
when communications are restored, the dialects tend to come together again into a national
language. But in the days of Indo-european migrations, there was no possibility of restoring
communications. Hence, the process of diversification was drastic.
25
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 26
Few ordinary readers realize the occupational hazards of book reviewing. Let me
mention the most common: literary adhensions. This is as prevalent among critics as ulcers in
the advertising profession. Symptom - inability to detach one’s hands from the book under
review. “It was impossible to put down,” complained Critic Y. By comparison, Critic X gives
the reader an outside chance. “I could not put the book down,” he wrote. Critic Z’s condition
is serious, but not hopeless: Once I started it, it was very difficult to lay it down.” Obviously Z
put up a fight.
There is the critic who, instead of finding the book stuck in his hands, finds himself
stuck to the chair. Let me give an example. A few years ago one of my favorite reviewers sat
down to read a novel about the sea. From what I have been able to deduce, he noticed an odd
tingling in his spine about halfway through the book. He broke into a cold sweat, tried to
stand up, but found he could not do so. He read on and tried to rise again. No dice. This must
have been humiliating, but Critic tells us that he went bravely on until he finished. (It) kept
me tightly glued to my chair from beginning to end” was all he could write of his harrowing
experience. At least, this is all that was quoted in an ad for the book.
There are numerous minor afflictions that need not concern us at length - compulsive
enjoyment (“ I laughed so much tears came to my eyes and I had to stop “), pain (“ I felt as if I
had been run over by a truck “, and itchiness (“ induces a skin - crawling tension “). There is a
lesson in this for all of us. Avoid books that have given the reviewer so much trouble.
26
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 27
I walk the short dirt road from our house to the January bay just before the afternoon
sunset. Scraped by the town truck’s snowplows, the road has become rock, as hard as granite
in the depth of its midwinter frost. My boots strike with each step: the tremor is not to be
ignored. My nostrils tense as the sharp air pierces: the sun glows on the tops of glazed drifts
and I can feel winter’s hands moving cold under my scarf and across my shoulders.
Alone, I vibrate with the excitement of the moment. Without movement, without
shelter, without skills, a man would die here in the intensity of winters’s presence. But I walk
faster, breathe deeper, throw open my arms as if to hug winter to me. In the moment of the
clasping is the proof of my existence, demonstrated with a zest unknown in lesser times.
These winters give life, they do not still it. Instead of ogres, we have enchantment here.
In the classic cold there is a pumping realization that the blood roars, the heart beats and the
sinews stretch. Every essential is magnified, every awareness is honed by this season that
allows for no illusion, and yet rewards its reality with an absolute verification of life that no
temperate zone can promise.
There is risk below zero. But is not such risk essential if verification is to follow? It is
our annual blessing - a time so intense that every man, woman and child of Maine comes as
close as a mortal can to an awareness of the miracle of life.
There are no such moments under the palms where warm breezes blow from wet and
tepid seas.
- John N. Cole
27
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 28
In eastern Washington state, the early-morning sun light the field as Sergio Fernandez
scans for asparagus stalks to harvest. With a rectangular bucket strapped to his waist, Sergio
holds a long wooden-handled tool with a blade jutting from its end and moves expertly from
one side of a row to another. He chooses a stalk, bends down to hold it, then digs into it
beneath the earth, cutting it off with an audible crunch. At the end of a row, he crouches, puts
his knife across his knee, and files the blade sharp again.
Sergio Fernandez - this is not his real name - seems a master asparagus cutter. He is
only 8 years old. On this crisp morning, at 7 o’clock, he is one of many hundreds of children at
work illegally, despite exposes and Congressional investigations.
The persistence of child labor in the fields has only one undeniable cause. The average
farmworker family cannot make even a subsistence living unless all able members work. Even
though farmworkers provide an essential service, our society does not truly value what they
do, and so we don’t make any extra room in the pricing system for them. Millions of dollars
change hands for shipping, wrapping, and marketing between fields and stores, but we don’t
pay living wages to those who pick the crops.
-Paula DiPerne
28
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 29
One potential hideaway that until now has been completely ignored is De Witt Isle, off
the coast of Tasmania.* Its assets are 4,000 acres of jagged rocks, tangled undergrowth and
trees twisted and bent by battering winds. Settlers have avoided it like the plague, but
bandicoots (ratlike marsupials native to Australia), wallabies, eagles, and penguins think De
Witt is just fine.
So does Jane Cooper, 18, a pert Melbourne high school graduate, who emigrated there
with three goats, several chickens and a number of cats brought along to stand guard, against
the bandicoots. Why De Witt? “I was frightened at the way life is lived today in our cities,”
says Jane. “I wanted to be alone, to have some time to think and find out about myself.”
She has been left alone to write poems and start work on a book, play the flute and dive
for crayfish and abalone to supplement her diet of cereal, canned goods and home-grown
vegetables.
Her solitary life isn’t easy. “Dear God,” she wrote in her diary on her first day ashore,
“how I love this island... but I don’t know if I’m strong enough to stay. I found myself walking
along the rocks crying.” Then her mood began to change: “I’m going to conquer this island. I
won’t let it beat me....I had been feeling so sorry for myself that I was unaware of the beauty
that surrounded me.” Recently she sent a letter home via the local fishermen. She wrote: “I
feel very old and very young. I’m more determined than ever to stay here.” She has made a
friend - a penguin named Mickey Mouse - and she is beginning to feel that “this is my world
and my life...it is so beautiful here I can’t imagine Melbourne any longer.” To millions of
citybound Australians, Jane has become something of a heroine.
*a large island southeast of Australia
29
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 30
Think about how often you speak from the time you awaken to the time you go to sleep.
The answer psychologist give is approximately seven hundred discrete utterings, that is, those
which aren’t parts of a “conversation” but actually different occasions to say something.
Investigators say some people utter 12,000 sentences every day, which averages out to almost
100,000 words!
Put differently, an average American can speak the equivalent of two novels per day,
although he reads less than three books per year.
We seem to be so busy “speaking” to each other the we’re not really “saying” very
much. Conversation, or the art of such, is being “lost” only because no one is listening. And
no one is listening to you because you haven’t listened to the other guy.
The reason that no one listens, usually, is that our egos get in the way, in the sense that
we’re mentally formulating what we’re going to say when the person gets through speaking.
Instead of digesting the other person’s information, we are most often busy thinking only of
how best we can impress him with our next statement.
The result is what we call EgoSpeak: the art of boosting our egos by speaking only
about what we want to talk about, and not giving a hoot about what the other person wants to
talk about. EgoSpeak has dozens of variations, scores of subcategories, hundreds of
opportunities daily to be practiced and studied, and literally millions of practitioners.
30
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 31
And now that I am afflicted by this dull ache within my breast that my doctors cannot
heal; now that I am like a forest tree under the woodman’s axe and ere long God will lay me
low like an outworn tower; and my awakenings are no longer the proud awakenings of youth,
when limber are the sinews and every thought is buoyant - even now have I found my
consolation, which is not to let myself be cast down by these portents of a failing body, nor
overborne by infirmities which are base and personal, locked up within me, and to which the
historians of my empire will not accord three lines in their chronicles. Little matters it that my
teeth are loosening, my cheeks sagging - and indeed it were unseemly to crave the least pity on
that score, Nay, anger wells up within me at the mere thought of it! For these flaws are in the
vase alone, not in its contents.
They tell me that when my neighbor in the East was stricken with a palsy, and one side
of him grew cold and numb, and he needs must drag with him everywhere that dead half of
himself which smiled no more, even so he lost nothing of his dignity, but, rather, profited by
this ordeal. To those who praised him for his strength of mind he answered scornfully that
they forgot who he was, and bade them keep such eulogies for the tradesfolk of the city. For a
ruler, if he begin not by ruling over his own body, is but a ridiculous usurper. I reckon it no
loss but an amazing boon that today I have freed myself a little more from life’s empire.
Thus is it with old age, True, all that awaits me on the downward slope is unfamiliar.
But my heart is full of my dead friend and, gazing at the villages with eyes drained dry by my
loss, I wait for love to flood through me again, like a returning tide.
31
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 32
The morning warmed up, drawing sweat, and the tennis courts filled with more of our
kind. Many of the new arrivals were familiar. I exchanged nods of greeting with a couple of
them. One I did not exchange nods with was a young man. One morning last summer, he and
I had a friendly discussion about the problems of teaching oneself to play tennis - a rare
occurrence on the courts. Afterward, I didn’t see him there for some time, but he turned up
again a few weeks ago, and I inquired where he’d been, He replied, proudly, that he’d
dropped out for a while to take tennis lessons with a professional instructor. Of course, his
situation seemed enviable, and I said so - which made him seem to consider my situation most
unfortunate, He offered to demonstrate the backhand his instructor had taught him. When he
was finished - he had looked quite stiff from trying to hard to copy his tutor - he said to me,
“Go ahead, let me see you do it.” By ten, the backhand was my best stroke there being, I had
discovered, nothing lovelier to emulate than the video Rosewall. So I showed him my
backhand, and he hasn’t nodded or spoken to me since.
32
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 33
I recall that during my youth, in the 1920’s, my mother thought - or, rather, knew - that
it was dangerous to drive an automobile without gasoline: it fried the valves, or something.
“Now don’t you dare drive all over town without gasoline!” she would say to us when we
started off. Gasoline, oil, and water were much the same to her, a fact that made her life both
confusing and perilous. Her greatest dread, however, was the Victrola. She had an idea that
the phonograph might blow up. It alarmed her, rather than reassured her, to explain that the
phonograph was run neither by gasoline nor by electricity. She could only suppose that it was
propelled by some new-fangled and untested apparatus which was likely to let go at any
minute, making us all the victims and martyrs of the wild-eyed Edison’s dangerous
experiments. The telephone she was comparatively at peace with, except, of course, during
storms, when for some reason or other she always took the receiver off the hook and let it
hang. She came naturally by her confused and groundless fears, for her own mother lived the
latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over
the house. It leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets if the wall switch had been left on.
She would go around screwing in bulbs, and if they lighted up she would hastily and fearfully
turn off the wall switch, happy in the satisfaction that she had stopped not only a costly but a
dangerous leakage. Nothing could ever clear this up for her.
-James Thurber
33
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 34
After years during which they were exploited by male employers, misled by the media,
manipulated by men, and cheated by doctors, some American women have, by sheer force of
their collective idealism, became emancipated. They can now look forward to being exploited
by their sisters, misled by their own publications, manipulated by their self-styled leaders, and
cheated by “health collectives.” Is this really what it’s all about? Is this what they are fighting
for?
The starting point for change can be the admission by U.S. feminists that the new myths
have no more validity than the ones they displaced. There is no magic spiritual bond that
unites all women in a crusade for justice. Sisterhood is beautiful, but it’s no substitute for
authentic personhood. Any group that encourages its members to put blind group loyalty
above personal integrity is repressive, and repression is supposedly what feminists were
rejecting.
Perhaps the most disturbing myth of all is that feminism is solely a women’s issue. In
reality, there are often more men than women supporting feminist objectives. The failures of
the American movement can be directly related to the exclusion of men. If there is an
embarrassingly obvious lesson of the past 10 years, it is that man is every bit the victim that
women is. The use of scapegoats demeans, and there is truth in the axiom, “Once we accept
ourselves, we are comfortable accepting and being accepted by others.”
34
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 35
The Prussian Officer
During the night the lightning fluttered perpetually, making the whole sky white. He
must have walked again. The world hung livid around him for a moments, fields a level sheen
of gray-green light, trees in dark bulk, and the range of clouds black across a white sky. Then
the darkness fell like a shutter, and the night was whole. A faint flutter of half-revealed world,
that could not quite leap out of the darkness - Then there again stood a sweep of pallor for the
land, dark shapes looming, a range of clouds hanging overhead. The world was a ghostly
shadow, thrown for a moment upon the pure darkness, which returned ever whole and
complete. And the mere delirium of sickness and fever went on inside him - his brain opening
and shutting like the night- then sometimes convulsions of terror from something with great
eyes that stared around a tree - then the long agony of the march, and the sun decomposing his
blood - then the pang of hate for the Captain, followed by a pang of tenderness and ease. But
everything was distorted, born of an ache and resolving into an ache.
In the morning he came definitely awake, Then his brain flamed with the sole horror of
thirstiness! The sun was on his face, the dew was steaming from his wet clothes. Like one
possessed, he got up. There, straight in front of him, blue and cool and tender, the mountains
ranged across the pale edge of the morning sky. He wanted them - he wanted them alone - he
wanted to leave himself and be identified with them. They did not move, they were still and
soft, with white, gentle markings of snow. He stood still, mad with suffering, his hands
crisping and clutching. Then he was twisting in a paroxysm on the grass.
35
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 36
But Sloth’s creators have completely revamped the options that have been traditionally
available in American cars. They have jettisoned the cigarette lighter (a safety measure
realized in the long-term sense and one that protects the driver’s lungs), the radio the record
player, the maplight and the air-conditioner. What they have substituted is phenomenally
ingenious.
First of all is the coin-tosser. It is a spring-operated device, tension-set, to lob quarters
into toll booths. For turnpike driving, it can be preset to toss a coin every 10 minutes at 60
miles an hour, which is what Frantic’s engineers have found the average interval to be on pay
roads. Negotiations are being held now with the leading highway authorities to establish highspeed, nonstop toll booths for autos equipped with the gadget.
The Sloth also boasts a parking detector, really a modified electronic sensor, for street
parkers. When in operation, it pings upon “hearing” parked cars with their engines running
in neutral. It has been known to find spots two blocks away before nearer rival cruisers have
been alerted to the news that a vacancy is in the offing. It can also be adjusted, directionally,
to alert the parker when a tow truck is on location.
At least one Sloth improvement has caused a basic split among Frantic’s engineers.
This is the squelcher. The squelcher could eliminate the most pestiferous road nuisance in
America - the car that honks at you when it is patently clear that because of physical or other
circumstances, you can’t move for fear of hitting the car in front of you. Some Sloths have
been equipped with a feedback control that responds to a rear honk with a jet of liquid enamel
that is sprayed on the honkers’s windshield.
However, some safety experts have felt that while this would stop the honker from
honking it would also stop him from going, leading to chain honking rearward. They have,
therefore, fitted other Sloths with a recording device that directs a stereo stream of invective at
the honker. Admittedly an experimental feature, the squelcher promises to be one of the more
controversial items in automotive circles.
36
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 37
Residents of Canton, Illinois (population 14,000), regulated their lives according to the
daily seven blasts of the town’s whistle, perched on top of the local International Harvester
plant. They awakened to the first morning whistle at 6 a.m., set their watches by it, and moved
in steady, sure steps throughout the day, alert to the whistle’s sound. The Environmental
Protection Agency heard in the whistle not the sound of a community ordering its hours but a
D.B.A. (decibels adjusted) measurement of 89.28 points higher than the limit allowed by a state
noise-pollution law slated to go into effect in February 1977.
There was already on the books a state nuisance law EPA could apply to the whistle, so
the Agency wrote plant manager Robert Nelson warning him that he could be in violation of
the new law. Nelson cooperated by promptly shutting down the whistle. The town schedule
went haywire: people were late for work, parents got their children off to school at odd hours,
and lunch and dinner did not appear at the appointed times.
Within 48 hours after the shutdown, 7,000 persons had signed petitions protesting the
silencing of the whistle. As a consequence, it was turned back on. Said an EPA spokesman:
“We were just reacting to a complaint and seeing if we should do anything about it. There is
obviously not much nuisance if the majority of people like the whistle.”
37
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 38
If a serious literary critic were to write a favorable, full-length review of How Could I
Tell Mother She Frightened My Boy Friend Away, Grace Plumbuster’s new story, his startled
readers would assume either that he had gone mad or that Grace Plumbuster was his editor’s
wife. If the review was unfavorable, they would probably be even more astonished; they would
wonder why on earth he had squandered so much energy on attacking something that nobody
in his right mind would dream of defending. Animadversions on the use of sledge hammers to
crack nuts would be bandied about, and the reviewer’s reputation would be gravely imperiled.
The point is that serious literary critics are not expected to waste their time on pulp fiction.
The elaborate demolition of ephemera is no part of their province. They can pick and choose,
and when they elect to knock, fair play demands that they should take on someone more or less
their own size.
38
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 39
The average citizen today is knowledgeable about “landmark” court decisions
concerning such questions a racial segregation, legislative apportionment, prayers in the public
schools, or the right of a defendant to counsel in a criminal prosecution. Too often, however,
he thinks that these decisions settle matters once and for all. Actually, of course, these wellpublicized court decisions are merely guideposts pointing toward a virtually endless series of
vexing legal questions. It is often more difficult to determine how far the courts should travel
along a road than to decide what road should be taken.
Illustrations of this difficulty exist in all areas of the law, and especially in those most
familiar to the lay public. For example, this nation could hardly fail to agree that statecompelled racial segregation in the public schools is a denial of the equal protection of the laws
guaranteed by the 14th amendment. The real difficulty lies in determining how desegregation
shall be accomplished and how to solve the problem of de facto school segregation, perpetuated
by the practical if unfortunate realities of residential patterns.
Similarly, there was substantial editorial approval of the Supreme Court’s initial
decision that grossly inequitable legislative apportionment was a proper matter for judicial
scrutiny. The traditional democratic ideal of majority rule, it was argued, could not be
subverted by apportionment schemes which at times appeared to give the rural voter twice the
electoral strength of his urban counterpart. But when this principle was extended to render
unlawful the composition of virtually every state legislature in the nation, the reaction to such
an extension received as much attention as the apportionment decision itself.
39
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 40
Just why some individuals choose one way of adjusting to their difficulties and others
choose other ways is not known. Yet what an individual does when he is thwarted remains a
reasonably good key to the understanding of his personality. If his responses to thwartings are
emotional explosions and irrational excuses, he is tending to live in an unreal world. He may
need help to regain the world of reality, the cause-and-effect world recognized by generations
of thinkers and scientists. Perhaps he needs encouragement to redouble his efforts. Perhaps,
on the other hand, he is striving for the impossible and needs to substitute a worth-while
activity within the range of his abilities. It is the part of wisdom to learn the nature of the
world and of oneself in relation to it, and to meet each situation as intelligently and as
adequately as one can.
40
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 41
Throughout extensive areas of the tropics the tall and stately primeval forest has given
way to eroded land, scrub and the jumble of secondary growth. Just as the virgin forest of
Europe and North America were laid low by man’s improvidence, so those of the tropics are
now vanishing only their destruction may be encompassed in decades instead of centuries. A
few authorities hold that, except for government reserves, the earth’s great rain forests may
vanish within a generation. The economic loss will be incalculable, for the primary rain forests
are rich sources of timber (mahogany, teak) and such by-products as resins, gums, cellulose,
camphor and rattans. No one, indeed, can compute their resources, for of the thousands of
species that compose the forest cover, there are only a few whose physical and chemical
properties have been studied with a view to commercial use.
Most important of all, the primeval rain forest is a reservoir of specimens, a dynamic
center of evolution whence the rest of the world’s plant life has been continually enriched with
new forms. These extensive reserves must be defended from the acquisitive hand of man,
whose ruthless ax would expose them to the ravages of sun and rain.
41
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 42
Woodsmen, hunters, and trackers learned to follow and read the information
unwittingly left behind by animals, men, nature and time. Their ability to survive depended
on their skill in reading these signs. Soon they reasoned that if signs left behind accidentally
had so much meaning, they could leave signs deliberately for their own future use or for the
benefit of friends following them. Thus trail signs and symbols came into being and soon
became more or less standardized. A trail blazer in new territory hacked pieces of bark off
some of the trees in his path so that he could find his way back or so that others could follow
him. Indians frequently made a cut on both sides of the tree so that the trail could be seen from
either direction and from either side of the tree. The white men chipped from one side only,
and then trails were harder to follow.
42
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 43
Intuition is not a quality which everyone can understand. As the unimaginative are
miserable about a work of fiction until they discover what flesh-and-blood individual served as
a model for the hero or heroine, so even many scientists scout scientific intuition. They can not
believe that a blind man can see anything that they can not see. They rely utterly on the
celebrated inductive method of reasoning; the facts are to be exposed, and we are to conclude
from them only what we must. This is a very sound rule - for mentalities that can do no better,
But it is not certain that the really great steps are made in this plodding fashion. Dreams are
made of quite other stuff, and if there are any left in the world who do not know that dreams
have remade the world, then there is little that we can teach them.
43
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 44
“What do they look like?,” demanded Michael.
“You’ll know them when you see them,” Dad sort of laughed, and Timothy saw a pulse
beating time in his cheek. Mother was slender and soft, with a woven plait of spun-gold hair
over her head in a tiara, and eyes the color of the deep cool canal water where it ran in
shadow, almost purple, with flecks of amber caught in it. You could see her thoughts
swimming around in her eyes, like fish-some bright, some dark, some fast, quick, some slow
and easy, and sometimes, like when she looked up where Earth was, being nothing but color
and nothing else. She sat in the boat’s prow, one hand resting on the side lip, the other on the
lap of her dark blue breeches, and a line of sunburnt soft neck showing where her blouse
opened like a white flower.
She kept looking ahead to see what was there, and, not being able to see it clearly
enough, she looked backward toward her husband, and through his eyes, reflected then, she
saw what was ahead; and since he added part of himself to this reflection, a determined
firmness, her face relaxed and she accepted it and she turned back, knowing suddenly what to
look for.
Timothy looked too. But all he saw was a straight pencil line of canal going violet
through a wide shallow valley penned by low, eroded hills, and on until it fell over the shy’s
edge. And this canal went on and on, through cities that would have rattled like beetles in a
dry skull if you shook them. A hundred or two hundred cities dreaming hot summer-day
dreams and cool summer-night dreams...
They had come millions of miles for this outing - to fish. But there had been a gun on
the rocket. This was a vacation. But why all the food, more than enough to last them years
and years, left hidden back there near the rocket?
44
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 45
Hollywood has depended more than ever in recent years on plays and novels for its
story material. The ratio of original screenplays to adaptations is now about fifty-fifty- a far
cry from the old days when a large majority of a producer’s scripts were conceived by the
writers in his studio. In the eyes of the movie makers, a best-selling novel or hit play has a
peculiar advantage over an original script. It has been pretested before a critical public and
therefore must be good and must be a potential box-office success. Furthermore, it is usually
easier and less time-consuming for a salaried script writer to adapt a major work than to write
one. The rub for the producers, of course, is that they pay such extravagant prices for the
rights to these pretested properties that the load on the budget is often so great that the movie
slips into the red.
45
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 46
The locust is an enigma. It is not a distinct species in itself but merely the
metamorphosis of another quite picayune insect into an evil creature with gregarious and
migratory habits. This transition is due to a physiological response to violent fluctuations in its
environment. Between plagues it is a gaunt and harmless grasshopper. This incredible Jekylland-Hyde phenomenon was explained by the “phase theory” of Uvarov in 1921. In cycles
ranging from 10 to 17 years, depending upon favorable rains which produce the luxuriant
vegetation that serves as additional food for the locusts and escape from their natural enemies,
and obscure instinct takes hold. Suddenly the insipid little grasshopper puts on muscle and a
scowl, changes color, develops longer wings, shorter legs, higher temperature and a ravenous
appetite. After devouring everything in the immediate locality, he then explodes into the
heavens as if by signal.
46
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 47
As if to slake the rising tide of feminine autonomy, Congress in a burst of sentiment on
May 7, 1914, proclaimed a national holiday, Mother’s Day, to be celebrated the second Sunday
every May. It was a vote for Mom and an apple pie in every home. The following month, the
General Federation of Women’s Clubs at its biennial convention banned such suggestive
dances as the tango and the hesitation, and suggestive stories that were currently appearing in
popular magazines.
At the same time, Theater Arts magazine chastised a Broadway comedy, The Rule of
Three, which made light of a delicate matter: “Divorce as a subject for farcical treatment
world hardly in any circumstances commend itself to audiences of the kind managers would
seek to bring to their theater.
47
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 48
He never could pinpoint, with his dazzled and watery eyes, Armande’s silhouette among
the skiers. Once, however, he was sure he had caught her, floating and flashing, bare headed,
agonizingly graceful, there, there and now there, jumping a bump, shooting down nearer and
nearer, going into a tuck - and abruptly changing into a goggled stranger.
Presently she appeared from another side of the terrace, in glossy green nylon, carrying
her skis, but with her impressive boots still on. He had spent enough time studying skiwear in
Swiss shops to know that shoe leather had been replaced by plastic, and laces by rigid clips.
You look like the first girl on the moon, he said, indicating her boots and if they had not been
especially close fitting, she would have wiggled her toes inside as a women does when her
footwear happens to be discussed in flattering terms (smiling toes taking over the making of
mouths).
“Listen,” she said as she considered her Mondstein Sexy (their incredible trade name),
“I’ll leave my skis here, and change into walking shoes and return to Witt with you a deux.
I’ve quarreled with Jacques, and he has left with his dear friends. All is finished.”
48
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 49
On June 17, 1744, the commissioners from Maryland and Virginia negotiated a treaty
with the Native Americans of the Six Nations at Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The Native
Americans were invited to send boys to William and Mary college. In a letter the next day they
declined the offer as follows:
We know that you highly esteem the kind of learning taught in those Colleges, and that
the Maintenance of our young Men, while with you, would be very expensive to you. We are
convinced, that you mean to do us Good by your Proposal; and we thank you heartily. But
you, who are wise, must know that different Nations have different Conceptions of thing and
you will therefore not take it amiss, if our Ideas of this kind of Education happen not to be the
same as yours. We have had some Experience of it. Several of our young people were
formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern Provinces: they were instructed in all
your Sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad Runners, ignorant of every
means of living in the woods . . . neither fit for Hunters, Warriors, nor Counselors, they were
totally good for nothing.
We are, however, not the less oblig’d by your kind Offer, tho’ we decline accepting it;
and, to show our grateful Sense of it, if the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a Dozen of their
Sons, we will take Care of their Education, instruct them in all we know, and make Men of
them.
49
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 50
We should also know that “greed” has little to do with the environmental crisis. The
two main causes are population pressures, especially the pressures of large metropolitan
populations, and the desire - a highly commendable one - to bring a decent living at the lowest
possible cost to the largest possible number of people.
The environmental crisis is the result of success- success in cutting down the mortality
of infants (which has given us the population explosion), success in raising farm output
sufficiently to prevent mass famine ( which has given us contamination by pesticides and
chemical fertilizers), success in getting people out of the noisome tenements of the 19th-century
city and into the greenery and privacy of the single-family home in the suburbs (which has
given us urban sprawl and traffic jams). The environmental crisis, in other words, is largely
the result of doing too much of the right sort of thing.
To overcome the problems that success always creates, one must build on it. But where
to start? Cleaning up the environment requires determined, sustained effort with clear targets
and deadlines. It requires, above all, concentration of effort. Up to now we have tried to do a
little bit of everything - and tried to do it in the headlines - when what we ought to do first is
draw up a list of priorities.
50
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 51
The people of Wales represent the remnants of those pugnacious Celtic people who
were subjected to centuries of Roman rule, underwent the invasions of the Saxons who drove
them to their mountain fastness, and endured the phenomenal organizing efficiency of the
Norman conquerors without ceding one iota of their cultural independence. It is significant
that when the Romans landed in 43 A.D. they swept up through England without any great
trouble, but it took them another thirty years to subdue Wales. It took the Saxons a hundred
years to do something of the same sort, although in their case they pushed the Welsh into what
they must have regarded as non - viable mountains and left them there. They didn’t know the
Welsh.
And here perhaps, is the secret of the essential difference of the Welsh. An old Welsh
proverb says, “The celt always fights and always loses.” Militarily and politically this has been
true of the Welsh, but, during those centuries of ceaseless strife, the Welshman came to realize
that there was something deeper, more important than political or military triumph,
something he had always been unconsciously struggling to preserve, an indefinable passion for
music and poetry and in this last battle, the Welshman has belied the proverb and emerged
victorious.
Thus, very briefly, we have an explanation of the extraordinary tenacity with which this
people has clung to its traditions, its customs, its language, and its own way of life.
51
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 52
But after a while there was no more work for me at the cheese factory. I lapsed into an
irritable winter stupor and Sally had to come home to a poverty of spirit that was much more
difficult to laugh off than poverty of income. Since she was working and I wasn’t it was only
fair that I baby-sit more than she, but I couldn’t accept the restrictions. Half crazy with cabin
fever, I would plunge out into the snow as soon as she got up, and go for long, laborious walks
in the swamp. My self-esteem was dropping fast, and added another weight to an
overburdened Sally. We couldn’t adjust to the new reversal of our roles, and we realized that I
still expected her to do more with the baby, and she expected me to be a more responsible
breadwinner. We began to set up confrontations that could lead to a separation. The new
home and baby were powerful forces that held us together, but there’s no denying that our
new roots suffered heavily from winterkill that year.
After long deliberation, Sally quit her job which couldn’t support us in any case, and
we went on welfare. We hoped to end the migraine headaches that had been plaguing her for
months, we also wanted to save our marriage, and hoped our temporary financial relief would
allow us to start over more creatively. Sally would develop a market for her weaving, and I
had a chance to write some magazine articles. Though we justified our decision to ourselves
daily for months, we never felt good about it, and we never told our friends what we had done.
-Donald R. Pellman
The New York Times Magazine
52
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 53
Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something
extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but
moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms. It falls upon
the banks and the grass, separating one long blade from another; turning a drift of brown,
frosted leaves from a single heap to innumerable flashing fragments; or glimmering
lengthways along wet twigs as though light itself were ductile. Its long beams pour, white and
sharp, between the trunks of trees, their clarity fading as they recede into the powdery, misty
distance of beech woods at night. In moonlight, two acres of coarse bent grass, undulant and
ankle deep, tumbled and rough as a horse’s mane, appear like a bay of waves, all shadowy
troughs and hollows. The growth is so thick and matted that even the wind does not move it,
but it is the moonlight that seems to confer stillness upon it. We do not take moonlight for
granted. It is like snow, or like the dew on a July morning. It does not reveal but changes
what it covers. And its low intensity - so much lower than that of daylight - makes us conscious
that it is something added to the down, to give it, for only a little time, a singular and
marvelous quality that we should admire while we can, for soon it will be gone again.
53
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 54
We might as well accept it as a fact that our present mode of living, with its intricate
technical aspects, requires a correspondingly intricate organization. It would be foolish to talk
of turning this clock back or slowing its pendulum to the tempo of Walden Pond.
Corporations and labor unions have conferred great benefits upon their employees and
members as well as upon the general public. But if a power becomes too concentrated in a
corporation or a union and its members are coerced into submission, or if either assumes and
selfishly exploits a monopolistic position regardless of the public interest, the public safeguards
of individual freedom are weakened. Tyranny is tyranny, no matter who practices it;
corruption is corruption. If citizens get used to these things and condone them in their private
affairs, they school themselves to accept and condone them in public affairs.
But it is not so much these more flagrant (and less frequent) transgressions as it is the
everyday organizational way of life that threatens individual freedom. For the obvious
transgressions there are obvious remedies at law. But what shall we say about the endless
sterile conferences held in substitution for individual inventiveness; the public opinion polls
whose vogue threatens even our moral and aesthetic values with the pernicious doctrine that
the customer is always right; the unctuous public relations counsels that rob us of both our
courage and our conviction? This continuous, daily deferral of opinion and judgement to
someone else becomes a habit. The undeveloped negative remains a negative. It conjures a
nightmare picture of a whole nation of yes men, of hitchhikers and eavesdroppers, tiptoing
backwards offstage with their fingers to their lips- this, the nation whose prophets once cried
“Trust thyself!”
54
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 55
The theater is a jungle in which the playwright, the actor, and the director struggle for
supremacy. Sometimes the fight goes one way and then, for a time, another. I have lived
trough the reign of each in turn and now it seems to me the playwright is once more supreme.
Pinter, Stoppard, and Gray stalk unchallenged by Olivier and Peter Brook. Once more the
audience is invited not only to look and listen but to think as they once thought with Shaw and
Galsworthy. There is a rich heritage in the British theater, but it is not, alas, the heritage of the
actor, still less of the director. The playwright must in the final battle always prove the
winner. His work, imperishable; his fame, enduring. I write “alas” because although I have
tried my hand at both directing and playwriting, I am in essence one of those of whom
Shakespeare wrote that we were destined to strut and fret an hour upon the stage and then be
heard no more.
My generation of actors were trained to entice our prey. We kept an eye open, a claw
sharpened, even when we professed to slumber. However deep the tragedy or shallow the
farce, we never forgot to face front. Nowadays, the relation between player and public tends to
be more sophisticated. Together they share a mutual experience of pain and sorrow.
Sometimes the actor seems able to dispense with his audience- to no longer need them. He may
choose or chance to perfect his performance on a wet afternoon in Shrewsbury, with hardly
anyone watching, and thereafter the repetition for him may stale. For me this never happens.
I never perfect a performance, though obviously I am sometimes better or worse, but I have
learned that without a perfect audience, my struggle to the summit is impossible. I am aware
as the curtain rises of the texture of the house.
Adapted from “The Play’s Still the Thing”
by Robert Morley, Saturday Review, June 11, 1977.
55
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 56
The football is oval in shape, usually thrown in a spiral, and when kicked end over end
may prove difficult to catch. If not caught on the fly, it bounces around erratically.
The apparent intent of the game is to deposit the ball across the opponent’s goal line.
Any child with a ball of his own might do it, six days a week and most of Sunday morning, but
the rules of the game specify it must be done with members of both teams present and on the
field. Owing to large - scale substitutions this is often difficult.
In the old days people went crazy trying to follow the ball. The players still do, but the
viewing public, who are watching the game on TV, can relax and wait for the replay. If
anything happens, that’s where you’ll see it. The disentanglement of bodies on the goal line is
one of the finer visual moments available to sports fans. The tight knot bursts open, the arms
and legs miraculously return to the point of rest, before the ball is snapped. Some find it
unsettling. Is this what it means to be born again?
All ball games feature hitting and socking, chopping and slicing, smashing, slamming,
stroking, and whacking, but only in football are these blows diverted from the ball to the
opponent. And the more the players are helped or carried from the field, the more attendance
soars. This truly male game is also enjoyed by women who find group therapy less rewarding.
The sacking of the passer by the front four is especially gratifying. Charges that a criminal
element threatens the game are a characteristic, but hopeful, exaggeration. What to do with
big, mean, boyish-hearted men, long accustomed to horsing around in good clean dormitories,
unaccustomed to the rigors of life in the Alaska oilfields, was, until football, a serious national
dilemma.\
- Adapted from “Odd Balls” by
Wright Morris, Atlantic, June 1978.
56
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 57
Since the late 1930’s the Bureau of Indian Affairs has been working to promote native
language literacy among Native Americans. Native Americans were to be taught to read and
write in their native language before being taught English. Studies in many cultures around
the world demonstrate that children learn to read best in their mother tongue. Bilingual
reading books and other educational materials were prepared in Navaho, Hopi, Siouan, Pueblo
and Papago. The difficulties tremendous because many Native Americans languages are
distinctively different in structure from all other languages in the world. They are
polysynthetic, not analytic. That is, they do not have “words” in the sense that other languages
do - as independent meaningful sound sequences that combine into “sentences.” Their
“sentences” are made by combining prefixes, infixes, and suffixes into what looks like one long
word but is essentially the equivalent of our sentence. It is impossible, in other words, to make
a Native American utterance that is not a sentence. In our sense, Native American languages
do not have parts of speech, conjugations, or declensions. The sentence is the smallest
structure available to speakers of the language. Therefore, bridging the translation gap
between English and such languages is a massive feat.
In most cases, Native American children need to be bilingual though not necessarily
biliterate. That is, they need to speak their native language to participate fully in their home
and tribal affairs, but, unless a literature exists in their native language, they do not need to
read and write that language. On the other hand, they also need a reading, writing, and
speaking knowledge of English, not only to get their due in this country, but ironically, also to
preserve their heritage.
- Jean Malmstrom
57
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 58
She walked along the river until a policeman stopped her, It was one o’clock, he said.
Not the best time to be walking alone by the side of a half-frozen river. He smiled at her, then
offered to walk her home. It was the first day of the new year. 1946, eight and a half months
after the British tanks had rumbled into Bergen-Belsen.
That February, my mother turned twenty-six. It was difficult for strangers to believe
that she had ever been a concentration camp inmate. Her face was smooth and round. She
wore lipstick and applied mascara to her large dark eyes. She dressed fashionably. But when
she looked into the mirror in the mornings before leaving for work, my mother saw a shell, a
mannequin who moved and spoke but who bore only a superficial resemblance to her real self.
The people closest to her had vanished. She had no proof that they were truly dead. No
eyewitnesses had survived to vouch for her husband’s death. There was no one living who had
seen her parents die. The lack of confirmation haunted her. At night before she went to sleep
and during the day she stood pinning dresses she wondered if, by some change, her parents
had gotten past the Germans or had crawled out of the mass grave into which they had been
shot and were living, old and helpless, somewhere in Poland. What if only one of them had
died? What if they had survived and had died of cold or hunger after she had been liberated,
while she was in Celle dancing with British officers?
She did not talk to anyone about these things. No one, she thought, wanted to hear
them. She woke up in the mornings, went to work, bought groceries, went to the Jewish
Community Center and to the housing office like a robot.
-Adapted from Children of the Holocaust
by Helen Epstein
58
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 59
“But the view is so lovely,” my mother said to me. We were standing on the family
burial plot, in Pennsylvania. Around us, and sloping down the hill, were the markers of
planted farmers. My grandfather’s stone, with the family name carved in the form of bent
branches, did not seem very much like him. Elsewhere on the plot were his parents, and greataunts and uncles I had met only at spicy-smelling funerals in my remotest childhood. My
mother paced off two yards, saying, “here’s Daddy and me. See how much room is left?”
“But she” - I didn’t have to name my wife - “has never lived here.” I was again a child
at one of those dreaded family gatherings on dark holiday afternoons - awkward and stuffed
and suffocating under the constant need for tact. Only in Pennsylvania, among my kin, am I
pressured into such difficult dance - steps of evasion. Every buried coffin was a potential hurt
feeling. I tried a perky sideways jig, hopefully humorous and added, “And the children would
feel crowded and keep everybody awake.”
She turned her face and gazed downward at the view - a lush valley, a whitewashed
farmhouse, a straggling orchard, and curved sections of the highway leading to the city whose
glistening tip, a television relay, could just be glimpsed five ridges in the distance. She had
expected, my evasion but had needed to bring me to it, to breast my refusal and the
consequence that, upon receiving her and my father, the plot would be closed, would cease to
be a working piece of land. Placatory, I agreed. “The view is lovely.”
Adapted from Updike’s “Picked-up Pieces”
59
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 60
Many archaeologists assume that Ice Age animal images represent only a form of
hunting magic. The hunter, so the theory runs, made an animal image and “killed” it, then
went out and hunted with the power of magic on his side. Still other archaeologists theorize
that the animals were totems figures of ancestor animals from which different human groups
or clans supposedly descended. The animals have also been interpreted as sexual symbols,
with certain species representing the male principle and others the female. I was now to ask
new questions.
When I put the Vogelherd horse under the microscope, I discovered that its ear, nose,
mouth and eye had been carefully and accurately carved, but that these features had been
worn down by long handling. The figure had obviously been kept by its owner and used for a
considerable period. Clearly it had not been created for the purpose of being “killed” at once.
But in the shoulder of the horse was engraved one unworn angle that I took to represent
a dart or wound. Apparently some time late in the use of this figure, it had been killed. But
Why? Was the killing intended as hunting magic? Perhaps. But if Cro-Magnon was as
sophisticated as I was beginning to find he was, could the killing not have been for some other
symbolic purpose, such as initiation, the casting of a spell, the curing of illness, a sacrifice for
the coming of winter, or the celebration for the coming spring?
Whatever the meaning, here was an indication that Ice Age images, like notations and
certain tools, ere made to be kept and used over a long period for specific purposes.
-Adapted from National Geographic,
January 1975
60
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 61
But what young buyers seem to demand most from the stores and products they favor
are honesty, reliability, and individuality. In fact, many consultants and businessmen who
specialize in youth markets emphasize today that spurious appeals to youth will no longer
work.
They observe that young people can’t be lured by the promise of status, which has
worked so well on their elders; instead, they often defiantly look for functional and even
humble products. But experts also note that these young people will spend plenty for things
that can be individualized and used, not merely exhibited.
“For the emerging adults, it really has to do with being different from the Joneses, “
says Hugh Edwards, a 32-yearold market researcher in Chicago. “They are going to ask ‘Does
express me? Does this expand me?’ We’re going to see more demand for customization. They
are saying bunk to all this stuff advertisers are telling us. They say ‘We like things, but only
for what they can do for us.’ It makes a difference most advertisers have yet to catch up with.”
61
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 62
The baloney weighed the raven down, and the shopkeeper almost caught him as he
whisked out the delicatessen door. Frantically he beat his wings to gain altitude, looking like a
small black electric fan. An up-draft caught him and threw him into the sky. He circled twice,
to get his bearings, and began to fly north.
Below, the shopkeeper stood with his hands on his hips, looking up at the diminishing
cinder in the sky. Presently he shrugged and went back into his delicatessen. He was not
without philosophy, this shopkeeper, and he knew that if a raven comes into your delicatessen
and steals a whole baloney it is either an act of God or it isn’t, and in either case there isn’t
very much you can do about it.
The raven flew lazily over New York, letting the early sun warm his feathers. A water
truck waddled along Jerome Avenue, leaving the street dark and glittering behind it. A few
taxicabs cruised around Fordham like well-fed sharks. Two couples came out of the subway
and walked slowly, the girls leaning against the men. The raven flew on.
It had been a hot night, and the raven saw people waking on the roofs of the city. The
gray rats that come out just before dawn were all back in their cellars because the cats were
out, stepping along the curbs. The morning pigeons had scattered to the rooftops and window
ledges when the cats came, which the raven thought was a pity. He could have done with a few
less pigeons.
- Peter S. Beagle
62
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 63
Having been seen at the window, having been waved to, made Anna step back
instinctively. She knew how foolish a person looking out of a window appears from the outside
of a house - as though waiting for something that does not happen, as though wanting
something from the outside world. A face at the window for no reason is a face that should
have a thumb in its mouth: there is something only-childish about it. Or, if the face is not
foolish it is threatening blotted white by the darkness inside the room it suggests a malignant
indoor power. Would Portia and Thomas think she had been spying on them?
Also, she had been seen holding a letter - not a letter that she had got today. It was to
escape from thoughts out of the letter she had gone to the window to look out. Now she went
back to her escritoire which, in a shadowed corner of this large light room, was not suitable to
write more than notes at. In the pigeonholes she kept her engagement pad, her account books;
the drawers under the flap were useful because they locked. At present, a drawer stood open,
showing packets of letter; and more letters, creased from folding, exhaling an old smell, lay
about among slipped-off rubberbands. Hearing Thomas’s latchkey, the hall door opening,
Portia’s confident voice, Anna swept the letters into the drawer quickly, then knelt down to
lock everything up. But this sad little triumph of being ready in time came to nothing, for the
two Quaynes went straight into the study; they did not come upstairs.
63
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 64
This summer there are probably more American families in Europe than ever before.
Bemused Europeans, even in remotest villages, begin to find them a familiar sight, debouching
en masse from their Detroit station wagons or Volkswagen micro-buses in a litter of maps,
guidebooks, and newspapers, tumbling out in unpredictable numbers like clowns from a circus
car. First the father, grim and harried, bearing on inadequate shoulders the heavy burden of
strategic and logistical planning, always persuaded that there will be no room at the inn; then
the mother, absent and unconcerned, her mind on higher things like the beautiful town square
or the fine Palladian church; then a scramble of children, speculating about baseball standings
or demanding Coca-Cola. Europe, with all its wide experience, has never seen anything quite
like this - anything quite so innocent or quite so devastating. But the great old continent,
having taken so much in its stride, seems prepared to accept and absorb even this.
64
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 65
NORTH CAROLINA
See also
Architecture, Domestic - North Carolina
Great Smoky Mountains National Park (N.C. and
Tenn.)
Neuse River (N.C.)
Politics and government
Black hope in North Carolina [H. Grantt vying for Senate
seat] B. Yeoman. il The Nation 250:662-4 My 14 ‘90
Crusty centenarian Henry Stenhouse runs for Congress,
turning the race into a 100-year dash. il por People
Weekly 33:62 my 7 ‘90
Jesse Helms on offense [bid for a fourth term] D. Baer.
por U.S. News & World Report 108:37-8 my 14 ‘90
Senator Alms [J.Helm’s direct mail campaign] c. Babington
The new Republic 202:15-17 my 28 ‘90
65
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 66
Tibet - History
951.5
Barber, Noel
From the land of the lost continent; the
Dalai Lama’s fight for Tibet. Boston,
Houghton Mifflin c 1969
235 p. maps. 22cm
Bibliography. p. 227-228
66
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 67
370.15 Roger, Carl Ransom 1902 R
Freedom to learn; a view of what
education might become by Carl R. Rogers. Columbus Ohio C E Merrill Pub Co. 1969,
358 p. 23 cm ( studies of the person, Paperback) Includes Bibliographies
1. Learning, Psychology of
67
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 68
q 745.1 U.S. Social Life and Customs - Colonial Period
A
American Heritage
The American Heritage history of colonial antiques; by the editors; Marshall B
Davidson, author and editor in charge. (New York) American Heritage/ Simon and Schuster (c
1967)
384 p., ill (part col.) 29 em
1. Furniture, American 2. US - Social life and Customs - Colonial Period 3. Antiques US I., Davidson, Marshal B
II Title
68
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 69
The teeming herd of antelopes and zebras are now nearly gone. The browsing families
of elephants no longer wander across the plains. The rhinos that once pawed the dust of
almost every valley are hard to find. The lions and cheetahs are absent from vast savannas
that have been turned into cattle ranches and wheat farms.
Those who knew Kenya a generation ago can still remember vast grasslands where one
could ride a horse for hours through endless herds of antelopes and zebras. Professional
hunters can recall a time when no one talked about the end of the game. Ivory merchants, who
operated quite as boldly under British colonial governors are they do now in independent
Kenya, believed there would always be tens of thousands of elephants. Westerners thought
that there would always be a “someday” when one could come to Kenya for an incomparably
exciting experience - whether sighting down rifle or camera lens.
Yet, a land that once seemed inexhaustible in its abundance is now reaching exhaustion.
A land that once seemed unconquerable in its pristine wildness, is now virtually conquered.
-Boyce Rensberger
69
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 70
The propensity of Americans to join is not new. It goes back to the ladies reading clubs
and other cultural groups which spread on the moving frontier, and which were the
forerunners of parent-teacher associations and the civic and forum groups of today. The
jungle of voluntary associations was already dense enough for De Tocqueville to note that “in
no country in the world has the principle of association been more unsparingly applied to a
multitude of different objects than in America.” The permissiveness of the State, the openness
of the society, the newness of the surroundings, the need for interweaving people from diverse
ethnic groups - or conversely, their huddling together inside the ethnic tent until they could be
assimilated - all these shaping forces were present from the start. What came later was the
breaking up of the rural and small-town life of America and the massing in impersonal cities,
bringing a dislocation that strengthened the impulse to join like-minded people.
70
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 71
Next to his towering masterpiece, Moby Dick, Billy Budd is Melville’s greatest work. It
has the tone of a last testament, and the manuscript was neatly tied up by his wife, Elizabeth,
and kept in a trunk for some thirty years. It was not until 1924 that it was first published.
Slowly it has become recognized as the remarkable work it is. Billy Budd has been dramatized
for Broadway, done on T.V., made into an opera, and reached a highly satisfying form in
Ustinov’s movie.
Scholars disagree, somewhat violently, about what Melville was trying to say. He did
make it pretty clear that he was recounting a duel between Good and Evil.
Several times he remarked that Billy Budd is as innocent and ignorant as Adam before
the fall. His enemy is like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost.
When Billy Budd destroys the letter, and is sentenced to be hanged according to the
letter of the law, controversy exists as to whether the Captain is simply a mortal man
preserving order, or a Jehovah-like figure, dispensing cruel justice.
Melville, it is claimed, cleverly took pains to hide his heretical feelings. Billy Budd is
written as if told by a pious, God-loving man.
Ironically, Melville’s iconoclasm has largely misfired, for the story today is accepted as
either one of simple suspense or a reverent parable of God, Satan, and Adam. Meanwhile the
scholars are still arguing, and Billy Budd remains like a porcupine, thorny, with interesting
ambiguities.
71
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 72
We have never regarded the decibel as a particularly trustworthy index of sound.
Sound is not easily measured. Some of the loudest sounds wouldn’t give a decibel machine the
faintest tremor; a hushed voice in a house where someone has died; or a child’s finger on the
latch of a door where a man is trying to work, timorously testing the lock to see if the man
won’t come out and play. The quality of sound is much more telling than the volume, and this
is true in the city, where noise is inevitable. A country sawmill is rich in decibels, yet the ear
adjusts easily to it, and it soon becomes as undisturbing as a cicada on a suburban afternoon.
New York’s noise, even in its low decibel range, has an irritating quality, full of sharp
distemper. It is impatient, masochistic - unlike the noise of Paris, where the shrill popping of
high-pitched horns spreads a gaiety and a slightly drunken good nature. Heat has an effect on
sound, intensifying it. On a scorching morning, at breakfast in a cafe, one’s china coffee cup
explodes against its saucer with a fierce report. The great climaxes of sound in New York are
achieved in side streets, as in West 44th Street, beneath our window, where occasionally an
intestinal stoppage takes place, the entire block laden with undischarged vehicles, the pangs of
congestion increasing till every horn is going -a united, delirious scream of hate, every decibel
charged with a tiny drop of poison.
-E. B. White
72
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 73
Let’s be honest right at the start. Physics is neither particularly easy to comprehend
nor easy to love, but then again, what - or for that matter, who - is? For most of us it is a new
vision, a different way of understanding with its own scales, rhythms, and forms. And yet, as
with Macbeth, Mona Lisa, or Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, the ride rewards. Surely you
have already somehow prejudged this journey. It’s all too easy to compartmentalize our
human experience: science in one box, music, art, and literature in another box.
The western mind delights in little boxes - life is easier to analyze when it’s
disemboweled - small pieces in small compartments (we call it specialization). It is our
traditional way of seeing the trees and missing the forest. The label on the box for physics too
often reads “Caution: Not for Common Consumption” or “Dispassionate.” If you can, please
tear off that label and discard the box or we will certainly, sooner or later, bore each other to
death. There is nothing more tedious than the endless debate between humanist and scientist
on whose vision is truer; each of us is less for what we lack of the other.
It is pointless and even worse to separate physics from the body of all creative work, to
pluck it out from history, to shear it from philosophy, and then to present it pristine pure, allknowing, and infallible. We know nothing of what will be with absolute certainty. There is no
scientific tome of unassailable, immutable truth. Yet what little we do know with any surety is
heady stuff it reveals an inspiring grandeur and intricate beauty.
73
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 74
There was a stumbling rush for the cover of fortification proper; and there the last
possible line of defense was established instinctively and in a moment. Officers and men
dropped on their knees behind the low bank of earth, and continued an irregular deliberate
fire, each discharging his piece as fast as he could load and aim. The garrison was not
sufficient to form a continuous rank along even this single front, and on such portions of the
works as were protected by the ditch, the soldiers were scattered almost as sparsely as
sentinels. Nothing saved the place from being carried by an assault except the fact that the
assailants were unprovided with scaling ladders. The adventurous fellows who had flanked
the palisade rushed to the gate, and gave entrance to a torrent of tall, lank men in butternut or
dirty gray clothing, their bronzed faces flushed with the excitement of supposed victory, and
their yells of exultation drowning for a minute the sharp outcries of the wounded, and the
rattle of the musketry. But the human billow was met by such a fatal discharge that it could
not come over the rampart. The foremost dead fell across it, and the mass reeled backward.
Unfortunately for the attack, the exterior slope was full of small knolls and gullies, besides
being cumbered with rude shanties, of four or five feet in height made of bits of board, and
shelter tents, which had served as the quarters of the garrison. Behind these covers, scores if
not hundreds sought refuge and could not be induced to leave them for a second charge.
74
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 75
The greatest attraction in this vicinity is the famous old fortress of Ticonderoga, the
remains of which are visible from the piazza of the tavern, on a swell of land that shuts in the
prospect of the lake.
In my first view of the ruins, I was favored with the scientific guidance of a young
lieutenant of the engineers, recently from West Point, where he had gained credit for great
military genius. I saw nothing but confusion in what chiefly interested him; straight lines and
zigzags, defense within defense, wall opposed to wall, and ditch intersecting ditch; oblong
squares of masonry below the surface of the earth, and huge mounds of turf-covered hills of
stone, above it.
I should have been glad of a hoary veteran to totter by my side, tell me, perhaps of the
french garrisons and their Indian allies - of Abercrombie, Lord Howe, and Amherst - of Ethan
Allen’s triumph and St. Claire’s surrender. The old soldier and the old fortress would be
emblems of each other. His reminiscences, though vivid as the image of Ticonderoga in the
lake, would harmonize with the gray influence of the scene. A survivor of the long disbanded
garrisons, though but a private soldier, might have mustered his dead chiefs and comrades some from Westminster Abbey, and English churchyards, and battlefields in Europe - others
from their graves here in America - others, not a few, who lie sleeping round the fortress; he
might have mustered them all and bid them march through the ruined gateway, turning their
old historic faces on me as they passed. Next to such a companion, the best is one’s own fancy.
Adapted from Hawthorne’s Visit to Old Ticonderoga
75
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 76
I, too
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamedI, too, am America.
-Langston Hughes
76
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 77
What exactly is a tornado? The general picture is familiar enough. The phenomenon is
usually brewed on a hot, sticky day with south winds and an ominous sky. From the base of a
thundercloud a funnel-shaped cloud extends a violently twisting spout toward the earth. As it
sucks in matter in its path, the twister may turn black, brown, or occasionally even white (over
snow). The moving cloud shows an almost continuous display of sheet lightning. It lurches
along in a meandering path, usually northeastward, at 25 to 40 miles per hour. Sometimes it
picks up its finger from the earth for a short distance and then plants it down again. The
funnel is very slender: its wake of violence generally averages no more than 400 yards wide.
As the tornado approaches, it is heralded by a roar as of hundreds of jet planes or thousands
of railroad cars. Its path is a path of total destruction. Buildings literally explode as they are
sucked by the tornado’s low-pressure vortex (where the pressure drop is as much as 10
percent) and by its powerful whirling winds (estimated at up to 500 miles per hour). The
amount of damage depends mainly on whether the storm happens to hit populated areas. The
worst tornado on record in the U.S. was one that ripped across Missouri, lower Illinois and
Indiana in three hours on March 18, 1925, and killed 689 people.
The tornado’s lifetime is as brief as it is violent. Within a few tens of miles (average:
about 16 miles) it spends its force and suddenly disappears.
-Morris Tepper
77
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 78
So many of the metaphors that once brought us together in shared wonder have lost
their hold on us. The movies no longer grip the majority of us. Even team sports, which
seemed unassailable, are growing more controversial as they grow more prosperous and we
gain more sophistication about the way they exploit participants. And, in any event,
familiarity, due in part to media overexposure, breeds restlessness, if not contempt, with the
old metaphors. Looking for something fresh, untainted, we push hopefully into areas that were
previously the provinces of buffs and aficionados. We are looking for novelty, of course, but
praying as well for a certain purity, the kind that can only develop away from the distorting
pressures of the celebrity system. The circus, once a form of mass entertainment, now a quiet
backwater to which we take our children out of a sense of obligation to our own past and in
hopes of getting them to share our possibly false nostalgia, is such a place-innocent, unwordly,
a living anachronism.
78
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 79
She came forward, all in black, with a pale head
floating towards me in the dusk. She was in mourning. It
was more than a year since his death, more than a year since
the news came, she seemed as though she would remember and
mourn forever. She took both my hands in hers and murmured.
“I had heard you were coming.” I noticed she was not very
young-I mean not girlish. She had a mature capacity for
fidelity, for belief, for suffering. The room seemed to have
grown darker, as if all the sad light of the cloudy evening
had taken refuge on her forehead. This fair hair, this pale
visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded by an ashy halo
from which the dark eyes looked out at me. Their glance was
guileless, profound, confident, and trustful. She carried
her sorrowful head as though she were proud of that sorrow,
as though she would say, I-I alone know how to mourn him as
he deserves. But while we were still shaking hands, such a
look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived
she was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of
Time. For her he had died only yesterday.
-Adapted from Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
79
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 80
The traveler used to go about the world to encounter the natives. A function of travel
agencies now is to prevent this encounter. They are always devising new ways of insulating the
tourist from the travel world. In the old traveler’s accounts, the colorful native innkeeper, full
of sage advice and local lore, was a familiar figure. Now he is obsolete. Today on Main Street
in your home town you can arrange transportation, food, lodging, and entertainment for
Rome, Sydney, Singapore, or Tokyo.
No more chaffering. A well-planned tour saves the tourist from negotiating with the
natives when he gets there. One reason why returning tourists nowadays talk so much about
and are so irritated by tipping practices is that these are almost their only direct contact with
the people. Even this may soon be eliminated. The Travel Plan Commission of the
International Union of Official Travel Organization in 1958 was studying ways of
standardizing tipping practices so that eventually all gratuities could be included in the tour
package. Shopping, like tipping, is one of the few activities remaining for the tourist. It is a
chink in the wall of prearrangement which separates him from the country he visits. No
wonder he finds it exciting. When he hops he actually encounters natives, negotiates in their
strange language, and discovers their local business etiquette. In a word, he tastes the thrill
and “travail” which the old-time traveler once experienced all along the way - with every
purchase of transportation, with every night’s lodging, with every meal.
80
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 81
I am almost exclusively guided by the precept, more particularly a conservationist’s
than a sportsman’s, of killing creatures only in such kinds and quantities as I intend to eat.
Crows are the one exception to this, and I will have to be indulged in some free-style
speculation to explain why. I admire crows, but it is a different kind of admiration from that
in which I hold hawks and owls. In the latter, the raptors, it is their speed and seeming
recklessness, their enormous and aloof skill as hunters, that excite me. The crow, a slow flier,
uses different tools intelligence, cooperativeness with other crows. On the one hand, there is
instinct and madness (according to a falconer I know, hawks are not wise, and the one owl he
tried to train was painfully stupid) that will subdue creatures several times the raptor’s size;
on the other hand, there is a kind of humanoid common sense that leads crows to choose such
easy, if not totally defenseless, prey as eggs, carrion, and infant birds. I conclude from this that
my urge to shoot crows is fundamentally a piece of sentimentality, and a pretty silly one. I
deem to think of owls and hawks, and even cats and foxes, as real hunters, and of crows, along
with jays and magpies, as being like men who hunt from cars, jacklighting deer at night or
shooting out the window into grounded coveys of quail by day.
81
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 82
Certainly the train was old. The seats sagged like the jowls of a bulldog, windows were
out and strips of adhesive held together those that were left; in the corridor a prowling cat
appeared to be hunting mice, and it was not unreasonable to assume his search would be
rewarded.
Slowly, as though the engine were harnessed to elderly coolies, we crept out of Granada.
The southern sky was as white and burning as a desert; there was one cloud, and it drifted like
a traveling oasis.
We were going to Algeciras, a Spanish seaport facing the coast of Africa. In our
compartment there was a middle-aged Australian wearing a soiled linen suit; he had tobaccocolored teeth and his fingernails were unsanitary. Presently, he informed us that he was a
ship’s doctor. It seemed curious, there on the dry, dour plains of Spain, to meet someone
connected with the sea. Seated next to him there were two women, a mother and daughter.
The mother was an overstuffed, dusty woman with sluggish, disapproving eyes and a faint
mustache. The focus for her disapproval fluctuated; first, she eyes me rather strongly because,
as the sunlight fanned brighter, waves of heat blew through the broken windows and I had
removed my jacket-which she considered, perhaps rightly, discourteous. Later on, she took a
dislike to the young soldier who also occupied our compartment. The soldier and the woman’s
not very discreet daughter, a buxom girl with the scrappy features of a prizefighter, seemed to
have agreed to flirt. Whenever the wandering cat appeared at our door, the daughter
pretended to be frightened, and the soldier would gallantly shoo the cat into the corridor: this
by-play gave them frequent opportunity to touch each other.
The young soldier was one of many on the train. With their tasseled caps set at snappy
angles, they hung about in the corridors smoking sweet black cigarettes and laughing
confidentially. They seemed to be enjoying themselves, which apparently was wrong of them,
for whenever an officer appeared the soldiers would stare fixedly out the windows, as though
enraptured by the landslides of red rock, the olive fields and stern stone mountains. Their
officers were dressed for a parade, many ribbons, much brass; and some wore gleaming,
improbable swords strapped to their sides. They did not mix with the soldiers, but sat together
in a first-class compartment, looking bored and rather like unemployed actors.
82
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 83
In that vast American circus tent known as communication, the elephants and
performing wild animals in the center ring have drawn public attention away from a corner of
the big top where one of the most astonishing juggling acts in the history of media has been
drawing a steadily increasing audience. To lift this metaphor out of the sawdust, the juggler is
the ubiquitous newsletter, which today covers a wider range of interests than any other
medium and collectively represents the broadest cross section of American life.
The newsletter is no stranger to the print media; newspapers began in that form, at first
in manuscript. As early as the fifteenth century, one of the most common uses today, the
financial or economic newsletter, was anticipated by the German commercial empire of the
Fugger family, which kept its far flung operatives in Europe and Asia informed by that means.
If newsletters are now obscured by other media, it is because they are not an advertising
medium and their circulations are relatively small. Their function is to inform a special
audience in a special way.
I lost track of time as field succeeded endless field, then looked at my watch with a start.
83
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 84
We had traveled for an hour and a half through the countryside, and I had yet to see a car or a
truck or a tractor or any kind of farm machinery more complex than a shovel. I had not even
seen a road, only narrow paths wandering through the fields, curving around the paddies,
linking village to village. The countryside lay quiet, verdant planted to the last inch; the
villages seeming to grow out of the very fields, the people moving slowly across the horizon at
their traditional tasks backs bent as they set out the rice, backs bent as they set out the new
young trees, backs bent as they pulled their barrows along the narrow paths.
As I watched a man trundle his barrow through the field, I realized that I had done
more than simply walk across the plank boards of the little bridge over Shumchun River,
passing from one country into another. I had crossed an invisible line that took me from one
century into another. On the Lo Wu side I was in the 20th century, the 20th century of
industrialism, of tin cans, of paper wrappings, of gasoline engines, of urgent motors, of blazing
billboards, of crashing sounds - the world of waste and garbage and litter, the land of
machines and hurry and hustle.
Now from the window of the 19th-century railroad car, I looked out at the 17th century.
There was nothing in this cavalcade of villages, this checkerboard of rice paddies, this world of
men and women and animals and simple tools, hand made, hand wielded that would startle the
eye of a traveler to china in 1672 or even 1572. The people wore the same conical hats, the
same simple blue trousers and formless jackets that march across those willow pattern dishes
of grandmother’s day that introduced most of us to the land of China.
-Harrison E. Salisbury
84
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 85
A Loud Sneer for Our Feathered Friends
From childhood, my sister and I have had a well-grounded dislike for our friends the
birds. We came to hate them when she was ten and I was eleven. We had been exiled by what
we considered an unfeeling family to one of those loathsome girls’ camps where Indian lore is
rife and the management puts up neatly lettered signs reminding the clients to be Good Sports.
From the moment Eileen and I arrived at dismal old Camp Hi-Wah, we were Bad Sports, and
we liked it.
We refused to get out of bed when the bugle blew in the morning, we fought against
scrubbing our teeth in public to music, we sneered when the flag was ceremoniously lowered at
sunset, we avoided doing a good deed a day, we complained loudly about the food, which was
terrible, and we bought some chalk once and wrote all over the Recreation Cabin, “We hate
Camp Hi-Wah.” It made a wonderful scandal, although unfortunately we were immediately
accused of the crime. All the other little campers loved dear old Camp Hi-Wah, which shows
you what kind of people they were.
The first two weeks Eileen and I were at Camp Hi-Wah, we sat in our cabin grinding
our teeth at our counselors and writing letters to distant relatives. These letters were, if I say
so myself, real masterpieces of double dealing and heartless chicanery. In our childish and, we
hoped, appealing scrawl, we explained to Great-Aunt Mary Farrel and Second Cousin Joe
Murphy that we were having such fun at dear Camp Hi-Wah making Indian pocketbooks.
-Ruth McKenney
85
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 86
A single knoll rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north
and west of the Wichita Range. For my people, the Kiowas, it
is an old landmark, and they gave it the name Rainy Mountain.
The hardest weather in the world is there. Winter brings
blizzards, hot tornadic winds arise in the spring, and in the
summer the prairie is an anvil’s edge. The grass turns
brittle and brown, and it cracks beneath your feet. There
are green belts along the river and creeks, linear groves of
hickory and pecan, willow and witch hazel. At a distance in
July or August the steaming foliage seems almost to writhe in
fire. Great green and yellow grasshoppers are everywhere in
the tall grass, popping up like corn to sting the flesh, and
tortoises crawl about on the red earth, going nowhere in the
plenty of time. Loneliness is an aspect of the land. All
things in the plain are isolated; there is no confusion of
objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man. To
look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun
at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion. Your
imagination comes to life, and this, is where Creation was
begun.
86
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 87
There has never been a just war, never an honorable oneon the part of the instigator of
the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as a half
dozen instances. The loud little handful-as usual-will shout for the war. The pulpit will-warily
and cautiously-object-at first the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and
try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, “ It is
unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.” Then the handful will shout louder.
A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen,
and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will
outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before
long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech
strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned
speakers-as earlier-but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nationpulpit and all-will take
up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his
mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap
lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of these
conscience-smoothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any
refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just and will
thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
-Mark Twain
87
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 88
The impact of space junk on the Earth’s surface has caused some accidents. These had
not been anticipated at the beginning of the space age. Then it was generally assumed that
spent spacecraft and associated hardware would disintegrate and be incinerated by friction
with Earth’s atmosphere. Some chance of accidental reentry was foreseen, but it was held to
be a remote possibility. It was believed that a spacecraft could land intact only through the use
of heat-resistant metals, calculated reentry paths. Successful reentry was also dependent on
such factors as the angle of first incidence with the upper atmosphere, orbital velocity, and
structural strength. Originally, these refinements were reserved for the manned experiments
such as Mercury, Vostok, and Gemini, but they have since been applied across the spectrum of
space research. The inescapable conclusion is that as time passes, and design and construction
techniques become more sophisticated, a progressively larger percentage of vehicles may
survive reentry. Even though early warning still remains; unexpected damage could be visited
on Earth from space. The eventual addition of nuclear-powered rockets further complicates
the problem. The mere chance of their reentry is enough to suggest international action to
mitigate harmful effects.
88
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 89
I find it takes the young writer a long time to become aware of what language really is
as a medium of communication He thinks he should be able to put down his meaning at once
and be done with it, and he puts it down and releases his feeling for it in language that is
meaningless to anyone else. He has to learn that he can load almost any form of words with his
meaning and be expressing himself but communicating nothing. He has to learn that language
has grown naturally out of the human need to communicate, that it belongs to all those who
use it, and its communicative capacities have developed to meet the general need, that it is most
alive when it comes off the tongue supported as it always is by the look and action of the
speaker, that the tongue use of it is universal but the written use of it is relatively rare. He
must come to see that tongue use is filled with cliches which are the common counters best
serving the general need. Words and phrases that come off his tongue made alive by the living
presence of himself become on paper dead transcriptions. Somehow he must overcome the
capacity of words to remain dead symbols of meaning as they are in the dictionary. He must
breathe life into them as he sets them on paper.
89
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 90
Every night that winter he said aloud into the dark of the pillow: Half-past four! Halfpast four! till he felt his brain had gripped the words and held them fast. Then he fell asleep
at once, as if a shutter had fallen; and lay with his face turned to the clock so that he could see
it first thing when he woke.
It was half-past four to the minute, every morning. Triumphantly pressing down the
alarm-knob of the clock which the dark half of his mind had outwitted, remaining vigilant all
night and counting the hours as he lay relaxed in sleep, he huddled down for a last warm
moment under the covers, playing with the idea of lying abed for this once only. But he played
with it for the fun of knowing that it was a weakness he could defeat without effort; just as he
set the alarm each night for the delight of the moment when he woke and stretched his limbs,
feeling the muscles tighten, and thought: Even my brain-even that! I can control every part of
myself.
Luxury of warm rested body, with the arms and legs and fingers waiting like soldiers
for a word of command! Joy of knowing that the precious hours were given to sleep
voluntarily! - for he had once stayed awake three nights running, to prove that he could, and
then worked all day, refusing even to admit that he was tired; and now sleep seemed to him a
servant to be commanded and refused.
The boy stretched his frame full-length, touching the wall at his head with his hands,
and the bedfoot with his toes; then he sprang out, like a fish leaping from water. And it was
cold, cold.
-Doris Lessing
90
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 91
In school and colleges, in these audiovisual days, doubt has been raised as to the future
of reading - whether the printed word is on its last legs. One college president has remarked
that in fifty years “only five percent of the people will be reading.” For this, of course, one
must be prepared. But how prepare? To us it would seem that even if only one person out a
hundred and fifty million should continue as a reader, he would be the one worth saving, the
nucleus around which to found a university. We might think this not impossible person, this
Last Reader, might very well stand in the same relation to the community as the queen bee to
the colony of bees, and that the others would quite properly dedicate themselves wholly to his
welfare, serving special food and building special accommodations. From his nuptial, of
intellectual flight, would come the new race of men, linked perfectly with the long past by the
unbroken chain of the intellect, to carry on the community. But it is more likely that our
modern hive of bees, substituting a coaxial cable for spinal fluid, will try to perpetuate the race
through audiovisual devices that ask no discipline of the mind and that are already giving the
room the languor of an opium parlor.
An E. B. White Reader
91
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 92
Among the long-suffering population of the world were the Native Americans, living
miserably depressed lives on reservations as wards of the government. Most of these Native
Americans had neither the dignity of their old ways nor the advantages of the now dominant
society that surrounded them. Up to this point it had been the government’s policy to treat all
the different tribes alike, as if they were ignorant and somewhat stubborn children-a mistake
which is yet to be really rectified. A body of custom had grown up in the government’s Native
Americans Service as to how to “handle” them and their problems. Like the State
Department’s Foreign Service, the Native American Service transferred its employees from
post to post so often that they could put in a lifetime of service without learning anything about
the people they were administering. The bureaucracy that grew up was more oriented toward
the problems of the employees than those of the Native Americans. Under such conditions it
was almost impossible to introduce the disturbing anthropological idea that the Native
Americans were deeply and significantly different from European-American, for that would
have threatened to upset the bureaucratic applecart. Though the treatment by the government
still leaves much to be desired, it has been vastly improved during the years in which trained
anthropologists have worked on the reservations.
-Edward T. Hall
92
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 93
The great city is not necessarily beautiful or well-planned. Venice and Florence are
delights to the eye; yet neither has been a great city since the Renaissance. Brasilia, one of the
most elaborately designed of modern cities, is also one of the deadliest. An impressive physical
setting is essential to a city’s greatness, but by itself that is not enough. Take Pittsburgh: its
natural setting, at the junction of two rivers, is magnificent. Man botched the job of doing
anything with it. Grand avenues and impressive architecture, though necessary to a great city,
do not satisfy the equation. If the Third Reich had lasted another ten years, Berlin, which
Hitler planned to rename Germania, would have become the world’s most monumental city. It
also would have been the most monumentally dull. In fact, it became second-rate on January
30, 1933, when Hitler took power. A city cannot be both great and regimented. Blessed with
culture, history and size, Moscow, Shanghai, and Peking ought to be great cities, but they are
not. They all lack the most important element: spontaneity of free human exchange. Without
that a city is as sterile as Aristophanes’ Nephelococcygia, which was to be suspended between
heaven and earth-and ruled by the birds.
A city governed by birds might be more comfortable than a city governed by men. But
it would not be human, nor would it be great; a city is great only in its human associations,
confusing as they may be. The ancient Athenians, true urbanites, delighted in the everyday
drama of human encounter. For them, the city was the supreme instrument of civilization, the
tool that gave its people common traditions and goals, even as it encouraged their diversity and
growth.
-Richard Peck, ed.
93
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 94
Most people want to know how things are made. They frankly admit, however, that
they feel completely at sea when it comes to understanding how a piece of music is made.
Where a composer begins how he manages to keep going - in fact, how and where he learns his
trade - all are shrouded in impenetrable darkness. The composer, in short, is a man of
mystery, and the composer’s workshop an unapproachable ivory tower.
One of the first thing that layman wants to hear about is the part inspiration plays in
composing. He finds it difficult to believe that composers are not much preoccupied with that
question, that composing is as natural for the composer as eating or sleeping. Composing is
something that the composer happens to have been born to do; and because of that, it loses the
character of a special virtue in the composer’s eyes.
The composer, therefore, does not say to himself: “Do I feel inspired?” He says to
himself: “Do I feel like composing today?” And if he feels like composing, he does. It is more
or less like saying to himself: “Do I feel sleepy?” If you feel sleepy, you go to sleep. If you
don’t feel sleepy, you stay up. If the composer doesn’t feel like composing, he doesn’t compose.
It’s as simple as that.
94
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 95
Although patience is the most important quality a treasure hunter can have, the trade
demands a certain amount of courage too. I have my share of guts, but make no boast about
ignoring the hazards of diving. As all good divers know, the business of plunging into an alien
world with an artificial air supply as your only link to the world above can be dangerous as
stepping into a den of lions. Most of the danger rests within the diver himself.
The devil-may-care diver who shows great bravado underwater is the worst risk of all.
He may lose his bearings in the glimmering dim light which penetrates the sea and become
separated from his diving companions. He may dive too deep, too long and suffer painful,
sometimes fatal, bends.
He may surface too quickly and force his lungs to squeeze their supply of high-pressure
air into his blood stream, causing an embolism - a bubble of air in the blood which often kills.
He may become trapped in a submarine rockslide, get lost in an underwater cave, or be
chopped to bits by a marauding shark. These are not occasional dangers such as crossing a
street in busy traffic. They are always with you underwater. At one time or another I have
faced all of them except bends and embolism, which can be avoided by common sense and
understanding of man’s physical limits beneath the surface.
Once, while salvaging brass from the sunken hulk of an old steel ship, I brushed lightly
against a huge engine cylinder which looked as if it were as solid as it was on the day the ship
was launched. Although the pressure of my touch was hardly enough to topple a toy soldier,
the heavy mass of cast iron collapsed, causing a chain reaction in which the rest of the old
engine crumbled. Tons of iron dropped all around me. Sheer luck saved me from being
crushed. I have been wary of swimming around steel shipwrecks ever since.
95
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 96
There have always been at least two ways to do everything, and presumably one pays
his money and takes his choice. When the money up to the staggering sums required to
produce a movie musical, however, one might imagine that there would be an especially
watchful eye out for value received. Why shoot a movie that costs millions so that it looks
exactly like the original stage production put on for a few hundred thousand? Even more to
the point, why cramp the picture within the arbitrary confines of the theater proscenium when
the camera can open up a world of fantasy and fun? An urge to be faithful to the original
show is only part of the story - and scarcely the most convincing part in view of other liberties
so frequently taken along the way. But to reproduce any kind of stage presentation on celluloid
is purely journeyman’s work, a matter of picking the pieces and pasting them together. True
adaptation on the other hand, calls for imagination, finesse, and creativity. Perhaps that is why
it is so rare.
96
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 97
The American Museum of Natural History has long portrayed various aspects of man.
Primitive cultures have been shown through habitat groups and displays of man’s tool,
utensils, and art. In more recent years, there has been a tendency to delineate man’s place in
nature, displaying his destructive and constructive activities on the earth he inhabits. Now for
the first time, the Museum has taken man apart, enlarged the delicate mechanisms that make
him run, and examined him as a biological phenomenon.
In the new Hall of the Biology of Man, Museum technicians have created a series of
displays that are instructive to a degree never before achieved in an exhibit hall. Using new
techniques and new materials, they have been able to produce movement as well as form and
color. It is a human belief that beauty is only skin deep. But nature has proved to be a master
designer, not only in the matter of man’s bilateral symmetry but also in the marvelous
packaging job that has arranged all man’s organs and systems within his skin-covered case.
When these are taken out of the case, greatly enlarged and given color, they reveal form and
design that give the lie to that old saw. Visitors will be surprised to discover that man’s
insides, too, are beautiful.
97
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 98
Stop All the Clocks
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week, and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one:
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
- W.H. Auden
98
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 99
Iona sees a hall porter with some sacking, and decides to talk to him.
“Friend, what sort of time is it?” he asks.
“Past nine. What are you standing here for? Move on.”
Iona moves on a few steps, doubles up, and abandons himself to his grief. In less than
five minutes he straightens himself, holds his head up as if he felt some sharp pain, and gives a
tug at the reins; he can bear it no longer. “The stables,” he thinks, and the little horse, as if it
understood, starts off at a trot.
About an hour and a half later Iona is seated by a large dirty stove. Around the stove,
on the floor, on himself, and regrets having returned so early.
One of the cabdrivers half gets up, grunts sleepily, and stretches toward a bucket of
water.
“Do you want a drink?” Iona asks him.
“Don’t I want a drink!”
“That’s so? Your good health! But listen, mate - you know, my son is dead... Did you
hear? This week, in the hospital... It’s a long story.”
Iona looks to see what effect his words have, but sees none - the young man has hidden
his face and is fast asleep again. The old man sighs, and scratches his head. Just as much as
the young one wants to drink, the old man wants to talk. Is it nothing to tell?
“I’ll go and look after my horse,” thinks Iona; “there’s always time to sleep. No fear of
that!”
He puts on his coat, and goes to the stables to his horse; he thinks of the corn, the hay,
the weather. When he is alone, he dares not think of his son; he can speak about him to
anyone, but to think of him, and picture him to himself, is unbearably painful.
“Are you tucking in?” Iona asks his horse, looking at its bright eyes; “go on, tuck in,
though we’ve not earned our corn, we can eat hay.”
“That’s how it is, my old horse. There’s no more Kuzma Ionitch. Now let’s say, you
had a foal, you were the foal’s mother, and suddenly, let’s say, that foal went and left you to
live after him. It would be sad, wouldn’t it?”
The little horse munches, listens, and breathes over its master’s hand...
Iona’s feelings are too much for him, and he tells the little horse the whole story.
99
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 100
The “musical revolution” we are witnessing is obviously part of a much larger social
and intellectual revolution of which so far one can but dimly see the outline. The strains we
feel are signs of the coming to an end of one conception of individualism. It fostered the
virtuoso, whose relation to the spectator (If not the patron) was clear, and made the artistic
career a priestly function. As the worshipful public grew larger and more anonymous, it saw
its devotions and tastes becoming more and more strictly controlled by equally anonymous and
massive groups - the unions and corporation. But this collectivization of power and talent was
paralleled by a greater diffusion of knowledge and a wider opportunity to develop talents, until
we now find in the great amateur movement - not only in music but in all the arts - a decline of
worship, a gradual dispossession of the paid performer, and a taking over of his functions.
100
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 101
Shooting is a tense business. Many an altercation, if not bloodshed, is averted by a little
dissembling in the field. A gunner snaps a quick one at a bird swerving behind a clump of
trees. He cries happily, “I hit it! It’s down, just beyond these pines.”
Meantime from where we stand we can see the bird sail on, unruffled by a single pellet, over
the hills and into the next county. But do we say so? Oh, no. We call back, “Good work!
Keep a line on the spot - we’ll get the dog in.”
All hands converge and we start searching every likely thicket. After a decent interval one
of us says to the weakening gunner, “You know, I’m quite sure a bird came out, flying strong,
after you shot - do you think it was your bird, just possibly?” And pretty soon he decides it
might have been, though he was right on it, and we may as well go along.
101
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 102
Rumor is the most primitive way of spreading stories by passing them on from mouth to
mouth. But civilized countries in normal times have better sources of news than rumor. They
have radio, television, and newspapers. In times of stress and confusion, however, rumor
emerges and becomes rife. At such times the different kinds of news are in competition: The
press, television, and radio versus the grapevine.
Especially do rumors spread when war requires censorship on many important
matters. The customary news sources no longer give out enough information. Since the people
cannot learn through legitimate channels all that they are anxious to learn, they pick up
“news” wherever they can and when this happens, rumor thrives.
Rumors are often repeated even by those who do not believe the tales. There is a
fascination about them. The reason is that the cleverly designed rumor gives expression to
something deep in the hearts of the victims - the fears, suspicions, forbidden hopes, or
daydreams which they hesitate to voice directly. Pessimistic rumors about defeat and
disasters show that the people who repeat them are worried and anxious. Optimistic rumors
about record production or peace soon coming point to complacency or confidence - and often
to overconfidence.
102
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 103
We are now living in the golden age of mountaineering. This most selfless of all sports,
demanding the utmost in physical exertion and endurance, achieved its ultimate reward when
Mount Everest, the highest peak of the “Roof of the World,” was conquered in 1953. And
much of the credit for this achievement must go to superior equipment. The basic
paraphernalia of the mountaineer remains the same: rope, alpenstock, crampons, etc., but
recent improvements have added immeasurably to man’s capacity. The nylon rope, much
stronger and lighter than manila, was introduced by our mountain troops in World War II;
mountain clothing is now light without sacrificing warmth; oxygen breathing apparatus is light
in weight and easily usable; and, most important of all, each generation of climbers passes on
to its successors the knowledge and lore so painfully acquired.
Mountaineering has become an increasingly popular form of recreation among people
who would never thing of going to the Himalayas. Alpinists are not the only ones who enjoy
the exaltation of high places. At the other extreme are the sightseers who ride the aerial
tramway or dive up the toll road for a look at the view. In between these opposites are the
holiday hikers and weekend mountaineers who fully enjoy the matchless sport that mountains
afford, as well as the beautiful scenery.
103
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 104
QUEBEC (PROVINCE)
See also
Finance-Quebec (Province)
Industries
See also
Hydro-Quebec
Languages Canada’s language crisis [address, November 28,1989] N.J. Patterson. Vital
speeches of the Day 56:473-6 My 15 ‘90
Nationalism After Meech, the economic deluge[probable consequences of constitutional
accord failure] P.C. Newman il Maclean’s 103:48 My 21 ’90 Au revoir, Quebec? [Meech Lake
Accord] J.E. Magnet. World Press Review 37:79 my ’90 A deadline for a divorce. M. Starr. il
map Newsweek 115:35 Je 4 ’90 Is Canada coming apart? B.W. Nelan. il Time 135:63 Je 4 ’90
Quebec must pay the price of independence. D. Francis. il Maclean’s 103:15 My 21 ’90
Suddenly, Quebec is looking like Mulroney’s Lithuania. T. Mason. Il Business Week p76 Je 4
‘90
Politics and government Stalled in Quebec [S. Copps seeks Liberal delegates; with
interview] B. Wallace, il pors Maclean’s 103.22-2 My 21 ‘90
104
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 105
NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION Can NATO survive Gorbachev? R. Alan.
The New Leader
73:5-6 Ap 16 ’90 Caveat victor. The New Republic 202:7-8 Je 4 ’90 Defending Europe
without nukes. S. Budiansky. il U.S.
News and World Report 108:44-5 My 14’90 The end of alliances? C. W. Kegley and G.
A. Raymond.
il USA Today (periodical) 118:32-4 My ’90 The fear of Weimar Russia [Soviet Union
does not
want East Germany to join NATO] S. Talbott. il Times 135:36 Je 4 ’90 Losing out in
Europe? [effect of German reunification
on NATO] R. Watson. il Newsweek 115:26-7 My 14 ’90 NATO at the crossroads
[Nuclear Planning Group meeting
in Alberta] J. Bierman. il Maclean’s 103:24-5+ My 21 ’90 NATO is moving its
maneuvers to the conference table.
B. Javetski. il Business week p65 My 21 ’90 NATO is review of nuclear forces centers on
tactical air-tosurface missiles. Aviation Week & Space Technology 132:29-30 My 14 ’90 This new
hours [effect of German reunification] J. Smolowe.
il Time 135:26-8 My 14 ‘90
105
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 106
INVESTMENT BANKING
See also
CS First Boston Inc Drexel Burnham Lambert Incorporated First Boston Corp. Merrill
Lynch & Co., Inc. Morgan Stanley and Company Over-the-counter securities markets Paine
Webber Group Inc. Richard C. Blum & Associates Solomon Inc. Small business investment
companies Wertheim Schroder & Co. Incorporated
Ethical aspects Baby, you’re a rich man still[M. Milken] J. Greenwald.
il por Time 135:72 My 14 ’90 Has Mike Milken already named names? G.G. Marcial.
il por Business Week p 148 My 21 ’90 The insider story [M. Milken] M. Laws. il
National
Review 42:33-5 My 28 ’90 Lessons of Milkenomics. The Nation 250:689 My 21 ’90 The
mugging of Milken [plea bargain] National Review
42:17-18 My 14 ’90 Poker, barbarians and deals: what to expect from Wall Street
[books on Salomon Brothers and RJR Nabisco takeover] J. J. Piderit. il American
162:476+ My 12 ’90 Sour Milken [M. Milken pleads guilty] M Kinsley. The New
Republic 202:4 My 21 ‘90
Japan
See also
Nomura Securities Co Ltd.
Switzerland
See also
Credit Suisse
United States
See Investment banking INVESTMENT BANKING IN LITERATURE Poker,
barbarians and deals: what to expect from Wall Street
[books on Salomon Brothers and RJR Nabisco takeover] J. J. Piderit. il America
162:476+ My 12’90
106
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 107
NATIONAL PARKS AND RESERVES Can our parks and wilderness area return to nature?
J.K. Agee, il USA Today (Periodical) 118:73-5 My ’90 How are our national parks? It’s
time to take a concerned
look. il Sunset (Central West edition) 184:268-9 My ‘90
Volunteer workers Into the woods {American Hiking Society Volunteer
Vacation Program] M. E. Johnson and S. Brewer. il New Choices for the Best Years
30:13 My ‘90
California
See also
Golden Gate National Recreation Area (Calif.) Mojave National Park (Calif.) Yosemite
National Park (Calif.)
Florida
See also
Everglades National Park (Fla.)
New Jersey
See also
New Jersey Pinelands National Reserve
North Carolina
See also
Great Smoky Mountains National Park (N.C. and Tenn.)
Tennessee
See also
Great Smoky Mountains National Park (N.C. and Tenn.)
United States
See National parks and reserves
Western States
See also
Yellowstone National Park
107
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 108
937 Rome - History - Ethnological Period B
Birch, Raymond 1914
the origins of Rome New York, Praeger 1960
212p. illus. places, maps 21cm
(ancient people and places)
Bibliography: p 152-160
108
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 109
The light carriage swished through the layers of fallen leaves upon the terrace. In places,
they lay so thick that they half covered the stone balusters and reached the knees of Diana’s
stag. But the trees were bare; only here and there a single golden leaf trembled high upon the
black twigs. Following the curve of the road, Boris’s carriage came straight upon the main
terrace and the house, majestic as the Sphinx herself in the sunset. The light of the setting sun
seemed to have soaked into the dull masses of stone. They reddened and glowed with it until
the whole place became a mysterious, a glorified, abode, in which the tall windows shone like a
row of evening stars.
Boris got out of the britska in front of the mighty stone stairs and walked toward them,
feeling for his letter. Nothing stirred in the house. It was like walking into a cathedral. “
And,” he thought, “by the time that I get into that carriage once more, what will everything be
like to me?”
109
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 110
Plutarch loved those who could use life for grand purposes and depart from it as
grandly, but he would not pass over weaknesses and vices which marred the grandeur. His
hero of heroes is Alexander the Great; he loves him above all other men, while his abomination
of abominations is bad faith, dishonorable action. Nevertheless he tells with no attempt to
extenuate how Alexander promised a safe conduct to a brave Persian army if they
surrendered, and then, “even as they were marching away he fell upon them and put them all
to the sword,” a breach of his word, Plutarch says sadly, “which is a lasting blemish to his
achievements.” He adds piteously, “but the only one.” He hated to tell that story.
110
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 111
Any night, every night, the transcontinental ships roar across the vast width of our
country. At four miles a minute they reel off these great stretches which the pioneers of
another day conquered so heroically, mile by indomitable mile. It is another element, but it is
still the same spirit. The pioneer, driving his teams, trusted the stars to guide him in the cool
of night. Today the pilot has radium dials and airway beacons. But stars or dials, one
horsepower or 1600, only the progress of science separates the pioneer from the pilot; for the
struggle to triumph over space is never-ending, and the courage that drives men forward is a
flame that will not die.
111
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 112
But there is also a deeper level to our uneasiness. For we grew up to think with
Emerson that America is the country of young men. That was part of our heritage of
optimism, of our faith in progress. A society that believed in inevitable improvement, that
judged tomorrow always better than yesterday, necessarily ascribed a special virtue to youth,
less constricted by the errors of the past, more responsive to the opportunities of the future. It
was proper that the young should rise up against the old; experience would happen and could
enjoy their own relaxed stability because they knew someone else labored under the burden of
progress. Perhaps we in our group resent this present generation so much because we fear
they are stealing from us the leisure of our conservatism. How can we sit by if they too accept
the status quo, and if no one pushes forward?
112
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 113
It has been demonstrated beyond doubt that the cave paintings in question were closely
associated with hunting, since only animals which were hunted by man appear in them, and
since hunters, weapons, and traps are of frequent occurrence. It follows with high probability
that they served a magical purpose: the animals were portrayed in order to ensure a successful
hunt. It is clear that under these circumstances the artist who could draw the most lifelike
pictures would be most sought after by hunters; the more realistic the painting the more
powerful the sympathetic magic. The sense of beauty which we feel today in looking at these
marvelous paintings is in part, of course, a reflection of the ancient artist’s accurate rendition
of nature; the artist reproduces the simplicity and economy of line with which nature has
endowed wild animals. However, there is more than this in these paintings. The artist often
gives too little but virtually never too much; with a minimum of line drawing he gives the
illusion of completeness, and his lines are often more graceful and more economical than in
nature. We are, therefore, fully justified in stressing both the imitative and the aesthetic aspect
of the work of paleolithic artists.
113
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 114
Some bold claims have been made for the facsimile (which means “exact copy”) method
of transmitting news by television They may have given the impression that it is only a matter
of a few months, or years, until a subscriber can receive his individual newspaper in his own
home by that means each morning. We can not say how soon the day will come when even
such a small newspaper as a four-page facsimile edition will be available by that means. The
recording machines are expensive; they are being produced only in limited quantity.
Transmission is limited, as is television, by the horizon. It would require a chain of radio
stations to blanket the country with such a newspaper. But the new facsimile newspaper is at
least a portent of things to come. How important is a portent we leave to the future.
114
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 115
Many observers have commented on what seems to be the fact that fear plays a much
smaller part than we should think it must in the life of an animal which lives dangerously.
Terror he can know, and perhaps he knows it frequently. But it seems to last only a little
longer than the immediate danger it helps him to avoid, instead of lingering, as in the human
being it does, until it becomes a burden and a threat. The frightened bird resumes his song as
soon as danger has passed and so does the frightened rabbit his games. It is almost as if they
knew that “cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but
once.”
115
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 116
America’s wobbling, back-country trains are the unsung heroes of her transportation
system. During World War II they provided vital links to military bases and war plants. Often
beset by flat wheels or leaky boiler flues, they still do an important job in tying the remote
communities they serve to the outside world. Each performs many useful chores, and most
rate just as high in grass-roots United States as mighty rail systems like the Pennsylvania and
Santa Fe do in the rest of the country.
Many of these short-line trains have survived the junkman only because of a customer
or two who provide revenue carloads to pay the bills. Without these benefactors, rust and
weeds would soon cover their rails. Train crews on the nine-mile Bath & Hammondsport
Railroad in New York are kept busy handling carloads of expensive wines from a cuvee at
Hammondsport. The B & H advertises itself as “The Champagne Route.”
Each of the short-line railroads has a flavor all its own - colorful characteristics that
have endeared it to the people it serves. And, like these people, many have acquired intriguing
nicknames. The picturesque Maryland & Pennsylvania has been dubbed “Ma and Pa.” The
Tennessee, Alabama & Georgia has become the “Tag Road.” The Columbus & Greenville in
Mississippi is often called the “Cinders and Grit.” and the now abandoned Leavenworth,
Kansas & Western was known as the “Leave Kansas and Walk.”
116
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 117
When a new musical runs into trouble on the road you can generally predict what it’s
going to look like in town. The “book” will nearly have vanished. Musical comedy “books”
are everybody’s trouble, and the first thing to do with the dialogue when it shows signs of
making the customers wish they’d stayed home to read is to dump it. A narrative can always
be reduced to a few simple statements of passion, with chords from the orchestra pit throbbing
beneath them to supply what language has left out, and once the statements have been made
the orchestra can take over altogether. Now four new songs are rushed in for the star.
Because the star will get laryngitis no matter how many songs he or she has, four more won’t
make matters much worse. And wherever a certain slackness continues to be felt, the
choreographer can be called upon to stage one more relay race. The show shall have music
whenever it goes, and dancing will make it go faster. The results, by the way, may be good or
bad depending upon the natural character of the entertainment; a show that means to be no
more than a lively pastime may very well profit from the radical, realistic surgery.
117
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 118
Land that has lost its productivity keeps its people poor, but that is only the surface
story. More important is this: the soil did not work from the fertile Alabama fields into the
tidal marshes while an alert, energetic, and solvent class of farmers tried determinedly to hold
it. If the soil had been guarded by farmers answering this description, it could have been held,
for we have the knowledge to hold topsoil and maintain fertility, but the economic and social
climate made good farming a matter of secondary importance. The ideas of the farming people
eroded first. The land simply followed to the infertile marshes.
118
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 119
If one is tempted to reflect on the type of language which is used in polite society, and,
more particularly, if one is inclined to interpret it literally, one must concluded that social
intercourse involves a collection of inanities and a tissue of lies. We say “Good morning” to the
boss although the weather is foul and our temper is no better. We say “Pleased to meet you”
when we really mean, “I hope I’ll never see you again in my life.” We chatter aimlessly at a tea
about matters that are not fit to exercise the mind of a child of two.
To say “Pleased to meet you” or “ Good morning” or to chatter at tea are examples of
the ceremonial function of language. Language used in this way is not informational. It simply
celebrates whatever feelings are responsible for bringing men together in social groups. It is
said that the custom of shaking hands originated when primitive men held out empty hands to
indicate that they had no concealed weapons and were thus amicably disposed. In the same
way, when we say “How do you do,” or “ Good morning” we perform a sort of ceremony to
indicate community of feeling with the person so addressed.
119
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 120
Patience and time. And talent. And money. These virtues, everybody agrees, are
essential for the creation of a repertory theater. And they sound impressive. But they are
surely insufficient. There is something left out of account her, and it is very simple, success.
Slow growth in the shadow of good will and generous subsidies may be possible in any number
of regional repertory companies. I was associated with one (which was, incidentally, one of the
most esteemed).
But all this cut no ice at Lincoln Center. Here the Beaumont Theater is unique, not
only in terms of the controversies it provokes, but in terms of the expectations it arouses. We
have the Metropolitan Opera Company next to us, the Philharmonic, the New York State
Theater. Besides this, we are within a stone’s throw of Broadway, which exercises the
ingenuity of the finest commercial theater in the world. Finally, we are being designated potentially as the National Theater of America. We simply are not in a position to say - to our
audiences, to our critics, to the world at large - that what we are doing is building a future
repertory company of the highest standards: “It will take us some years, as such things do, of
course, please bear with us in the meantime...” Certainly, such patience as the world had with
us has long been exhausted. We are here to succeed, and to do so now. We have no divine
right to fail, and, of course, we don’t claim any such right. The architecture here looks good,
too.
120
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 121
The Great American Disaster Restaurant could hardly have a more inappropriate
name, So popular is it among Londoners that a perpetual line of customers stands outside
from noon until midnight. And for what do they wait? Why, those delicacies from the New
World known as the American hamburger and milkshake.
Open a year ago by a young American, Peter Morton, the Disaster is popular in part
because it has become an “in” place to dine for London’s young swingers. (Mia Farrow and
Twiggy have eaten there.) But it is the hamburger, charbroiled and weighing either one-fourth
or one-half pound, that is the basis of the Disaster’s success.
If the hamburgers taste exactly like those in the United States, as American customers
say they do, it’s because of Mr. Morton. “I wanted a place with real American atmosphere,
from music to service to food, the last the most important,” he explains. “So I spent seven
months eating hamburgers to find just the right combination of ingredients.” By the time he
had tasted about 2,000 he had perfected his recipe as well as developed a temporary dislike for
hamburgers.
121
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 122
The medieval minstrel always performed for the moment. His performance was
ephemeral. There were no records, no television or movies to preserve it. He only delivered
fresh messages - in essentially a one-to-one relationship with his audience.
But a rock group must find a saleable message, make it acceptable to the largest
possible audience, sedulously watch the charts, and keep reinforcing the message in arenas all
across the country. A rock band rarely creates any more, especially after becoming popular.
They just re-create. Thus much of rock’s power to seize the moment is dying in this
excruciating commercial hell.
Where have all the minstrels gone? Gone to dollars, everyone. When will they ever
learn, when will they ever learn ?
122
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 123
Something extraordinary happens in baseball parks. There are no strangers, only
friends one has not met. Every neighbor is a neighbor in the most unself-conscious sense. Fans
share a common proprietorship, an involvement, an identification with the players and with
one another. The whole scene is hooked up by invisible wires, and communal juices flow
through an event which is part sporting competition, part picnic, and part town meeting. It
isn’t professionals performing and spectators looking on. The fans are part of every play.
Stand outside the stadium some day and listen to the rise and fall, the tempo and texture of the
crowd-sound. You can follow the game without seeing an inning. Exhilaration and
depression, ecstasy and desolation wash back and forth. Personal expression is everybody’s
right. The same hot dogs are sold in the bleachers and the mezzanine box. It is not possible to
be lonely or left out of this simple, lively, democratic process.
123
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 124
The journalistic medium that offers the highest protein content, and to which readers
bring their most serious attention, is the news-oriented magazine. Before they open such a
magazine, readers know what they have a right to expect. They have the right to a hard, keen,
skeptical, yet benign look at the world’s performance, reported urbanely and illuminated by
flashes from the past and blips from the future. They expect the correspondents, writers,
researchers, and editors who have gathered and checked the facts, written them up, and
pointed them up to have thrown out the fluff and the empty calories, and to have preserved the
essence in its proper sweet or sour sauce. They expect these professionals to have argued
among themselves about the least to intimate what readers should make of it all and severally.
In short, thinking people look to news-oriented magazines for the kinds of information and
sophistication of judgment they need for the strategic part of their personal planning - and
often of their business thinking, too.
124
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 125
Now it was dark and dull in the temple again. A few people near the altar murmured
prayers. A few votive lights burned before the marble goddess. The thunder prowled savagely
outside, invaded the temple like a beast, searching. Marcus stood unmoving, his mouth open to
take smothering air.
The lightning flashed again, and again Marcus saw her, and again his heart plunged,
and he was sick as if dying. Surely this silent woman was not Livia, his dream, his beloved, the
haunter of his nights, the radiant companion of his days! He pressed his back closer to the
wall, and felt the ice of sweat on his forehead and on his lip.
The storm was retreating as fast as it had come, like all summer storms. Now the
lightning came rarely, though the thunder roamed as if seeking a victim, like a lion hungry for
that which had escaped. Still Marcus could not stir.
Then Marcus murmured, “Livia?”
She did not reply. A random shaft of light touched her, raining down upon her from
the high round hole in the painted ceiling. It was surely Livia. He stretched out his hand. It
encountered soft but lifeless flesh that did not start away, did not respond to his touch. It was
the hand of one dead for hours, chill and quiet. He found himself squeezing it; it was limp in
his fingers. “Livia!” he exclaimed. “Livia?”
- T. Caldwell
(adapted)
125
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 126
The duneland air burns with the smell of sand, ocean, and sun. On the tops of the hills,
the grass stands at its tallest and greenest, its new straw-green seed plumes rising through a
dead crop of last year’s withered spears. On some leaves there is already a tiny spot of orange
wither at the very tip, and thin lines of wither descending on either edge. Grasses in the salt
meadows are fruiting; and there are browning and greenish-yellow patches on the levels of
summer green. On the dunes, the sand lies motionless in a tangle of grass; in naked places, it
lies as if it were held down by the sun. When there has been no rain for a week or more, and
the slanting flame has been heavy on the beach, the sand in my path down Fo’castle dune
becomes dry, so loose and deep that I trudge through it as through snow.
The winter sea was a mirror in a cold, half-lighted room; the summer sea is a mirror in
a room burning with light. So abundant is the light and so huge the mirror that the whole of a
summer day floats reflected on the glass. Colors gather there, sunrise and twilight, cloud
shadows and cloud reflections, the pewter dullness of gathering rain, the blue, burning
splendor of space swept free of every cloud. Light transfixes ocean, and some warmth steals in
with the light, but the waves that glint in the sun are still a tingling cold.
- Henry Beston
126
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 127
His curiosity endeared him to her. It was so long since anyone had asked her a question
and been interested in the answer. His curiosity had been the beginning of their friendship.
Going out into her overgrown little garden one afternoon, she had found him leaning against
the rickety fence staring at her house, which was round in shape and had attracted his
attention. It was made of dark wood and had narrow, arched windows and an arched door
studded with big square-headed nails. A high twisted chimney-stack rose from the center of
the roof. Surrounded by the looped and tangled growth of the garden-rusty, black-leaved
briers and crooked apple trees - the place reminded the boy of a menacing-looking illustration
by Arthur Rackham in a book he had at home. Then the door had opened and the witch
herself had come out, leaning on a stick. She had untidy white hair and a face cross-hatched
with wrinkles; but her eyes weren’t witch-like, not black and beady and evil, but large and
milky blue and kind, although crows had trodden about them.
“How can your house be round inside?” William asked, in his high, clear voice. She
looked about her and then saw his red jersey through the fence and, above it, his bright face
with its straight fringe of hair. “How can rooms be round?” he asked. He made a wedge with
his hands.
“You had better come and see,” she said. He opened the gate at once and went in. “She
might pop me into the oven,” he thought.
-Elizabeth Taylor
127
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 128
Add to the revolutions going on quietly among young homemakers whose tastes often
are taking them away from the mass-produced: Handcrafted objects that “reflect mood and
personality.”
Paul J. Smith, director of the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York, says:
“Young people’s attitudes toward buying and owning are different from those of their parents.
Their way of living is more casual and individualistic.
“Young people often want the unique object, the handmade article as an expression of
their personalities. Many are involved in handcrafts themselves.
“There is no compulsion to furnish their homes with matched sets.’ Their tastes are
eclectic.”
128
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 129
People find it necessary to read everyday of their lives. People need to read directions,
handbooks, schedules, information pamphlets, rules and regulations, as well as all kinds of
forms to get things done.
The box below gives you information about Tawana, a new employee who must make
several workplace decisions. Two things Tawana must read in order to make decisions are
included: a Commuter Bus Schedule and an Employee Handbook.
Tawana consults the policies in her Employee Handbook.
Tawana has accepted a job with Union Liberty, a company located in Pine Hill. She plans to
commute by bus from her home in Oakville. When she arrives in Oakville, she will have a
fifteen minute walk to the Union Liberty office. A copy of her commuter bus schedule is
below.
Commuter Bus Schedule
Oakville to Pine Hill
Monday - Friday, Except Holidays
Leave Arrive Leave Arrive
a.m a.m. 2:00 2:31
5:00 5:37 3:00 3:37
5:15 6:00 4:00 4:31
6:10 6:47 4:46 5:17
6:53 7:30 5:28 5:58
7:56 8:33 6:07 6:38
9:00 9:31 6:36 7:13
10:00 10:3l 7:00 7:31
11:00 11:3l 8:00 8:37
p.m. p.m. 9:00 9:4l
12:00 12:31 l0:00 10:4l
1:00 1:3l 11:00 11:4l
129
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 130
Employee Handbook
Union Liberty is an efficient and successful small company. It provides each employee with
a handbook that lists all its policies and procedures. These guide its personnel policy. If you
have any questions, consult with your supervisor.
Office Hours:
Each work week consists of forty hours. Each employee is allowed forty five minutes for
lunch. Lunch time will be established by your supervisor.
Attendance:
Punctuality and good attendance is expected of all employees. Tardiness of fifteen minutes
must be made up. If you will not be reporting to work due to illness, telephone your
supervisor before 9:00 a.m. If you are absent for two consecutive days or more, you must
follow a special procedure outlined by your supervisor. The information will be given to you
via the telephone.
Overtime:
Overtime is kept to a minimum. However, there are times when employees are
requested to take overtime assignments. There are special conditions that surround working
overtime. Your supervisor will advise you regarding compensation and travel.
130
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 131
Office Hours:
Each work day consists of eight hours which includes a thirty minute lunch time. All
employees are permitted a flexible starting time. Your preference should be discussed with
your supervisor. The various starting times range from 7:30 to 8:30 a.m. These will
correspond to leaving times ranging from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Start
7:30 a.m.
7:45 a.m.
8:00 a.m.
8:15 a.m.
8:30 a.m.
End
3:30 p.m.
3:45 p.m.
4:00 p.m.
4:15 p.m.
4:30 p.m.
131
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 132
Time Cards:
To document work schedules, a time card must be accurately kept. Consult your
supervisor to find out how to complete your card.
Vacation time must be taken in half-day segments upon the approval of your
supervisor. If you take a half-day vacation, the following chart gives you an example of what
your schedule would be like at various starting times.
Half day off (morning)
Half day off (afternoon)
Starting
Arrive work
Leave work
7:30
11:50
11:10
7:45
12:05
11:25
8:00
12:20
11:40
8:15
12:35
11:50
8:30
12:50
12:10
132
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 133
News for Customers OFFER
POWER ELECTRIC’s energy conservation program offers its customers a variety of free
booklets. Each booklet can save you money. Several suggestions for using less energy are made. For
example, one booklet tells you how to keep your apartment or home warmer on cold days. Many of the
suggestions do not cost money. Others require a minimal amount of money. Here are some practical
suggestions.
Do your windows make noise when the wind blows? Install weather stripping on your
windows. This will not only cut down on the noise, it will also keep heat from escaping and cut your
heating costs.
Do you have a door that leads to the outside or to an unheated hallway? Install weather
stripping around the door. Again, you’ll be saving heat and money.
Do you have tiny cracks or gaps where drafts enter your house? Use caulking material to plug
the cracks or gaps around window frames or where utility cables enter your apartment or house. Fill
in the cracks and prevent drafts.
Do you have an air conditioner? Is cold air coming into the room through small spaces around
or in the air conditioner? Get some heavy plastic or other covering material to cover the unit. This will
eliminate a draft of cold air from coming into the room.
Is cold air coming in from under your door and window even though they are closed? Fill a
sock or a tube of material with sand and place it on the sill or by the bottom of the door. This will
eliminate a draft of cold air from coming into the room.
KEEPING IN THE HOT AIR
Keep window shades down, venetian blinds closed, and drapes drawn at night. This keeps the
cold air out and the warm air in.
Keep window shades up, venetian blinds open, and drapes open during the day. This lets the
warm sunlight in to warm the room.
Use plastic coverings on the inside of windows you do not open during the winter. These act as
indoor storm windows that keep the room warm.
PROTECTION
POWER ELECTRIC will send its employees to help you plan energy saving steps. However,
there have been unauthorized individuals who pose as POWER ELECTRIC employees to gain
entrance into your home. All our employees carry photo identification cards. Employees carry these
cards on chains around their necks. Ask to see this identification card before you let anyone into your
home.
POWER ELECTRIC’s meter readers wear gray uniforms with POWER ELECTRIC and the
company emblem over the jacket or shirt pocket. Look out and inspect the uniform before admitting
the meter reader into your home.
133
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 134
Warranty
Selgar, Inc. warrants to the original purchaser that CHARKIT chairs will be free from defects
in workmanship and material under normal use while owned by the original purchaser. This
warranty applies only to the original purchaser for as long as the purchaser owns the chairs
and may be enforced only by the original purchaser. Any CHARKIT chairs which are found
to be defective in workmanship or material under normal use will be repaired or replaced with
like chairs or chairs of comparable quality at CHARKIT’s option. All said repairs or
replacement will be without charge except for transportation costs to and from CHARKIT
which will be the sole responsibility of the purchaser.
This warranty does not apply to chairs which have been subject to accident, negligence,
abuse or to damages which have been caused by improper use, care, modification, service, or
repair. This warranty does not apply to rattan or wicker chairs or chairs purchased prior to
January 1, 1993.
To enact this warranty service, the original purchaser must mail or fax a written notice
to CHARKIT, P. O. Box XZ, SENRITE, MS 12345. This notice must include a copy of the
original proof of purchase, the serial number from the label affixed to the chair, and a brief
description of the claimed defect. THIS WARRANTY CANNOT BE ENACTED WITHOUT
ORIGINAL PROOF OF PURCHASE.
Upon receipt of the above written notice, CHARKIT will send the purchaser written
authorization for the return of the chair(s) with a pre-addressed shipping label. This written
authorization is not to be considered an acceptance of the purchaser’s warranty claim. NO
RETURNS WILL BE ACCEPTED WITHOUT WRITTEN AUTHORIZATION.
Within 30 days of receipt of written authorization, purchaser must ship the chairs in
such authorization to CHARKIT to the location on the pre-addressed location. The chairs
must be properly packaged for shipping. CHARKIT will not accept responsibility for any
repair or replacement of chairs damaged or lost in transit.
THE ABOVE WARRANTY IS IN LIEU OF ALL OTHER EXPRESS WARRANTIES,
ORAL OR WRITTEN. IT SHALL CONSTITUTE THE EXCLUSIVE REMEDY OF THE
PURCHASER AND THE EXCLUSIVE LIABILITY OF CHARKIT. CHARKIT’s
LIABILITY WILL NOT EXCEED THE PURCHASE PRICE OF THE CHAIRS IN ANY
EVENT.
134
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 135
KALLIT TELEPHONE COMPANY
Account Number: 724-668-7474 March 7, 1993
Helpful Numbers
To question your Kallit Telephone Company charges call (201)555-0047 from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. To order or
change your telephone service, call (201)555-1234 from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. There is no charge for calls to the above
numbers if placed from within your calling area or to any 800 number. Check your telephone directory for more
information.
Summary of Kallit Telephone Charges
Basic service March 7 through April 7
Local calls
Directory information
Federal Tax (3%)
State and Local Taxes (6%)
Total
Basic Service Charges for March 7 through April 7
Line Charge
Total
Itemized Calls Directly Dialed
No.
Date
Place Number
1
Mar 08 ABC
102-4333
2
Mar 08 BCD 201-5555
3
Mar 10 CDE
345-9876
4
Mar 11 DEF
678-4567
5
Mar 11 EFG
890-8639
6
Mar 22 FGH 608-2847
7
Mar 23 GHI
275-9128
8
Mar 24 GHI
275-9128
9
Apr 06 HIJ
487-3050
10
Apr 06 IJK
184-2859
$30.99
26.70
.97
l.75
3.50
$63.91
$27.49
3.50
$30.99
Time
8:27PM
10:02AM
9:12PM
9:02AM
3:38PM
11:37AM
7:23PM
8:00PM
8:01AM
10:4lAM
Rate
Eve
Day
Eve
Day
Day
Day
Eve
Eve
Day
Day
Local Calls
Region No Discount 40% Discount 60% Discount
Calls Addl Min Calls Addl Min Calls Addl Min
LW
2
38
1
0
0
0
UW
6
78
0
0
0
0
NCY
52 116
9
65
7
48
NAS
1
0
1
5
0
0
SUF
1
6
0
0
0
0
UFW
2
3
0
0
0
0
Municipal Surcharge
YST/TAM Surcharge
135
Min.
4
10
5
3
11
6
3
1
5
3
Amount
1.11
4.54
6.70
.45
.99
1.31
$25.10
.08
1.52
$26.70
Amount
$.50
1.90
.63
1.77
2.45
2.27
.53
.13
2.65
.48
Student Text
College Remedial Reading
Passage 136
Reading directions, or handbooks, or guidebooks, or schedules, or rules or regulations, seems
to occur every day of our lives. People need to read to find out about different things and to
get things done.
The box below gives you information about Luis, an employee at the Vernon Green Plant in
Vernon West. Luis must make several workplace decisions. In order to do this, he must read
the Commuter Train Schedule and the Employee Handbook.
Luis works at the Vernon Green Plant in Vernon West. His normal quitting time is 5:30. It
takes him ten minutes to walk to the Vernone West train station. He lives in Hillsdale. A copy
of the train schedule is below.
Commuter Train Schedule
Vernon West to Hillsdale
Leave Arrive
12:30 1:30
1:30 2:30
2:30 3:30
3:30 4:30
4:00 4:45
4:50 5:35
4:58 5:45
5:03 5:50
5:23 6:10
5:37 6:20
5:45 6:30
6:00 7:00
7:00 8:00
8:00 9:00
9:00 10:00
10:00 11:00
11:00 Midnight
136