SAT R&W 92: A Full Reading Half-Module — 13 Questions Under Time

The workshop that made the town's clock in 1690 also made its weathervane, its bell frame and the iron gates of the church. Nothing in the accounts distinguishes one commission from another; all are entered as work in iron, at rates that vary with the weight of metal and not with the difficulty of the job. To the men who paid for them, the clock and the gates were kinds of work.

The engineer's report on the bridge is four pages long and contains no recommendation. It rehearses the history of the crossing, lists the loads the deck has carried since 1954, and stops. The council that commissioned it had asked whether the bridge should be closed.

Museums label a fossil with the place it was found, and visitors read the label as though it named the animal's home. Most fossils formed where a carcass came to rest, which for a river system may be many kilometres downstream of where the animal lived and in a habitat it never entered. The label is accurate about the rock and silent about the animal.

The choir had sung the piece for thirty years and knew it too well. At the first rehearsal the new director handed out a version with the bar lines removed. Half the singers could not begin at all, and those who could sang more slowly than they ever had with the bars in place. By the third week they were phrasing the line by its words rather than by its beats, which was what he had wanted.

Text 1

Anonymous medieval building accounts rarely name a designer, and historians have taken this to mean that the master mason of a cathedral was regarded as a craftsman among others rather than as an author of the work.

Text 2

The accounts name nobody at all — not the glazier, not the carpenter, not the man who supplied the lead. They are records of payment, kept for auditors, and a name appears in them only where a debt had to be chased. Silence in such a document is evidence about the document.

Bees returning to a hive perform a movement whose angle encodes the direction of a food source. The angle is measured against gravity inside the dark hive and read by the watching bees as an angle against the sun outside. Since the sun moves, a dance performed an hour after the forager returned would send its audience to the wrong place — and a bee kept waiting adjusts the angle as it waits.

Feruza had planned the argument on the way over and delivered it at the door, and her brother heard it out without interrupting, which she had not expected and had no answer for. When he finally said that she was probably right, she found she was still holding the second half of what she had prepared, and that she was not going to be able to put it down.

A survey of household water use fitted meters to individual taps in forty homes for a year. The largest single use was not bathing, cooking or laundry but the cold tap at the kitchen sink, run while waiting for the water to reach drinking temperature. Households with a chilled tap or a jug in the refrigerator used, on average, a fifth less water in total than those without.

While studying a story about a woman who has taken over her mother's seed business, a student has written the following claim:

Zebo keeps her mother's methods not because she believes in them but because she has not yet found the moment to change them.

Soils under old hedgerows hold more carbon per cubic metre than soils in the middle of the same fields. Researchers proposed that the difference is built up by the hedge itself — by roots and leaf litter adding carbon year after year — rather than reflecting ground that was always richer and was left as hedge for that reason.

Deer browse the low shrubs in which several woodland birds nest. One woodland was fenced to keep deer out; a neighbouring one was left open. The survey team reported that fencing had improved not just the number of successful nests but the proportion of attempts that succeeded:

A library digitised its card catalogue and kept the cards. Within a year the staff had returned to the cards for one purpose: the cards carry pencil annotations, added by librarians over decades, recording which books were asked for together. The database holds every field the cards held. What it does not hold is

Two clocks of the same design, one kept at sea level and one carried to the top of a mountain, disagree by a few billionths of a second a day, the higher clock running faster. The disagreement is the same whichever pair of clocks is used and whichever mountain, and it matches in size what the theory predicts for that difference in altitude. Since the clocks are identical and the effect follows the height rather than the instrument, the difference