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LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is adapted from the essay "Rough Water" by David McGlynn (©2008 by David McGlynn).

(1) One of my best races could hardly be called a race at all. I was a senior in high school, gunning to qualify for the USA Junior Nationals. The previous summer I had missed the cut by less than a second in the mile, and just the day before, at my high school regional meet, I had come within three-tenths of a second in the 500-yard freestyle. The qualification time was 4:39.69; I swam a 4:39.95. The next day, Sunday, I drove with my mother to the far side of Houston where a time trial was being held ­ an informal, unadvertised event thrown together at the last minute. The only races swum were those the swimmers requested to swim. Most were short, flapping sprints in which swimmers attempted to shave off a few one-hundredths of a second. I didn't have the courage to face the mile, and since I'd struck out in the 500 the day before, I decided to swim the 1,000-yard freestyle. Forty lengths of the pool. It was a race I'd swum fast enough to believe that given the right confluence of circumstances ­ cold water, an aggressive heat, an energetic meet ­ I could make the cut. I had fifteen seconds to drop to qualify.

(2) By the time I stood up on the blocks, I was not only the only one in the race, I was practically the only one in the natatorium. The horn sounded and I dove in. I was angry and disheartened at having missed the cut the day before and I had little belief that I could go any faster today.

(3) About six hundred yards in, my coach started to pace. I stayed steady on, not in a hurry, not about to get my hopes up. In my mind, I had already missed the time. Then a boy from a rival high school, whom I hardly knew, unfolded his legs and climbed down from the bleachers and started to cheer. He squatted low to the water and pointed his finger toward the end of the pool, as if to say, That's where you're going, now hurry up. I thought, If he's cheering, maybe I'm close.

(4) Sometimes a moment comes along when the world slows down, and though everything else moves around us at the same frenetic speed, we're afforded the opportunity to reflect in real-time rather than in retrospect. It is as though we slip into a worm-hole in the fabric of time and space, travel into the past and then back again to the present in the same instant. That morning, swimming, I remembered a day in late September the year before, the last day my swim team had use of an outdoor pool. All summer long my teammates and I swam under an open sky. After this day we would spend the rest of the season in a dank and moldy indoor pool.

(5) The triangular backstroke flags were strung across the lanes and the adjacent diving well. My teammates liked to run down the long cement deck, jump out over the diving well, and try to grab hold of the line. Many of them could jump far enough to make it. I could not, though I tried every day. I tried that day, and missed. Since I would not have another shot until May, I decided to try again. I squared up and ran, my feet wet against the pavement, and just as my foot hit the water's edge, one of my teammates called out "Jump!" I bent my knees and pushed off hard and got my hand around the flag line. I pulled the whole thing into the water. Autumn was coming and I wondered if there was a metaphor in what I had just done; a fortune folded inside a cookie: my greatest effort would come when I was down to my last opportunity.

(6) Now it was March and I was down to my last opportunity, thinking about that day and hearing the word "Jump!" as my eyes followed the finger of the boy pointing me onward. What I understood ­ not later, but right then, in the water ­ was how little this swim added up to in the world. I had spent more than a year training for this one swim, and when it was finished the world would be no different than before it began. If no one else cared, then the swim was mine alone. It mattered because it was the task before me now, the thing I wanted now. Swimming, I had long understood, is a constant choice between the now and the later: exhaustion now for the sake of fitness later, all those Friday nights spent in the pool in pursuit of an end that seemed always one step farther on. I was out of laters, this was the end, and I made my choice. I cashed in the energy I set aside for climbing out of the pool and unfolding my towel and tying my shoes. I've never sprinted harder in my life, not before and not since. I hit the wall. I knew by instinct, by the spasm of my tendons and the ache in my bones, before I ever turned toward the clock or heard my coach scream, that I had made it.

When the narrator heard "Jump!" in his mind while swimming (paragraph 6), he was most likely remembering:

SOCIAL SCIENCE: Passage A is adapted from the book Apple: A Global History by Erika Janik (©2011 by Erika Janik). Passage B is adapted from the article "The Fatherland of Apples" by Gary Nabhan (©2008 by The Orion Society).

Passage A by Erika Janik

(1) In early September of 1929, Nikolai Vavilov, famed Russian plant explorer and botanist, arrived in the central Asian crossroads of Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. Climbing up the Zailijskei Alatau slopes of the Tian Shan mountains separating Kazakhstan from China, Vavilov found thickets of wild apples stretching in every direction, an extensive forest of fruit coloured russet red, creamy yellow, and vibrant pink. Nowhere else in the world do apples grow thickly as a forest or with such incredible diversity. Amazed by what he saw, Vavilov wrote: `I could see with my own eyes that I had stumbled upon the centre of origin for the apple.'

(2) With extraordinary prescience and few facts, Vavilov suggested that the wild apples he had seen growing in the Tian Shan were in fact the ancestors of the modern apple. He tracked the whole process of domestication to the mountains near Alma-Ata, where the wild apples looked awfully similar to the apples found at the local grocery. Unfortunately, Vavilov's theory would remain mostly unknown for decades.

(3) Exactly where the apple came from had long been a matter of contention and discussion among people who study plant origins. Vavilov, imprisoned by Joseph Stalin in 1940 for work in plant genetics that challenged Stalin's beliefs, died in a Leningrad prison in 1943. Only after the fall of communism in Russia did Vavilov's theory, made more than half a century earlier, become widely recognized.

(4) As Vavilov predicted, it's now believed that all of the apples known today are direct descendents of the wild apples that evolved in Kazakhstan. Apples do not comprise all of Kazakhstan's plant bounty, however. At least 157 other plant species found in Kazakhstan are either direct precursors or close wild relatives of domesticated crops, including 90 per cent of all cultivated temperate fruits. The name of Kazakhstan's largest city, Alma-Ata, or Almaty as it is known today, even translates as `Father of Apples' or, according to some, `where the apples are'. So this news about the apple's origins was probably no surprise to residents, particularly in towns where apple seedlings are known to grow up through the cracks in the pavements. The apple has been evolving in Central Asia for upwards of 4.5 million years.

Passage B by Gary Nabhan

(5) Nikolai Vavilov is widely regarded as the world's greatest plant explorer, for he made over 250,000 seed, fruit, and tuber collections on five continents. Kazakh conservationist Tatiana Salova credits him with first recognizing that Kazakhstan was the center of origin and diversity for apples. "It is not surprising," she concedes, "that when Vavilov first came to Kazakhstan to look at plants he was so amazed. Nowhere else in the world do apples grow as a forest. That is one reason why he stated that this is probably where the apple was born, this was its birthing grounds."

(6) Discerning where a crop originated and where the greatest portion of its genetic diversity remains extant may seem esoteric to the uninitiated. But knowing where exactly our food comes from ­ geographically, culturally, and genetically ­ is of paramount importance to the rather small portion of our own species that regularly concerns itself with the issue of food security. The variety of foods that we keep in our fields, orchards, and, secondarily, in our seed banks is critically important in protecting our food supply from plagues, crop diseases, catastrophic weather, and political upheavals. Vavilov himself was personally motivated to become an agricultural scientist by witnessing several famines during the czarist era of Russia. He hoped that by combining a more diverse seed portfolio with knowledge from both traditional farmers and collaborating scientists, the number of Russian families suffering from hunger might be reduced.

(7) In a very real sense, the forests of wild foragers and the orchards of traditional farmers in such centers of crop diversity are the wellsprings of diversity that plant breeders, pathologists, and entomologists return to every time our society whittles the resilience in our fields and orchards down to its breaking point.

(8) And whittle away we have done. Here in North America, according to apple historian Dan Bussey, some 16,000 apple varieties have been named and nurtured over the last four centuries. By 1904, however, the identities and sources of only 7,098 of those varieties could be discerned by USDA scientist W. H. Ragan. Since then, some 6,121 apple varieties ­ 86.2 percent of Ragan's 1904 inventory ­ have been lost from nursery catalogs, farmers' markets, and from the American table.

The author's use of the words and phrases "thickets," "stretching in every direction," and "extensive forest" (paragraph 1) in Passage A most nearly serves to emphasize which of the following points?

SOCIAL SCIENCE: Passage A is adapted from the book Apple: A Global History by Erika Janik (©2011 by Erika Janik). Passage B is adapted from the article "The Fatherland of Apples" by Gary Nabhan (©2008 by The Orion Society).

Passage A by Erika Janik

(1) In early September of 1929, Nikolai Vavilov, famed Russian plant explorer and botanist, arrived in the central Asian crossroads of Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. Climbing up the Zailijskei Alatau slopes of the Tian Shan mountains separating Kazakhstan from China, Vavilov found thickets of wild apples stretching in every direction, an extensive forest of fruit coloured russet red, creamy yellow, and vibrant pink. Nowhere else in the world do apples grow thickly as a forest or with such incredible diversity. Amazed by what he saw, Vavilov wrote: `I could see with my own eyes that I had stumbled upon the centre of origin for the apple.'

(2) With extraordinary prescience and few facts, Vavilov suggested that the wild apples he had seen growing in the Tian Shan were in fact the ancestors of the modern apple. He tracked the whole process of domestication to the mountains near Alma-Ata, where the wild apples looked awfully similar to the apples found at the local grocery. Unfortunately, Vavilov's theory would remain mostly unknown for decades.

(3) Exactly where the apple came from had long been a matter of contention and discussion among people who study plant origins. Vavilov, imprisoned by Joseph Stalin in 1940 for work in plant genetics that challenged Stalin's beliefs, died in a Leningrad prison in 1943. Only after the fall of communism in Russia did Vavilov's theory, made more than half a century earlier, become widely recognized.

(4) As Vavilov predicted, it's now believed that all of the apples known today are direct descendents of the wild apples that evolved in Kazakhstan. Apples do not comprise all of Kazakhstan's plant bounty, however. At least 157 other plant species found in Kazakhstan are either direct precursors or close wild relatives of domesticated crops, including 90 per cent of all cultivated temperate fruits. The name of Kazakhstan's largest city, Alma-Ata, or Almaty as it is known today, even translates as `Father of Apples' or, according to some, `where the apples are'. So this news about the apple's origins was probably no surprise to residents, particularly in towns where apple seedlings are known to grow up through the cracks in the pavements. The apple has been evolving in Central Asia for upwards of 4.5 million years.

Passage B by Gary Nabhan

(5) Nikolai Vavilov is widely regarded as the world's greatest plant explorer, for he made over 250,000 seed, fruit, and tuber collections on five continents. Kazakh conservationist Tatiana Salova credits him with first recognizing that Kazakhstan was the center of origin and diversity for apples. "It is not surprising," she concedes, "that when Vavilov first came to Kazakhstan to look at plants he was so amazed. Nowhere else in the world do apples grow as a forest. That is one reason why he stated that this is probably where the apple was born, this was its birthing grounds."

(6) Discerning where a crop originated and where the greatest portion of its genetic diversity remains extant may seem esoteric to the uninitiated. But knowing where exactly our food comes from ­ geographically, culturally, and genetically ­ is of paramount importance to the rather small portion of our own species that regularly concerns itself with the issue of food security. The variety of foods that we keep in our fields, orchards, and, secondarily, in our seed banks is critically important in protecting our food supply from plagues, crop diseases, catastrophic weather, and political upheavals. Vavilov himself was personally motivated to become an agricultural scientist by witnessing several famines during the czarist era of Russia. He hoped that by combining a more diverse seed portfolio with knowledge from both traditional farmers and collaborating scientists, the number of Russian families suffering from hunger might be reduced.

(7) In a very real sense, the forests of wild foragers and the orchards of traditional farmers in such centers of crop diversity are the wellsprings of diversity that plant breeders, pathologists, and entomologists return to every time our society whittles the resilience in our fields and orchards down to its breaking point.

(8) And whittle away we have done. Here in North America, according to apple historian Dan Bussey, some 16,000 apple varieties have been named and nurtured over the last four centuries. By 1904, however, the identities and sources of only 7,098 of those varieties could be discerned by USDA scientist W. H. Ragan. Since then, some 6,121 apple varieties ­ 86.2 percent of Ragan's 1904 inventory ­ have been lost from nursery catalogs, farmers' markets, and from the American table.

The author of Passage A most likely states that the wild apples growing in the Tian Shan looked like apples found at the local grocery store to support the point that:

SOCIAL SCIENCE: Passage A is adapted from the book Apple: A Global History by Erika Janik (©2011 by Erika Janik). Passage B is adapted from the article "The Fatherland of Apples" by Gary Nabhan (©2008 by The Orion Society).

Passage A by Erika Janik

(1) In early September of 1929, Nikolai Vavilov, famed Russian plant explorer and botanist, arrived in the central Asian crossroads of Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. Climbing up the Zailijskei Alatau slopes of the Tian Shan mountains separating Kazakhstan from China, Vavilov found thickets of wild apples stretching in every direction, an extensive forest of fruit coloured russet red, creamy yellow, and vibrant pink. Nowhere else in the world do apples grow thickly as a forest or with such incredible diversity. Amazed by what he saw, Vavilov wrote: `I could see with my own eyes that I had stumbled upon the centre of origin for the apple.'

(2) With extraordinary prescience and few facts, Vavilov suggested that the wild apples he had seen growing in the Tian Shan were in fact the ancestors of the modern apple. He tracked the whole process of domestication to the mountains near Alma-Ata, where the wild apples looked awfully similar to the apples found at the local grocery. Unfortunately, Vavilov's theory would remain mostly unknown for decades.

(3) Exactly where the apple came from had long been a matter of contention and discussion among people who study plant origins. Vavilov, imprisoned by Joseph Stalin in 1940 for work in plant genetics that challenged Stalin's beliefs, died in a Leningrad prison in 1943. Only after the fall of communism in Russia did Vavilov's theory, made more than half a century earlier, become widely recognized.

(4) As Vavilov predicted, it's now believed that all of the apples known today are direct descendents of the wild apples that evolved in Kazakhstan. Apples do not comprise all of Kazakhstan's plant bounty, however. At least 157 other plant species found in Kazakhstan are either direct precursors or close wild relatives of domesticated crops, including 90 per cent of all cultivated temperate fruits. The name of Kazakhstan's largest city, Alma-Ata, or Almaty as it is known today, even translates as `Father of Apples' or, according to some, `where the apples are'. So this news about the apple's origins was probably no surprise to residents, particularly in towns where apple seedlings are known to grow up through the cracks in the pavements. The apple has been evolving in Central Asia for upwards of 4.5 million years.

Passage B by Gary Nabhan

(5) Nikolai Vavilov is widely regarded as the world's greatest plant explorer, for he made over 250,000 seed, fruit, and tuber collections on five continents. Kazakh conservationist Tatiana Salova credits him with first recognizing that Kazakhstan was the center of origin and diversity for apples. "It is not surprising," she concedes, "that when Vavilov first came to Kazakhstan to look at plants he was so amazed. Nowhere else in the world do apples grow as a forest. That is one reason why he stated that this is probably where the apple was born, this was its birthing grounds."

(6) Discerning where a crop originated and where the greatest portion of its genetic diversity remains extant may seem esoteric to the uninitiated. But knowing where exactly our food comes from ­ geographically, culturally, and genetically ­ is of paramount importance to the rather small portion of our own species that regularly concerns itself with the issue of food security. The variety of foods that we keep in our fields, orchards, and, secondarily, in our seed banks is critically important in protecting our food supply from plagues, crop diseases, catastrophic weather, and political upheavals. Vavilov himself was personally motivated to become an agricultural scientist by witnessing several famines during the czarist era of Russia. He hoped that by combining a more diverse seed portfolio with knowledge from both traditional farmers and collaborating scientists, the number of Russian families suffering from hunger might be reduced.

(7) In a very real sense, the forests of wild foragers and the orchards of traditional farmers in such centers of crop diversity are the wellsprings of diversity that plant breeders, pathologists, and entomologists return to every time our society whittles the resilience in our fields and orchards down to its breaking point.

(8) And whittle away we have done. Here in North America, according to apple historian Dan Bussey, some 16,000 apple varieties have been named and nurtured over the last four centuries. By 1904, however, the identities and sources of only 7,098 of those varieties could be discerned by USDA scientist W. H. Ragan. Since then, some 6,121 apple varieties ­ 86.2 percent of Ragan's 1904 inventory ­ have been lost from nursery catalogs, farmers' markets, and from the American table.

Passage A makes which of the following claims about plant species that are found in Kazakhstan?