SAT cross-text connections questions: how to answer them

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Many schools ban phones during lessons. Supporters say students concentrate better without the constant temptation to check messages.

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A teacher in Ohio found that letting students use phones to look up words and check facts during reading lessons made them more engaged. She argues that a total ban throws away a useful tool.

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The city's new bike lanes have been a success: the number of cyclists on Main Street has doubled since they opened. Clearly, if you build safe lanes, people will ride.

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Before declaring the bike lanes a success, we should note that the city also closed two nearby bus routes the same month. Some of the new cyclists may simply be former bus riders who had no other choice.

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The giant sloths of South America vanished soon after humans arrived on the continent. Paleontologist Ruth Akerman argues that this timing points to hunting as the main cause: sloths, slow and unafraid of people, would have been easy prey.

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Pollen records analyzed by Mateo Quispe show that the grasslands where many giant sloths fed were shrinking rapidly in the same centuries, as the climate warmed. Quispe notes that in areas where grasslands survived longer, sloth fossils continue later, even though humans were present there too.

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The town's annual festival, critics say, has become a tourist spectacle. Its parade once featured local farmers and craftspeople; now it is dominated by hired performers, and residents increasingly avoid it.

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Anthropologist Nadia Kowalczyk has studied the festival for twenty years. She acknowledges the hired performers but notes that residents have moved their own celebrations to the night before, in neighborhood gatherings that outsiders rarely see. The tradition, she argues, has not died but relocated.

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Film scholar Daniela Moreau argues that the director's use of long, unbroken shots is a way of showing respect for the actors, giving them space to develop a scene without the interference of editing.

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The director's own production notes, recently published, reveal that the long takes were largely a response to her tiny budget: editing equipment was expensive to rent, and filming each scene in one shot saved days of work. The notes say nothing about the actors.

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Historian Laila Mansour argues that the printing press spread new ideas mainly by making books cheaper. When a book cost a fraction of what a hand-copied manuscript did, she says, ordinary merchants and craftspeople could finally afford to read.

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Historian Peter Lindgren agrees that printed books were cheaper, but notes that most people in the period could not read at all. He argues that printed ideas often spread through public readings and sermons, reaching listeners who never owned a book.

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Some nutrition researchers recommend eating breakfast every day, citing studies in which people who ate breakfast weighed less on average than people who skipped it.

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In a trial by Grace Okafor, volunteers were randomly assigned either to eat breakfast or to skip it for sixteen weeks. Weight changed by almost exactly the same amount in both groups. Okafor suggests that earlier studies may have mistaken a habit shared by health-conscious people for a cause of lower weight.

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Literary critic Simone Achebe-Wright argues that the novelist's habit of ending chapters mid-sentence is a gimmick. Readers, she says, are briefly intrigued, but the device soon feels like a trick to keep them turning pages rather than an expression of anything in the story.

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The novel's chapter breaks fall almost exclusively at moments when the narrator, who suffers from memory loss, is interrupted by a doctor or a nurse. Read this way, the unfinished sentences are not a device to hook the reader but a record of the narrator's broken experience of time.

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Proponents of 'rewilding' argue that reintroducing large predators such as wolves can restore damaged ecosystems. When wolves returned to one valley, deer stopped lingering along rivers, and willows that the deer had been eating grew back, stabilizing the riverbanks.

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Ecologist Hannah Rees cautions against treating the valley as a template. In that case, she notes, the predators returned before the willows' roots had died off completely. In landscapes where decades of grazing have removed the plants entirely and eroded the soil, she argues, the return of predators alone may change little.

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Economist Farid Rahimi argues that raising the minimum wage in a city leads restaurants to hire fewer workers, because labor becomes more expensive. He points to a city where restaurant employment grew more slowly after a wage increase than it had in the previous five years.

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Comparing that city with a neighboring city that did not raise its wage, economist Jun Park found that restaurant employment slowed by almost exactly the same amount in both places over the same period. A regional downturn, he concludes, affected restaurants on both sides of the city line.

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Many music teachers insist that beginners learn to read notation before playing by ear. Without notation, they argue, students develop habits they later struggle to unlearn and cannot tackle complex pieces on their own.

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Researchers who followed beginning violinists for two years found that students who spent their first six months playing by ear went on to read notation as accurately as those who started with it, and they played more expressively. The order in which skills are learned, the researchers conclude, may matter less than teachers assume.

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Art historian Chloé Vasseur dates the unsigned portrait to about 1650, citing the sitter's lace collar, a style that went out of fashion soon after.

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Analysis of the canvas by conservator Ravi Menon found a pigment, Prussian blue, in the background. Prussian blue was not available to painters until the early 1700s. Menon notes that old-fashioned clothing sometimes appears in later portraits, particularly when a family commissioned a likeness of an ancestor from an earlier image.

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Cognitive scientist Amelia Ross argues that taking notes by hand helps students remember lectures better than typing does. Because handwriting is slower, she says, students cannot copy every word and must instead summarize, which forces them to process the material.

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In a study by Tomás Ferreira, students who typed notes but were instructed to summarize in their own words remembered lectures as well as students who wrote by hand. Students who typed without that instruction tended to copy lectures word for word and remembered less.

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Some astronomers have proposed that the unusual dimming of a distant star is caused by a vast swarm of comets passing in front of it. Comets, they note, are common around young stars and could block light irregularly, as observed.

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Astronomer Leila Farouk points out that the star is not young; it is several billion years old. She adds that comets large enough in number to block the observed amount of light would also glow in infrared as they were warmed by the star, yet no such glow has been detected.

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According to one common view, a language dies when its last fluent speaker dies. After that, the language survives only as a record in books and recordings, of interest to scholars but no longer part of anyone's life.

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Linguist Emil Sarkis has worked with communities reviving languages that had no fluent speakers for decades. Using old dictionaries and recordings, families have raised children who speak these languages at home. Sarkis prefers the term 'sleeping' to 'dead' for languages without current speakers.

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Dr. Ama Boateng's survey of 2,000 office workers found that those who worked in open-plan offices reported more interruptions than those in private offices. Boateng concludes that open-plan offices reduce productivity.

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Productivity, management researcher Kai Lindholm notes, is not the same as a feeling of being interrupted. In his study, teams in open-plan offices reported more interruptions but completed shared projects faster than teams in private offices, apparently because questions were answered on the spot.

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Historians have often portrayed the 1890s canal workers' strike as a failure, since the workers' main demand, a shorter working day, was refused.

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Labor historian Ines Duarte points out that within a year of the strike, the canal company quietly introduced paid rest breaks and safety rails along the locks, changes the strikers had listed as secondary demands. Judging the strike only by its headline demand, she argues, misses much of what it achieved.

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Sociologist Rachel Adeyemi argues that public libraries remain essential mainly because they provide free internet access to people who cannot afford it at home.

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Surveys by Tobias Engel found that, as home internet has become more widespread, library visits have not fallen. Many visitors now come for children's programs, quiet study space, and help from librarians with government forms. Engel argues that libraries' importance rests on far more than any single service.

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Biologist Noor Haidari observed that a species of desert beetle collects drinking water by standing head-down in morning fog, letting droplets form on its back and roll toward its mouth. She suggests that the bumps on the beetle's shell, which attract water, are an adaptation for this behavior.

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Comparing the shells of several related beetle species, Lars Eriksen found similar water-attracting bumps on species that live in humid forests and never encounter fog. He suggests that the bumps first evolved for some other purpose and were only later put to use for fog collection by the desert species.