SAT R&W W16: Transitions — Mixed Practice Under Time

Honey never spoils: jars sealed in ancient tombs have been opened and found edible. Its sugar concentration is so high that any bacterium landing in it loses water and dies. honey diluted with water ferments within days, which is how mead has been made for thousands of years.

Concrete gains most of its strength in the first month but continues to harden for years, and cores drilled from bridges built in the 1930s test stronger than the same mix did when new. the steel embedded in that concrete corrodes over the same decades, so the structure as a whole is not getting stronger.

Most of a violin's sound comes from the wooden body rather than the strings, and makers select spruce for the top by tapping boards and listening. instruments built from boards chosen by measured stiffness alone are consistently rated lower by players than those chosen by ear.

A census taken during a war undercounts young men, who are away, and overcounts them a decade later when the same cohort is recorded at home. Demographers know this and correct for it. the correction depends on knowing how many were away, which is exactly the figure the census failed to collect.

Cork is harvested by stripping the outer bark from a living oak, which regrows it over about nine years. The tree is not cut and can be stripped a dozen times in its life. cork oak woodlands are among the few commercial crops that support roughly the same bird populations as unmanaged forest.

Machine translation of legal contracts has improved to the point where a first draft can be produced in seconds. Firms that have tried it report that checking the draft takes about as long as translating from scratch used to. the errors it makes are fluent and plausible, and a checker must read every clause with the attention a translator would have given it.