College Board PSAT-READING Exam
Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test - Reading (Page 8 )

The Amazonian wilderness harbors the greatest number of species on this planet and is an irreplaceable resource for present and future generations. Amazonia is crucial for maintaining global climate and genetic resources, and its forest and rivers provide vital sources of food, building materials, pharmaceuticals, and water needed by wildlife and humanity. The Los Amigos watershed in the state of Madre de Dios, southeastern Peru, is representative of the pristine lowland moist forest once found throughout most of upper Amazonian South America. Threats to tropical forests occur in the form of fishing, hunting, gold mining, timber extraction, impending road construction, and slash-and-burn agriculture. The Los Amigos watershed, consisting of 1.6 million hectares (3.95 million acres), still offers the increasingly scarce opportunity to study rainforest as it was before the disruptive encroachment of modern human civilization. Because of its relatively pristine condition and the immediate need to justify it as a conservation zone, this area deserves intensive, long-term projects aimed at botanical training, ecotourism, biological inventory, and information synthesis. On July 24, 2001, the government of Peru and the Amazon Conservation Association signed a contractual agreement creating the first long-term permanently renewable conservation concession. To our knowledge this is the first such agreement to be implemented in the world. The conservation concession protects 340,000 acres of old-growth Amazonian forest in the Los Amigos watershed, which is located in southeastern Peru. This watershed protects the eastern flank of Manu National Park and is part of the lowland forest corridor that links it to Bahuaja-Sonene National Park. The Los Amigos conservation concession will serve as a mechanism for the development of a regional center of excellence in natural forest management and biodiversity science. Several major projects are being implemented at the Los Amigos Conservation Area. Louise Emmons is initiating studies of mammal diversity and ecology in the Los Amigos area. Other projects involve studies of the diversity of arthropods, amphibians, reptiles, and birds. Robin Foster has conducted botanical studies at Los Amigos, resulting in the labeling of hundreds of plant species along two kilometers of trail in upland and lowland forest. Michael Goulding is leading a fisheries and aquatic ecology program, which aims to document the diversity of fish, their ecologies, and their habitats in the Los Amigos area and the Madre de Dios watershed in general. With support from the Amazon Conservation Association, and in collaboration with U.S. and Peruvian colleagues, the Botany of the Los Amigos project has been initiated. At Los Amigos, we are attempting to develop a system of preservation, sustainability, and scientific research; a marriage between various disciplines, from human ecology to economic botany, product marketing to forest management. The complexity of the ecosystem will best be understood through a multidisciplinary approach, and improved understanding of the complexity will lead to better management. The future of these forests will depend on sustainable management and development of alternative practices and products that do not require irreversible destruction. The botanical project will provide a foundation of information that is essential to other programs at Los Amigos. By combining botanical studies with fisheries and mammology, we will better understand plant/animal interactions. By providing names, the botanical program will facilitate accurate communication about plants and the animals that use them. Included in this scenario are humans, as we will dedicate time to people-plant interactions in order to learn what plants are used by people in the Los Amigos area, and what plants could potentially be used by people. To be informed, we must develop knowledge. To develop knowledge, we must collect, organize, and disseminate information. In this sense, botanical information has conservation value. Before we can use plant-based products from the forest, we must know what species are useful and we must know their names. We must be able to identify them, to know where they occur in the forest, how many of them exist, how they are pollinated and when they produce fruit (or other useful products). Aside from understanding the species as they occur locally at Los Amigos, we must have information about their overall distribution in tropical America in order to better understand and manage the distribution, variation, and viability of their genetic diversity. This involves a more complete understanding of the species through studies in the field and herbarium. The work of Louise Emmons, Robin Foster, and Michael Goulding (in the fourth paragraph) are employed in the passage as

F Scott Fitzgerald was a prominent American writer of the twentieth century. This passage comes from one of his short stories and tells the story of a young John Unger leaving home for boarding school. John T. Unger came from a family that had been well known in Hades a small town on the Mississippi River for several generations. John's father had held the amateur golf championship through many a heated contest; Mrs. Unger was known "from hot-box to hot-bed," as the local phrase went, for her political addresses; and young John T. Unger, who had just turned sixteen, had danced all the latest dances from New York before he put on long trousers. And now, for a certain time, he was to be away from home That respect for a New England education which is the bane of all provincial places, which drains them yearly of their most promising young men, had seized upon his parents.
Nothing would suit them but that he should go to St. Midas's School near Boston--Hades was too small to hold their darling and gifted son. Now in Hades--as you know if you ever have been there the names of the more fashionable preparatory schools and colleges mean very little. The inhabitants have been so long out of the world that, though they make a show of keeping up-to-date in dress and manners and literature, they depend to a great extent on hearsay, and a function that in Hades would be considered elaborate would doubtless be hailed by a Chicago beef-princess as "perhaps a little tacky." John T. Unger was on the eve of departure. Mrs. Unger, with maternal fatuity, packed his trunks full of linen suits and electric fans, and Mr. Unger presented his son with an asbestos pocket-book stuffed with money.
"Remember, you are always welcome here," he said. "You can be sure, boy, that we'll keep the home fires burning." "I know," answered John huskily.
"Don't forget who you are and where you come from," continued his father proudly, "and you can do nothing to harm you. You are an Unger--from Hades."
So the old man and the young shook hands, and John walked away with tears streaming from his eyes.
Ten minutes later he had passed outside the city limits and he stopped to glance back for the last time.
Over the gates the old-fashioned Victorian motto seemed strangely attractive to him. His father had tried time and time again to have it changed to something with a little more push and verve about it, such as "Hades--Your Opportunity," or else a plain "Welcome" sign set over a hearty handshake pricked out in electric lights. The old motto was a little depressing, Mr. Unger had thought--but now.
So John took his look and then set his face resolutely toward his destination. And, as he turned away, the lights of Hades against the sky seemed full of a warm and passionate beauty.
The phrase "maternal fatuity", suggests that

F Scott Fitzgerald was a prominent American writer of the twentieth century. This passage comes from one of his short stories and tells the story of a young John Unger leaving home for boarding school. John T. Unger came from a family that had been well known in Hades a small town on the Mississippi River for several generations. John's father had held the amateur golf championship through many a heated contest; Mrs. Unger was known "from hot-box to hot-bed," as the local phrase went, for her political addresses; and young John T. Unger, who had just turned sixteen, had danced all the latest dances from New York before he put on long trousers. And now, for a certain time, he was to be away from home That respect for a New England education which is the bane of all provincial places, which drains them yearly of their most promising young men, had seized upon his parents. Nothing would suit them but that he should go to St. Midas's School near Boston--Hades was too small to hold their darling and gifted son.
Now in Hades--as you know if you ever have been there the names of the more fashionable preparatory schools and colleges mean very little. The inhabitants have been so long out of the world that, though
they make a show of keeping up-to-date in dress and manners and literature, they depend to a great extent on hearsay, and a function that in Hades would be considered elaborate would doubtless be hailed by a Chicago beef-princess as "perhaps a little tacky."
John T. Unger was on the eve of departure. Mrs. Unger, with maternal fatuity, packed his trunks full of linen suits and electric fans, and Mr. Unger presented his son with an asbestos pocket-book stuffed with money. "Remember, you are always welcome here," he said. "You can be sure, boy, that we'll keep the home fires burning." "I know," answered John huskily.
"Don't forget who you are and where you come from," continued his father proudly, "and you can do nothing to harm you. You are an Unger--from Hades."
So the old man and the young shook hands, and John walked away with tears streaming from his eyes.
Ten minutes later he had passed outside the city limits and he stopped to glance back for the last time.
Over the gates the old-fashioned Victorian motto seemed strangely attractive to him. His father had tried time and time again to have it changed to something with a little more push and verve about it, such as "Hades--Your Opportunity," or else a plain "Welcome" sign set over a hearty handshake pricked out in electric lights. The old motto was a little depressing, Mr. Unger had thought--but now.
So John took his look and then set his face resolutely toward his destination. And, as he turned away, the lights of Hades against the sky seemed full of a warm and passionate beauty.
The tone of sentence "their darling and gifted son" can best be described as

Big earthquakes are naturally occurring events well outside the powers of humans to create or stop. An earthquake is caused by a sudden slip on a fault. Stresses in the earth's outer layer push the side of the fault together. The friction across the surface of the fault holds the rocks together so they do not slip immediately when pushed sideways. Eventually enough stress builds up and the rocks slip suddenly, releasing energy in waves that travel through the rock to cause the shaking that we feel during an earthquake. Earthquakes typically originate several tens of miles below the surface of the earth. It takes many years--decades to centuries--to build up enough stress to make a large earthquake, and the fault may be tens to hundreds of miles long. The scale and force necessary to produce earthquakes are well beyond our daily lives. Likewise, people cannot prevent earthquakes from happening or stop them once they've started--giant nuclear explosions at shallow depths, like those in some movies, won't actually stop an earthquake.
The two most important variables affecting earthquake damage are the intensity of ground shaking cased by the quake and the quality of the engineering of structures in the region. The level of shaking, in turn, is controlled by the proximity of the earthquake source to the affected region and the types of rocks that seismic waves pass through en route (particularly those at or near the ground surface). Generally, the bigger and closer the earthquake, the stronger the shaking. But there have been large earthquakes with very little damage either because they caused little shaking or because the buildings were built to withstand that shaking. In other cases, moderate earthquakes have caused significant damage either because the shaking was locally amplified or more likely because the structures were poorly engineered. The amount of shaking during an earthquake is determined by

Big earthquakes are naturally occurring events well outside the powers of humans to create or stop. An earthquake is caused by a sudden slip on a fault. Stresses in the earth's outer layer push the side of the fault together. The friction across the surface of the fault holds the rocks together so they do not slip immediately when pushed sideways. Eventually enough stress builds up and the rocks slip suddenly, releasing energy in waves that travel through the rock to cause the shaking that we feel during an earthquake. Earthquakes typically originate several tens of miles below the surface of the earth. It takes many years--decades to centuries--to build up enough stress to make a large earthquake, and the fault may be tens to hundreds of miles long. The scale and force necessary to produce earthquakes are well beyond our daily lives. Likewise, people cannot prevent earthquakes from happening or stop them once they've started--giant nuclear explosions at shallow depths, like those in some movies, won't actually stop an earthquake.
The two most important variables affecting earthquake damage are the intensity of ground shaking cased by the quake and the quality of the engineering of structures in the region. The level of shaking, in turn, is controlled by the proximity of the earthquake source to the affected region and the types of rocks that seismic waves pass through en route (particularly those at or near the ground surface). Generally, the bigger and closer the earthquake, the stronger the shaking. But there have been large earthquakes with very little damage either because they caused little shaking or because the buildings were built to withstand that shaking. In other cases, moderate earthquakes have caused significant damage either because the shaking was locally amplified or more likely because the structures were poorly engineered.
This passage was most likely written to