Hi, ACTers,
I've tried to find every passage that I could from the reading section of the B04 test from April 13, 2019. So far, I have most of the excerpts, and it would be much appreciated if anybody could find the second part of the Alice Neel passage.
Ruma/Akash Passage
“My dad’s planting flowers in the backyard,” she told Adam that night on the phone.
“Does he plan to be around to take care of them?” His flippancy irritated her, and she felt defensive on her father’s behalf.
“I don’t know.”
“It’s Thursday, Ruma. How long are you going to torture yourself?”
She didn’t feel tortured any longer. She had planned to tell Adam this, but now she changed her mind. Instead she said, “I want to wait a few more days. Make sure everyone gets along.” “For God’s sake, Ruma,” Adam said. “He’s your father. You’ve known him all your life.” And yet, until now, she had not known certain things about him. She had not known how self-sufficient he could be, how helpful, to the point where she had not had to wash a dish since he’d arrived. At dinner he was flexible, appreciating the grilled fish and chicken breasts she began preparing after the Indian food ran out, making do with a can of soup for lunch. But it was Akash who brought out a side of her father that surprised Ruma most. In the evenings her father stood beside her in the bathroom as she gave Akash his bath, scrubbing the caked-on dirt from his elbows and knees. He helped put on his pajamas, brush his teeth, and comb back his soft damp hair. When Akash had fallen asleep one afternoon on the living-room carpet, her father made sure to put a pillow under his head, drape a cotton blanket over his body. By now Akash insisted on being read to at night by her father, sleeping downstairs in her father’s bed. The first night Akash slept with her father she went downstairs to make sure he’d fallen asleep. She saw a sliver of light under her father’s door and heard the sound of his voice, reading Green Eggs and Ham. She imagined them both under the covers, their heads reclining against the pillows, the book between them, Akash turning the pages as her father read. It was obvious that her father did not know the book by heart, as she did, that he was encountering it for the first time in his life. He read awkwardly, pausing between the sentences, his voice oddly animated as it was not in ordinary speech. Still, his effort touched her, and as she stood by the door she realized that for the first time in his life her father had fallen in love. She was about to knock and tell her father that it was past Akash’s bedtime, that he should turn out the light. But she stopped herself, returning upstairs, briefly envious of her own son.
The garden was coming along nicely. It was a futile exercise, he knew. He could not picture his daughter or his son-in-law caring for it properly, noticing what needed to be done. In weeks, he guessed, it would be overgrown with weeds, the leaves chewed up by slugs. Then again, perhaps they would hire someone to do the job. He would have preferred to put in vegetables, but they required more work than flowers. It was a modest planting, some slow-growing myrtle and phlox under the trees, two azalea bushes, a row of hostas, a clematis to climb one of the posts of the porch, and in honor of his wife, a small hydrangea. In a plot behind the kitchen, unable to resist, he also put in a few tomatoes, along with some marigolds and impatiens; there was just time for a small harvest to come in by the fall. He spaced out the delphiniums, tied them to stalks, stuck some gladiola bulbs into the ground. He missed working outside, the solid feeling of dirt under his knees, getting into his nails, the smell of it lingering on his skin even after he’d scrubbed himself in the shower. It was the one thing he missed about the old house, and when he thought about his garden was when he missed his wife most keenly. She had taken that from him. For years, after the children had grown, it had just been the two of them, but she managed to use up all the vegetables, putting them into dishes he did not know how to prepare himself. In addition, when she was alive, they regularly entertained, their guests marveling that the potatoes were from their own backyard, taking away bagfuls at the evening’s end. He looked over at Akash’s little plot, the dirt carefully mounded up around his toys, pens and pencils stuck into the ground. Pennies were there, too, all the spare ones he’d had in his pocket.
“When will the plants come out?” Akash called out from the swimming pool, where he stood crouching over a little sailboat. “Soon.” “Tomorrow?” “Not so soon. These things take time, Akash. Do you remember what I taught you this morning?” And Akash recited his numbers in Bengali from one to ten.
Credit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ACT/comments/bd9bzk/found_the_first_reading_passage_in_the_flesh/ u/sheenf
Alice Neel Passage
Francis Bacon used to say that no artist in their lifetime can possibly know whether or not he/she is any good. Only time, he said, could sort out the twin perils that beset every artist: theory, by which "most people enter a painting", and fashion - what an audience feels it should or should not be moved by. Bacon reckoned this "sort out" period to be somewhere between 75 and 100 years, by which time the artist would most likely be dead. For this reason, he also said, success in an artist's lifetime is no indicator of greatness - on the contrary. Every artist works within a void "and will never know".
In this sense, if no other, the American portrait artist Alice Neel can be said to have been lucky. She can never have had any expectations, because to be a woman and an artist on the cusp of the 20th century was to cast yourself into a void. (Think of another outstanding female artist, Louise Bourgeois, born in 1911, neglected until the 1980s, venerated since the 1990s.) Neel was born in 1900, into a middle-class Philadelphia family, at a time when, as Henry James had observed only 19 years earlier, to be a lady was to be a portrait. She worked all her long life: against the prevailing theory of what it was to be a woman, that it was not becoming for a woman to be an artist, to have a public life, that women were framed for the interior.
And against fashion: she remained a figurative artist when the rest of the New York art establishment was in the grip of abstract expressionism. Neel doesn't seem ever to have had any notion of "becoming" an artist, or even "being" an artist. She simply was an artist. Even after the mid-1970s, when she finally did become "fashionable" - helped by a major retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974 - Neel rarely took commissions. She painted for herself.
PM me if you can find the second passage
Credit: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/may/29/art
Minoan/Phoenician Shipbuilding Passage
To be sure, the Minoans before them traded with great vigor and defended their Mediterranean trade routes with swift and vicious naval force. Their ships—built with tools of sharp-edged bronze—were elegant and strong: they were made of cypress trees, sawn in half and lapped together, with white-painted and sized linen stretched across the planks, and with a sail suspended from a mast of oak, and oars to supplement their speed. But they worked only by day, and they voyaged only between the islands within a few days’ sailing of Crete; never once did any Minoan dare venture beyond the Pillars of Hercules, into the crashing waves of the Sea of Perpetual Gloom.
The Minoans, like most of their rival thalassocracies, accepted without demur the legends that enfolded the Atlantic, the stories and the sagas that conspired to keep even the boldest away. The waters beyond the Pillars, beyond the known world, beyond what the Greeks called the oekumen, the inhabited earth, were simply too fantastic and frightful to even think of braving. There might have been some engaging marvels: close inshore, the Gardens of the Hesperides, and somewhat farther beyond, that greatest of all Greek philosophical wonderlands, Atlantis. But otherwise the ocean was a place wreathed in terror: I can find no way whatever of getting out of this gray surf, Odysseus might well have complained, no way out of this gray sea. The winds howled too fiercely, the storms blew up without warning, the waves were of a scale and ferocity never seen in the Mediterranean.
Nevertheless, the relatively peaceable inland sea of the classical world was to prove a training ground, a nursery school, for those sailors who in time, and as an inevitable part of human progress, would prove infinitely more daring and commercially ambitious than the Minoans. At just about the time that Santorini erupted and, as many believe, gave the final fatal blow to Minoan ambitions, so the more mercantile of the Levantines awoke. From their sliver of coastal land—a sliver that, in time, would become Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel, and can be described as a land with an innate tendency toward ambition—the big Phoenician ships ventured out and sailed westward, trading, battling, dominating.
When they came to the Pillars of Hercules, some time around the seventh century B.C., they, unlike all of their predecessors, decided not to stop. Their captains, no doubt bold men and true, decided to sail right through, into the onrushing waves and storms, and see before all other men just what lay beyond.
The men from the port of Tyre appear to have been the first to do so. Their boats, broad-beamed, sickle-shaped “round ships” or galloi—so called because of the sinuous fat curves of the hulls, and often with two sails suspended from hefty masts, one at midships and one close to the forepeak—were made of locally felled and surprisingly skillfully machined cedar planks, fixed throughout with mortise and tenon joints and sealed with tar. Most of the long-haul vessels from Tyre, Byblos, and Sidon had oarsmen, too—seven on each side for the smaller trading vessels, double banks of thirteen on either side of the larger ships, which gave them a formidable accelerative edge. Their decorations were grand and often deliberately intimidating—enormous painted eyes on the prow, many-toothed dragons and roaring tigers tipped with metal ram-blades, in contrast to the ample-bosomed wenches later beloved by Western sailors.
Phoenician ships were built for business. The famous Bronze Age wreck discovered at Uluburun in southern Turkey by a sponge diver in 1982 (and which, while not definitely Phoenician, was certainly typical of the period) displayed both the magnificent choice of trade goods available in the Mediterranean and the vast range of journeys to be undertaken. The crew on this particular voyage had evidently taken her to Egypt, to Cyprus, to Crete, to the mainland of Greece, and possibly even as far as Spain. When they sank, presumably when the cargo shifted in a sudden storm, the holds of the forty-five-foot-long galloi contained a bewildering and fatally heavy amassment of delights, far more than John Masefield could ever have fancied. There were ingots of copper and tin, blue glass and ebony, amber, ostrich eggs, an Italian sword, a Bulgarian axe, figs, pomegranates, a gold scarab with the image of Nefertiti, a set of bronze tools that most probably belonged to the ship’s carpenter, a ton of terebinth resin, hosts of jugs and vases and Greek storage jars known as pithoi, silver and gold earrings, innumerable lamps, and a large cache of hippopotamus ivory.
Credit: https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2019/03/08/first-sailings-into-the-atlantic/
Lavoisier/Chinese Alchemy Passage
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) was a financier, established a system of weights and measures that led to the metric system, lived through the early turmoil of the French Revolution, and was a pioneer in scientific agriculture. He has been called the father of modern chemistry, and, in the course of his busy life, he brought Europe out of the dark ages of that science.
One of Lavoisier’s early contributions resulted from his boiling water for long periods of time. In eighteenth-century Europe, many scientists believed in transmutation. They thought, for instance, that water could he transmuted into earth, among other things. Chief among the evidence for this was water boiling in a pot. Solid residue forms on the inside surface. Scientists proclaimed this to be water turning into a new element. Robert Boyle, the great seventeenth-century British chemist and physicist who flourished a hundred years before Lavoisier, believed in transmutation. Having watched plants grow by soaking up water, he concluded, as many bad before him, that water can be transformed into leaves, flowers, and berries. In the words of chemist Harold Goldwhite of California State University, Los Angeles, "Boyle was an active alchemist." Lavoisier noticed that weight was the key, and that measurement was critical. He poured distilled water into a special “tea kettle” called a pelican, an enclosed pot with a spherical cap, which caught the water vapor and returned it to the base of the pot via two handle-like tubes. He boiled the water for 101 days and found substantial residue. He weighed the water, the residue, and the pelican. The water weighed exactly the same. The pelican weighed slightly less, an amount equal to the weight of the residue. Thus, the residue was not a transmutation but part of the pot—dissolved glass, silica, and other matter. As scientists continued to believe that water was a basic element, Lavoisier performed another crucial experiment. He invented a device with two nozzles and squirted different gases from one into the other, to see what they made. One day, he mixed oxygen with hydrogen, expecting to get acid. He got water. He percolated the water through a gun barrel filled with hot iron rings, splitting the water back into hydrogen and oxygen and confirming that water was not an element. Lavoisier measured everything, and on each occasion that he performed this experiment, he got the same numbers. Water always yielded oxygen and hydrogen in a weight proportion of 8 to 1. What Lavoisier saw was that nature paid strict attention to weight and proportion. Ounces or pounds of matter did not disappear or appear at random, and the same ratios of gases always yielded the same compounds. Nature was predictable, and therefore malleable.
Ancient Chinese alchemy, circa 300 to 200 B.C., was built around the concept of two opposing principles. These could be, for example, active and passive, male and female, or sun and moon. The alchemists saw nature as having a circular balance. Substances could be transformed from one principle to another, and then rendered back to their original state. A prime example is cinnabar, known commonly today as mercuric sulfide, a heavy red mineral that is the principal ore of mercury. Using fire, these early alchemists decomposed cinnabar into mercury and sulfur dioxide. Then they found that mercury would combine with sulfur to form a black substance called metacinnabar, "which then can be sublimed into its original state, the bright red cinnabar, when once more heated," according to science historian Wang Kuike. Both mercury's liquid quality and the cyclic transformation from cinnabar to mercury and back again gave it magical qualities. Kuike calls mercury "huandan, a cyclically transformed regenerative elixir" associated with longevity. These ancient practitioners became familiar with the concept that substances could be transformed and then come full circle to their original state. They developed exact proportions of the amounts of mercury and sulfur, as well as recipes for the exact length and intensity of the heating required. Most important, according to Kuike, these operations could be performed "without the slightest loss of the total weight. "It would appear that the ancient Chinese alchemists were empirically familiar with the conservation of mass fifteen hundred years before Lavoisier's experiment.
He and his alchemist precursors discovered that the weight of the products in a chemical reaction equal the weight of the reactants.
Credit: https://archive.org/stream/LostDiscoveriesDTeresi/Lost%20discoveries%20D%20Teresi_djvu.txt http://www.jcs-group.com/once/science/chemistry.html
Submitted April 15, 2019 at 03:46AM by intelligentwalnut http://bit.ly/2ZbB0tC
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