SAT text structure and purpose questions: how to answer them

Honeybees cannot see the color red. To a bee, a bright red flower may look almost black. For this reason, many flowers pollinated mainly by bees are blue, purple, or yellow, colors bees can see well.

When the city library began lending tools, such as drills, ladders, and sewing machines, some council members predicted that few people would use the service. The opposite happened. In its first year, the tool collection was borrowed more often per item than the library's books, and the waiting list for the pressure washer grew to over sixty names.

Archaeologists have long debated why the hilltop town of Corvessa was abandoned around 900 CE. One view holds that a series of droughts made farming impossible. Excavations led by Yusuf Haddad, however, found storage jars still half full of grain in many houses. People fleeing famine, Haddad notes, would hardly have left food behind. He suggests instead that the town was emptied quickly, perhaps because of a sudden threat such as an approaching army.

Political scientist Owen Bakare studied town meetings in which residents vote directly on local budgets. He found that turnout was highest not when budgets were largest but when a single, easily understood item, such as closing a fire station, appeared on the agenda. Large but abstract sums, it seems, mobilize fewer voters than small but concrete decisions. Bakare suggests that towns hoping to increase participation should present budgets as lists of specific choices rather than as totals.

Engineers designing earthquake-resistant buildings once focused on making structures as rigid as possible. Experience showed, however, that rigid buildings could crack when the ground moved beneath them. Modern designs often do the opposite: they place flexible bearings between a building and its foundation so that the ground can shift while the structure above moves much less. The goal is no longer to resist the earthquake but to let it pass underneath.

In 1880s Paris, a craze for roller skating swept the city. Huge rinks opened, skating clubs held races, and newspapers printed tips for beginners. By the 1890s, however, many of the rinks had closed as the public turned its attention to a new fashion: bicycling.

Many people think of deserts as lifeless. The Sonoran Desert, however, is home to more than two thousand species of plants. Some, like the saguaro cactus, store water in their thick stems, while others sprout, flower, and set seed in the few weeks after a rare rainstorm.

Sculptor Amara Diallo builds her large figures from discarded bicycle parts. From a distance, the figures look like smooth bronze statues. Only when viewers walk closer do they see the chains, spokes, and gears, and many say that this moment of discovery is what they remember most about her work.

Some scientists propose that dimming sunlight by spraying reflective particles into the upper atmosphere could slow global warming. Supporters note that large volcanic eruptions, which release similar particles, have cooled the planet for a year or two. Yet the same eruptions have also disrupted rainfall in some regions, and critics warn that an intentional program could shift monsoons that billions of people depend on.

The following text is from a short story. Nell has just moved to a farm.

The silence was the first thing Nell noticed. In the city there had always been something: buses sighing at the corner, a neighbor's radio, the elevator's thump. Here, lying awake, she could hear her own pulse. By the third night, though, she had begun to pick out other sounds: the creak of the windmill, an owl somewhere past the barn, the dog turning over on the porch.

Economists often treat a rise in the number of people working from home as purely good for city centers' air quality, since fewer commuters drive in. A study of three cities by transport researcher Hana Morikawa complicates that picture. She found that remote workers made fewer commuting trips but more short car trips during the day, to cafés, gyms, and shops near home, so that total car travel fell far less than expected. The benefit, in other words, was real but modest.

The following text is from a novel. Maurice, an aging violinist, is listening to his former student perform.

The girl played the opening exactly as he had taught her, every bow stroke where he had placed it twenty years before. Maurice found himself nodding, then frowning. It was perfect, and it was his, and he wished it were neither. When, in the slow movement, she lingered on a note he would never have held, he leaned forward in his seat for the first time all evening.

For decades, biologists assumed that the bright colors of poison dart frogs evolved solely as a warning to predators. Researcher Elena Basurto noticed, however, that in several populations the brightest males also won the most mates, even where predators were scarce. Her experiments showed that females preferred brighter males when given a choice. Basurto does not dispute that the colors deter predators; she argues that sexual selection has amplified them beyond what a warning alone would require.

Translators of poetry face a familiar dilemma: a version that keeps the exact meaning of each line usually loses the original's rhythm and rhyme, while a version that keeps the music must change the words. Translator Yuki Tanabe's solution is, in a sense, to refuse the choice. She publishes two translations of each poem on facing pages, one literal and one musical, and invites readers to move between them.

When the museum reopened its renovated gallery of medieval manuscripts, it lowered the lighting to a dim glow. Visitors complained that they could barely see the illustrations. Curators replied that the pigments in the pages fade with every hour of exposure, and that the books had already survived seven centuries partly because they had spent most of them closed. The museum has since added large digital screens beside each case, where visitors can zoom in on brightly lit photographs of every page.

The following text is from an essay about walking.

We speak of 'getting somewhere' as if the point of a walk were its end. But the child dawdling home from school knows better. She inspects a beetle, balances along the curb, takes the long way past the dog that always barks. Arriving is merely the price she pays for the walk.

Most studies of urban birdsong report that birds in noisy cities sing at higher pitches than their rural relatives, presumably so their songs are not drowned out by low-frequency traffic rumble. Ornithologist Priya Natarajan wondered whether this was a learned adjustment or an inherited one. She raised chicks of city birds in quiet aviaries and found that, as adults, they sang at the same pitches as rural birds. The higher pitches, she concluded, are learned from the singing birds around them rather than inherited.

Supporters of a four-day school week argue that it saves money on transport and heating. A district that adopted the schedule found savings of about two percent of its budget. That figure, while not trivial, was far smaller than many parents had been led to expect. Meanwhile, families reported new costs, such as childcare on the fifth day, that did not appear in the district's accounts at all.

The following text is from a memoir. The narrator describes her grandmother.

My grandmother never threw anything away. Rubber bands lived on the doorknob, bread bags were folded into neat squares, and the jar of mismatched buttons filled a whole shelf. As a child I found this embarrassing. It was years before I understood that she had once lived through a winter when a button could not be bought at any price.