SAT R&W 90: Mixed Module Practice 1 — Craft and Structure Under Time

The first maps of the sea floor drawn from sonar data were published as shaded relief, so that ridges and trenches appeared to be lit from one side. The convention was borrowed from land cartography and had no basis in anything a diver could see, since no light reaches those depths. It was adopted because a reader's eye reads shadow as shape without being taught to, making the maps immediately to people who had never handled sonar.

The court records give the miller's holding as three acres and a mean house by the water, and value the whole at less than the smith's tools alone. The clerk who wrote them used the same word for the holdings of four other families in the same entry.

Traffic engineers once judged a junction by how many vehicles it could pass in an hour, and the safest-looking designs were those with the clearest sightlines. Collision records at junctions rebuilt on that principle did not improve, and at some of them worsened. The explanation now offered is that a driver who can see far ahead drives faster, and that the margin gained by the sightline is spent on speed.

Every guidebook to the old quarter reproduces the same photograph of the covered bridge, taken from the eastern bank at about four in the afternoon. A visitor standing on the western bank at nine in the morning will not recognise the place. The bridge is the same; what the photograph records is one hour of one kind of light, repeated until it has become the thing itself.

Text 1

Folk songs collected in the nineteenth century were written down by editors who heard them sung. Where a singer's line did not scan, the editor mended it. The printed collections are therefore a record of what educated collectors thought a folk song ought to sound like.

Text 2

Wax-cylinder recordings made a generation later can be compared with printed texts of the same songs taken from the same villages. The recorded singers depart from regular metre constantly — and they depart in the same places from one village to the next, which is not what careless singing looks like.

A conductor rehearsing an unfamiliar orchestra spends the first hour not on the difficult passages but on a simple chord, played and replayed until the players are listening to one another rather than to him. The hour looks wasted to anyone watching the clock. What it buys is a habit that makes the remaining rehearsals : the difficult passages then take half the time they would otherwise have taken.