SAT R&W 33: Cross-Text Connections — Mixed Practice

Text 1

Birds in cities sing at a higher pitch than the same species in woodland. Low frequencies are swallowed by traffic noise, so a bird singing low in a city is not heard; the higher song carries. City populations have adjusted their song to the noise around them.

Text 2

High song also travels better among hard flat surfaces, and it is produced by birds perched high up. City birds sing from roofs and aerials because there is little else; woodland birds sing from within foliage. Perch height alone predicts pitch about as well as noise does.

Text 1

The diary is the most trustworthy of historical sources. Unlike a memoir, it is written before the outcome is known, and unlike a letter, it is addressed to nobody who must be impressed.

Text 2

Nineteenth-century diarists knew their volumes would be read by children and executors, and many wrote with that reader in view; a number left instructions for which years were to be destroyed. The absence of an addressee is an assumption, not a feature of the form.

Text 1

Open-plan offices were introduced to increase the number of unplanned conversations between colleagues. Removing walls puts people in one another's sight, and being in sight is the first condition of speaking.

Text 2

When two firms moved to open floors, electronic badges recorded face-to-face interaction falling by roughly two thirds, while messaging between the same people rose. Removed walls did put employees in sight of each other. What people appear to have done in response was withdraw behind headphones and a screen.

Text 1

A language dies when its last fluent speaker dies, and the count of living languages falls accordingly. On current rates a large share of the world's languages will be gone within the century.

Text 2

Counting fluent speakers misses what is happening in several communities where the last such speakers died decades ago. Children there are now learning the language from recordings and grammars, and using it daily among themselves. Whether the result is the same language is a question worth asking; that people are speaking it is not in doubt.

Text 1

Public monuments should be left standing whatever their subject. A city that removes them loses the record of what it once honoured, and a generation that never sees the statue never has to reckon with the fact that it was put up.

Text 2

Nothing about a plinth in the main square records that a debate ever took place. The statues that have been moved to museums are seen by more people now than when they stood outdoors, and each is displayed beside the argument that moved it. Leaving one in place preserves the object and loses the history.

Text 1

Wind turbines are often opposed on the ground that they kill birds. The figures are real, and a badly sited array on a migration route can kill a great many.

Text 2

Siting is the whole of the matter. Where arrays have been placed off migration corridors and fitted with detection systems that stop the blades when a large bird approaches, recorded deaths fall to a small fraction of the original figures. The objection is to particular turbines in particular places.