Central Ideas and Summaries

Passage I — Literary Narrative: “Nine Crates” (original story written for this practice set)

The first thing my aunt Ruth taught me about the orchard was that the peaches did not care about my schedule. I had arrived at her farm in the middle of June with a duffel bag, a phone that got one bar of signal if I stood on the porch railing, and a plan to spend the summer reading. By the end of my first week, I had read eleven pages.

“They ripen when they ripen,” Ruth said on my second morning, handing me a canvas picking bag before the sun had cleared the ridge. “You can sleep when they don’t.”

She was my mother’s older sister, but the two of them had never seemed related to me. My mother talked constantly, narrating her own errands aloud—“Now the dry cleaner, then the bank”—as if someone might need a record of them later. Ruth could go an entire morning without saying anything more than “Higher” or “Leave that one.” At first I took her silence as a verdict on me. I spent those early days trying to fill it, telling her about my school, my friends, the robotics team I had quit, and she would nod once, as though acknowledging a delivery, and move on to the next tree.

The work itself was simpler than I expected and harder than I wanted it to be. A ripe peach, Ruth showed me, comes away from the branch with the slightest upward twist; if you have to pull, you are stealing it early. I bruised dozens that first week by gripping too hard, and each time Ruth would take the damaged fruit from my hand, turn it over once, and drop it into the bucket she kept for jam. She never said anything about it, which was somehow worse than if she had.

In the evenings Ruth sat at the kitchen table with a ledger, a narrow green book in which she recorded each row of the orchard: the date it was picked, the number of crates, the weather. Her handwriting was as spare as her speech. Once, when she had gone out to check the irrigation, I opened the ledger and paged back through twenty years of entries. Some summers filled a dozen pages; one, the year of a late frost, took up half a page and ended with a single word, Lost. I closed the book quickly, feeling that I had read something not meant for me, though there was nothing in it but numbers and dates.

The storm came on a Thursday in July. I noticed it first as a change in the light—the leaves went from green to a strange, bright silver as the wind turned them over—and then Ruth was beside me, already moving.

“The lower rows,” she said. “Everything that’s ready. Go.”

For the next hour we picked faster than I had known was possible. I stopped thinking about the twist and simply felt for it, my hand closing around each peach and lifting in one motion. Thunder rolled down the valley in long, uneven waves. When the first heavy drops hit, we had filled nine crates, and Ruth was still working the last tree in the row, her gray braid dark with rain.

We sat afterward in the packing shed, listening to the hail rattle on the tin roof. Neither of us spoke. It occurred to me that I had not said a word in over an hour, and that I had not wanted to. The silence between us no longer felt like something I had to repair. It felt like the quiet of two people who had been paying attention to the same thing.

Ruth reached into the nearest crate, pulled out a peach, and examined it for a long moment. Then she handed it to me.

“Not a mark on it,” she said.

It was, I understood, the longest speech she had made about my work all summer, and I have kept it longer than almost anything anyone has said to me since.

When my mother called that night, she asked if I was bored yet. I stood on the porch railing, holding the phone up toward the one bar of signal, and tried to explain about the storm and the crates and the peach. I could hear how small it sounded as I said it. “That’s nice, honey,” my mother said, and began telling me about a new restaurant near our house.

After we hung up, I stayed on the railing for a while. Down in the orchard, the battered trees were black shapes against a clearing sky, and somewhere in the shed, nine crates of peaches were waiting for morning.

Passage I — Literary Narrative: “The Seam” (original story written for this practice set)

Mara had assumed that tuning a piano would be loud. She had imagined her grandfather hammering at keys while she waited in the car with her headphones on, and for the first week of July that was more or less how the job went. Abel’s doctor had taken away his driver’s license after a small stroke in May, and because Mara was sixteen, unemployed, and—in her mother’s phrase—“available,” she had become his driver.

The clients were mostly old, like the pianos. There was a church in Fenwick with an upright whose middle C had stuck since Easter and a widow on Larch Street who played nothing but hymns. Abel answered each of them with the same three words, “Let’s see it,” and then he disappeared into the piano and did not come out for two hours.

On the eighth day it rained, and Mara came inside.

She had expected noise, but what she heard instead was a kind of patient argument. Abel would strike a single key, listen, and fit his tuning hammer onto a pin no thicker than a pencil. Then he would turn it—so slightly that Mara could not see his wrist move—and strike the key again. Between strikes he held his head tilted, the way a bird does when it hears something under the grass.

“What are you listening for?” she asked finally.

He did not answer right away. He played two keys together, an F and the C above it, and the sound that came out had a faint wobble in it, a pulse like a slow heartbeat. “That,” he said. “The beats. When two notes are almost right, they fight a little. You hear the fighting.” He nudged the pin and played them again. The pulse slowed. “Now they’ve nearly agreed.”

“Nearly?”

“A piano is never in tune,” he said. “It’s only in tune with itself, for a while.”

Mara thought this was the kind of thing old people said to sound wise, and she told him so. Abel laughed—a short, surprised bark she had not heard since before the hospital—and handed her the hammer.

It was heavier than it looked. He put her hand on the pin, closed his own hand around hers, and told her to play the F and the C with her other hand. She heard the wobble at once, now that she knew what it was, and she was startled by how obvious it seemed, as if it had been there all along in every piano she had ever heard. Together they turned the pin. The pulse slowed, and slowed, and then for a moment it was gone, and the two notes sat side by side as smoothly as water.

“There,” Abel said, and let go.

After that she came inside every day. She learned the names of the parts—the hammers that strike the strings, the dampers that silence them, the felt that wears thin over years of practice—and she learned that her grandfather kept no notes, that every piano in the county seemed to live in his memory with its particular faults. “The Larch Street one goes flat in August,” he told her. “Humidity. She keeps a window open.” Mara began to notice that he talked to the pianos more than he talked to their owners, and that he talked to her more than he had in years.

She noticed other things, too. He tired by early afternoon now. Twice he struck a key and then sat with his hand on the lid, not listening so much as resting, and she pretended to be reading the music on the stand until he began again. On the drive home he often fell asleep, his head against the window, and she turned the radio down so low that it was barely a sound at all.

In the last week of August they went to the high school, where the auditorium piano had to be ready for the first assembly. Abel tuned the bass and the middle of the keyboard himself. Then, when he reached the high treble, where the strings are short and the beats are fast and hard to hear, he sat down in the front row and said, “Your turn.”

She was not ready, and she told him so. He folded his arms.

It took her forty minutes to tune eleven notes. When she finished, she played a scale from the top of the keyboard down to the place where his work began, and she could not hear the seam. She turned around to ask whether he could. He had his eyes closed and his head tilted, the way he always held it to listen, and he did not open them for a long time.

Passage IV — Natural Science: how a colorblind animal matches colors (original text)

Few animals change their appearance as quickly or as completely as the octopus. In less than a second, an octopus resting on a reef can shift from pale to mottled brown, raise small bumps on its skin to imitate the texture of coral, and seem to vanish against the rock behind it. Its skin contains thousands of pigment-filled sacs called chromatophores, each surrounded by tiny muscles controlled by nerves. When the muscles contract, they stretch a sac open, spreading its yellow, red, or brown pigment across a wider area; when they relax, the sac shrinks back to a dot. Beneath the chromatophores lie other cells that reflect light, producing whites, blues, and shimmering greens. Because the chromatophores are worked by nerves and muscles rather than by slow chemical changes, the whole display can be rearranged faster than a person can blink.

What has long puzzled biologists is not how the octopus produces its colors but how it chooses them. By most tests of their vision, octopuses appear to be colorblind. Their eyes contain only one type of light-sensitive pigment, or opsin, whereas human eyes contain three types, each most sensitive to a different range of wavelengths. With a single opsin, an animal can tell bright from dim but should have no way to tell, for example, red from green of equal brightness. In behavioral experiments, octopuses trained to choose between objects that differed in color but not in brightness generally performed no better than chance. Yet the same animals, placed on backgrounds of different colors, often adjust their skin to match them closely.

Several explanations have been proposed. One is that the matching is less precise than it looks to us. Many of the octopus’s predators, such as fish, see color differently than humans do, and to them an octopus may not need an exact color match at all; matching the brightness, contrast, and pattern of its surroundings may be enough to disappear. Under this view, the puzzle partly reflects our own way of seeing.

A second idea is that the skin itself senses light. In 2015, researchers studying the California two-spot octopus found that its skin contains the same opsin found in its eyes, and that patches of skin removed from the animal—with no connection to the brain—expanded their chromatophores when exposed to light. The skin, in other words, can respond to light on its own. But because the skin contains the same single opsin as the eye, this discovery does not by itself explain how the animal might distinguish colors. It may instead help the octopus judge the brightness of its surroundings over its whole body at once.

A third, more speculative idea concerns the shape of the octopus’s pupil, which is often a horizontal slit or a U shape rather than a round opening. Two researchers proposed in 2016 that such an off-center pupil could allow the eye to exploit chromatic aberration, a blurring that occurs because a lens bends different wavelengths of light by different amounts. In a camera, chromatic aberration is a flaw to be corrected. In an octopus, the researchers argued, it might be a source of information: red and blue light from the same object come into sharp focus at slightly different distances, so by adjusting its focus, the animal could in principle infer color from sharpness. The idea is ingenious, but it has been tested mainly with computer models of the eye rather than with living animals, and some vision scientists doubt that the effect would be large enough to be useful.

None of these explanations excludes the others. An octopus might rely mainly on brightness and pattern, use its skin as a rough light meter, and gain a little color information from its unusual eye. Another approach is to study the predators instead, testing which differences a hunting fish can and cannot detect. Distinguishing among the possibilities will require experiments that are difficult to design: tests that separate an animal’s ability to see a color from its ability to match it, carried out on a creature that can squeeze through any gap larger than its beak and that has a reputation, among laboratory staff, for taking its tank apart.

For now, the octopus is an example of a familiar pattern in biology. The behavior was noticed long before its mechanism was understood, and each partial explanation has opened new questions of its own. The animal that seems to disappear into its background has, so far, done much the same with its secrets.