SAT R&W 24: Text Structure and Purpose — Mixed Practice

Wikipedia's articles are usually judged by their accuracy, and by that measure they do well. The more revealing document, however, is the talk page attached to each article, where editors argue about wording for years. A reader who wants to know which claims are contested will learn more there in ten minutes than from the article itself.

A rainwater tank on a roof loses very little to evaporation, costs almost nothing to run and needs no permission from anyone. It also cannot supply a household through a dry season. The technologies that scale badly are often the ones that spread fastest, because anybody can start one without waiting. Cities that dismissed roof tanks as insufficient found them installed anyway, one house at a time.

Every few years someone proposes replacing school grades with written comments, and every few years the proposal is abandoned. The comments take four times as long to write and are read by fewer parents. Ultimately the grade survives not because anyone defends it but because nothing else fits into the time a teacher actually has.

Ergonomists studying kitchen work in the 1920s timed every step a cook took and rearranged the room to shorten the total. The resulting layouts saved real distance. What the studies did not record is that a cook standing in one place all afternoon grows tired in a different way, and later designers began putting some of the walking back.

Zilola had assumed the archive would be quiet. It was, but not in the way she expected: the silence had a shape to it, made of paper being turned three tables away and a fan somewhere behind the shelves. By the second week she could tell, without looking up, whether the reader opposite had found what he was looking for. She had come to write about the documents and was learning the room instead.

The standard account of the Silk Road describes caravans travelling from China to the Mediterranean. Very few did. Goods moved in short relays between neighbouring markets, changing hands many times, and the merchant who bought silk in Samarkand had usually never seen the place it was made. Distance was covered by the goods, not by the people.