Organization, Unity, and Cohesion

Passage I — The Ladder That Started a Library

[1] Three winters ago, Dana Okafor needed a ladder for exactly one afternoon. A gutter above her porch was overflowing, and buying a ladder seemed wasteful, since she would use it once and then store it for years. Similarly, (1) she posted a request on a neighborhood message board. Within an hour, four neighbors had offered to lend her theirs.

[2] The response gave Okafor an idea. If so many households owned tools that sat unused most of the year, a shared collection could serve the whole neighborhood. That spring, she and two friends converts (2) a vacant storage room at the community center into what they called the Library of Things. Donations arrived quickly: many useful items. (3)

[3] Borrowing works much as it does at a public library. Members, who pay no fee, sign up with a photo ID and can check out up to three items for a week at a time. (4) Every item carries a paper tag listing the date it was donated and any tips from previous borrowers, such as which drill bit works best on brick. These tags, which contain written notes and handwritten advice from earlier users of each item, (5) have become one of the library’s most popular features.

[4] Not every item has been a success. The pressure washer broke twice in its first month, the volunteers eventually learned (6) to give each borrower a five-minute demonstration. The telescope, meanwhile, has rarely left its shelf. Still, the volunteers keep them (7) in the collection because the few people who borrow it tend to return with stories of seeing Saturn’s rings for the first time.

[5] Today the Library of Things lends more than four hundred items a month. Okafor says the numbers matter less to her than the conversations at the checkout desk, where strangers swap stories about (8) leaky faucets and stubborn lawnmowers. Several neighbors’ have (9) since started similar libraries in their own apartment buildings.

Passage V — Mapping the Curb

[1] When Marisol Vega’s grandfather began using a wheelchair, the two of them discovered that their neighborhood was full of obstacles they had never noticed. A curb without a ramp could turn a short trip to the pharmacy into a long detour. A cracked or tilted slab of sidewalk was even worse, it could (41) tip the chair forward.

[2] Nevertheless, (42) Marisol, then a high school sophomore, decided to record every barrier within a mile of her home. Armed with a phone, a tape measure, and a notebook, she walked and covered on foot (43) each block, photographing missing ramps, broken slabs, and poles planted in the middle of the path. At every stop, she recorded what she found. (44)

[3] By winter, Marisol’s notebook held more than three hundred entries. She typed them into a free online mapping program, marking each problem with a colored pin: red for barriers that blocked a wheelchair completely and yellow for those that only slowed it down. In January, she presented the finished map to the citys’ (45) public works department. The engineers there were super psyched about (46) what she had built.

[4] Marisol’s map arrived at a useful moment. (47) The city had money set aside for sidewalk repairs but no complete list of where repairs were most needed. Within two years, crews had installed forty new curb ramps and repaired and fixed (48) more than a hundred broken slabs. Several of the new ramps sit on the very corners that had once forced her grandfather into long detours. (49) Marisol, now a college engineering student, still updates the map every spring.

Passage IV — Celery and Cornstarch

[1] In a quiet studio, a woman stands on a tray of gravel and watches a film projected on the wall. On the screen, an actor is hiking up a mountain trail. Watching the actor closely, the gravel crunches under her feet (31) in time with each of his steps, and a microphone a few feet away records every sound.

[2] This work is called Foley, after Jack Foley, a sound editor who (32) developed many of its techniques at Universal Studios in the late 1920s. Films record dialogue on set, but most of the other sounds an audience hears is (33) added later. Microphones on a set are aimed at the actors’ mouths. They pick up speech clearly but miss quieter sounds, such as footsteps, rustling clothes, and the clink of a cup set down on the surface of a tabletop. (34) Foley artists recreate these sounds in a studio, one scene at a time.

[3] Foley studios are usually lined with soundproof panels. (35) A bundle of celery snapped in two can stand in for a breaking bone. Cornstarch squeezed inside a leather pouch sounds remarkably like footsteps in snow. A pair of leather gloves, flapped quickly, makes a convincing sound. (36)

[4] The goal is not to copy reality exactly. Audiences, it turns out, are totally down with (37) sounds that match what they expect to hear, even when those sounds are not what a real event would produce. A real punch, recorded up close, sounds like a dull thud, Foley artists therefore (38) often slap a raw steak or punch a head of cabbage to make a movie fight sound more dramatic. (39)

[5] The next time a film makes you wince at the sound of a breaking bone, listen closely. You might be hearing a vegetable.