Free ACT Test Exam Braindumps (page: 132)

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the article "The Quiet Sideman" by Colin Fleming (©2008 by The American Scholar)

(1) Near the end of his eight years as a recording-session musician, tenor saxophonist Leon "Chu" Berry landed a short-lived spot with Count Basie's orchestra. Standing in for one of the Basie band's two tenor giants, Berry took a lead solo on "Oh, Lady Be Good," the 1924 Gershwin song that Basie had played for years. In the 28 seconds that the solo lasted on February 4, 1939, we are treated to no less than the musical personification of mind and body working together in divine tandem. When you hear the recording for the first time, you're likely to wonder why you've never heard of Chu Berry before.

(2) Why you've never heard of him is pretty simple: a lot of hard-core jazz buffs don't know much about him. Berry was a solid session player who turns up on recordings with Basie, Bessie Smith, Fletcher Henderson, and Billie Holiday. But he did not cut many sessions himself as a leader, and when he soloed, he worked within the recording constraints of the era and the swing genre ­ fast-moving 78s with solos often lasting for a mere 32 beats.

(3) The people who loved Berry were, not surprisingly, other tenor players, a situation leading to the dreaded "musician's musician" tag. But that's not nearly praise enough to describe Chu Berry, who, when given opportunity, displayed a musical dexterity that would be envied by future generations of horn men.

(4) Berry faced the lot of other horn players: having to grind it out long and hard until something memorable burst through; the prejudices and expectations of the listening public; and the accepted wisdom of what is and isn't art in a given medium. In this case, swing was fodder for dance parties, not music worthy of study.

(5) Oddly enough, Berry's geniality might help explain his failure to court history's favor: it wasn't in his nature to call attention to himself or his playing. Born in 1908 into the black middle class in Wheeling, West Virginia, the laid-back, affable Berry attended West Virginia State in Charleston, where he switched from alto sax to tenor and exhibited the willingness to fit in that characterized his presence in so many dance bands. He was the rare artist who refused to put his interests above those of the band, even if that meant playing ensemble passages rather than taking a healthy allotment of solo breaks.

(6) College proved a training ground for Berry the bandsman, as he teamed up with a number of amateur outfits. He never played simply to show off. Instead, he tried to bring out the positive attributes in any given situation or setting. Later, when Berry is performing with the Calloway ensemble, we hear some ragged, out-of- tune playing until Berry's first few solo notes emerge. The other players, no longer languidly blowing through their charts, immediately surge up behind him, all fighting-fit. Once Berry finishes his solo, the shenanigans resume.

(7) After making his way to New York, Berry immediately became a presence and soon was in demand. The great jazz orchestras of the swing era were fronted by musical directors/arrangers ­ Duke Ellington was preeminent ­ who drew the acclaim. The sidemen were musical traveling salesmen who sold someone else's wares in the best style they could manage. It was with Fletcher Henderson that Berry began to ditch some of the sideman's subservient trappings. For starters, Henderson wrote in keys that were rare for the jazz orchestras of the day, and his somber, indigo-inflected voicings were ideal for a player of Berry's introspective approach to his instrument: Berry sounds as if he's being swallowed by his sax. "Blues in C Sharp Minor," for instance, is odd, haunting, and ultimately relaxing. A Berry solo in it is slightly off mike, making the listener feel as though he's been playing for some time before we finally hear him. The effect is unnerving, as if we weren't paying close attention.

(8) In June 1940, Cab Calloway granted Berry a showcase piece, "A Ghost of a Chance," the sole recording in Berry's career to feature him from start to finish. It was his "Body and Soul," a response to Coleman Hawkins's famous recording, intended not as a riposte to a rival, but as the other half of a dialogue. Its rubato lines are disembodied from the music meant to accompany it, which is spartan to begin with. This may be Berry's one and only instance of indulgence on a record, a cathedral of a solo in its flourishes, angles, ornamentations, reflexivity. If sunlight could pass through music, "A Ghost of a Chance" would funnel it out in the broadest spectrum of colors.

The author uses the phrase "a cathedral of a solo" (paragraph 8) most likely to create a sense that Berry's solo was:

NATURAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article "Warp Factor" by Charles Liu (62003 by Natural History Magazine, Inc.)

(1) Astronomers sometimes describe the shape of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, as a thin-crust pizza with a plum stuck in the middle. The plum is the slightly oblong central bulge, protruding about 3,000 light-years above and below the galactic plane, comprised mostly of older stars; it makes up the core of the Milky Way, and includes a black hole two and a half million times the mass of the Sun. The crust of the pizza is the galactic disk ­ the source of most of our galaxy's light. Thin and flat, the disk is 100,000 light-years across, about 1,000 light- years thick, on average, and includes more than 80 percent of the galaxy's hundred billion or so stars.

(2) The plum-and-pizza picture works well enough, but like most simple metaphors, it breaks down if you push it. For one thing, the galactic disk isn't a rigid body, but a loose agglomeration of matter streaming around a common center of gravity. (The swirling pattern of a hurricane far better resembles our spinning galaxy.) For another thing, our galaxy's disk isn't flat; it's warped. Picture a disk of pizza dough spun into the air by a skilled chef: our galaxy goes through the same kind of floppy, wobbly gyrations, though at a rate best measured in revolutions per hundreds of millions of years.

(3) Why does the Milky Way have such an odd-looking warp? No definitive answer has emerged. One thing we do know: when it comes to warps, our galaxy is hardly unique. About half of all spiral galaxies are warped to some degree. Theoretical and computational models have shown that a number of physical processes can warp a galaxy, so it's a matter of figuring out which scenario applies. An innovative analysis of the problem by Jeremy Bailin, an astronomy graduate student at the University of Arizona in Tucson, has implicated a small satellite galaxy, currently being ripped to shreds by the gravity of the Milky Way.

(4) The Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy was discovered in 1994. It appears to be in a roughly polar orbit around the Milky Way ­ that is, above and below the galactic disk ­ about 50,000 light-years from the galactic center. That orbit brings the dwarf galaxy far too close to the huge gravitational tidal forces of the Milky Way for the dwarf to remain intact. As a result, the Sagittarius Dwarf now looks something like strands of spaghetti spilling from the front of a pasta-making machine, the galaxy's matter being drawn out over hundreds of millions of years by intergalactic tides.

(5) Gravitational collisions between small satellite galaxies and big spiral galaxies have long been regarded as possible culprits in the warping of a larger galaxy's disk. The best known satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way ­ the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds ­ are too far away, and have the wrong orbital characteristics, to have warped our galactic home. The Sagittarius Dwarf seems a much more likely candidate, simply because it is only a third as far from the center of the Milky Way as the Magellanic Clouds. But in astronomy ­ unlike in real estate ­ location isn't everything; to show a direct connection between warp and dwarf, the orbital motion of the Sagittarius Dwarf must be linked to the rotation of the Milky Way's disk.

(6) Bailin's study is the first to find such a link. His analysis of the galactic warp is based on angular momentum ­ a measure of how much a system is spinning or rotating. Just as objects moving in a straight line have momentum, objects spinning or orbiting around an axis have angular momentum; and just as the momenta of two objects combine when they collide, so two do their angular momenta. Imagine two figure skaters coming together for a combination spin. When they make physical contact, their individual spiraling motions combine to produce a single, unified whirl.

(7) Starting with the latest measurements of the structure and spin of the Milky Way, Bailin deduced the angular momentum of the warped portion of the Milky Way's disk. He then compared that measure with the angular momentum of the Sagittarius Dwarf ­ and found for the first time, within the margins of measurement error, that the two angular momenta are identical in both quantity and direction. Such a coupling of the angular momenta of two bodies almost never happens by chance; usually, it takes place only when two spinning systems, like the skaters, come into contact. The coupling isn't enough to prove cause and effect by itself, but it's solid circumstantial evidence that the interaction of the Sagittarius Dwarf with the Milky Way disk created the warp in our galaxy.

Which of the following statements best expresses the main idea of the passage?

NATURAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article "Warp Factor" by Charles Liu (62003 by Natural History Magazine, Inc.)

(1) Astronomers sometimes describe the shape of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, as a thin-crust pizza with a plum stuck in the middle. The plum is the slightly oblong central bulge, protruding about 3,000 light-years above and below the galactic plane, comprised mostly of older stars; it makes up the core of the Milky Way, and includes a black hole two and a half million times the mass of the Sun. The crust of the pizza is the galactic disk ­ the source of most of our galaxy's light. Thin and flat, the disk is 100,000 light-years across, about 1,000 light- years thick, on average, and includes more than 80 percent of the galaxy's hundred billion or so stars.

(2) The plum-and-pizza picture works well enough, but like most simple metaphors, it breaks down if you push it. For one thing, the galactic disk isn't a rigid body, but a loose agglomeration of matter streaming around a common center of gravity. (The swirling pattern of a hurricane far better resembles our spinning galaxy.) For another thing, our galaxy's disk isn't flat; it's warped. Picture a disk of pizza dough spun into the air by a skilled chef: our galaxy goes through the same kind of floppy, wobbly gyrations, though at a rate best measured in revolutions per hundreds of millions of years.

(3) Why does the Milky Way have such an odd-looking warp? No definitive answer has emerged. One thing we do know: when it comes to warps, our galaxy is hardly unique. About half of all spiral galaxies are warped to some degree. Theoretical and computational models have shown that a number of physical processes can warp a galaxy, so it's a matter of figuring out which scenario applies. An innovative analysis of the problem by Jeremy Bailin, an astronomy graduate student at the University of Arizona in Tucson, has implicated a small satellite galaxy, currently being ripped to shreds by the gravity of the Milky Way.

(4) The Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy was discovered in 1994. It appears to be in a roughly polar orbit around the Milky Way ­ that is, above and below the galactic disk ­ about 50,000 light-years from the galactic center. That orbit brings the dwarf galaxy far too close to the huge gravitational tidal forces of the Milky Way for the dwarf to remain intact. As a result, the Sagittarius Dwarf now looks something like strands of spaghetti spilling from the front of a pasta-making machine, the galaxy's matter being drawn out over hundreds of millions of years by intergalactic tides.

(5) Gravitational collisions between small satellite galaxies and big spiral galaxies have long been regarded as possible culprits in the warping of a larger galaxy's disk. The best known satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way ­ the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds ­ are too far away, and have the wrong orbital characteristics, to have warped our galactic home. The Sagittarius Dwarf seems a much more likely candidate, simply because it is only a third as far from the center of the Milky Way as the Magellanic Clouds. But in astronomy ­ unlike in real estate ­ location isn't everything; to show a direct connection between warp and dwarf, the orbital motion of the Sagittarius Dwarf must be linked to the rotation of the Milky Way's disk.

(6) Bailin's study is the first to find such a link. His analysis of the galactic warp is based on angular momentum ­ a measure of how much a system is spinning or rotating. Just as objects moving in a straight line have momentum, objects spinning or orbiting around an axis have angular momentum; and just as the momenta of two objects combine when they collide, so two do their angular momenta. Imagine two figure skaters coming together for a combination spin. When they make physical contact, their individual spiraling motions combine to produce a single, unified whirl.

(7) Starting with the latest measurements of the structure and spin of the Milky Way, Bailin deduced the angular momentum of the warped portion of the Milky Way's disk. He then compared that measure with the angular momentum of the Sagittarius Dwarf ­ and found for the first time, within the margins of measurement error, that the two angular momenta are identical in both quantity and direction. Such a coupling of the angular momenta of two bodies almost never happens by chance; usually, it takes place only when two spinning systems, like the skaters, come into contact. The coupling isn't enough to prove cause and effect by itself, but it's solid circumstantial evidence that the interaction of the Sagittarius Dwarf with the Milky Way disk created the warp in our galaxy.

It can reasonably be inferred that the problem the author mentions in paragraph 3 refers to:

NATURAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article "Warp Factor" by Charles Liu (62003 by Natural History Magazine, Inc.)

(1) Astronomers sometimes describe the shape of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, as a thin-crust pizza with a plum stuck in the middle. The plum is the slightly oblong central bulge, protruding about 3,000 light-years above and below the galactic plane, comprised mostly of older stars; it makes up the core of the Milky Way, and includes a black hole two and a half million times the mass of the Sun. The crust of the pizza is the galactic disk ­ the source of most of our galaxy's light. Thin and flat, the disk is 100,000 light-years across, about 1,000 light- years thick, on average, and includes more than 80 percent of the galaxy's hundred billion or so stars.

(2) The plum-and-pizza picture works well enough, but like most simple metaphors, it breaks down if you push it. For one thing, the galactic disk isn't a rigid body, but a loose agglomeration of matter streaming around a common center of gravity. (The swirling pattern of a hurricane far better resembles our spinning galaxy.) For another thing, our galaxy's disk isn't flat; it's warped. Picture a disk of pizza dough spun into the air by a skilled chef: our galaxy goes through the same kind of floppy, wobbly gyrations, though at a rate best measured in revolutions per hundreds of millions of years.

(3) Why does the Milky Way have such an odd-looking warp? No definitive answer has emerged. One thing we do know: when it comes to warps, our galaxy is hardly unique. About half of all spiral galaxies are warped to some degree. Theoretical and computational models have shown that a number of physical processes can warp a galaxy, so it's a matter of figuring out which scenario applies. An innovative analysis of the problem by Jeremy Bailin, an astronomy graduate student at the University of Arizona in Tucson, has implicated a small satellite galaxy, currently being ripped to shreds by the gravity of the Milky Way.

(4) The Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy was discovered in 1994. It appears to be in a roughly polar orbit around the Milky Way ­ that is, above and below the galactic disk ­ about 50,000 light-years from the galactic center. That orbit brings the dwarf galaxy far too close to the huge gravitational tidal forces of the Milky Way for the dwarf to remain intact. As a result, the Sagittarius Dwarf now looks something like strands of spaghetti spilling from the front of a pasta-making machine, the galaxy's matter being drawn out over hundreds of millions of years by intergalactic tides.

(5) Gravitational collisions between small satellite galaxies and big spiral galaxies have long been regarded as possible culprits in the warping of a larger galaxy's disk. The best known satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way ­ the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds ­ are too far away, and have the wrong orbital characteristics, to have warped our galactic home. The Sagittarius Dwarf seems a much more likely candidate, simply because it is only a third as far from the center of the Milky Way as the Magellanic Clouds. But in astronomy ­ unlike in real estate ­ location isn't everything; to show a direct connection between warp and dwarf, the orbital motion of the Sagittarius Dwarf must be linked to the rotation of the Milky Way's disk.

(6) Bailin's study is the first to find such a link. His analysis of the galactic warp is based on angular momentum ­ a measure of how much a system is spinning or rotating. Just as objects moving in a straight line have momentum, objects spinning or orbiting around an axis have angular momentum; and just as the momenta of two objects combine when they collide, so two do their angular momenta. Imagine two figure skaters coming together for a combination spin. When they make physical contact, their individual spiraling motions combine to produce a single, unified whirl.

(7) Starting with the latest measurements of the structure and spin of the Milky Way, Bailin deduced the angular momentum of the warped portion of the Milky Way's disk. He then compared that measure with the angular momentum of the Sagittarius Dwarf ­ and found for the first time, within the margins of measurement error, that the two angular momenta are identical in both quantity and direction. Such a coupling of the angular momenta of two bodies almost never happens by chance; usually, it takes place only when two spinning systems, like the skaters, come into contact. The coupling isn't enough to prove cause and effect by itself, but it's solid circumstantial evidence that the interaction of the Sagittarius Dwarf with the Milky Way disk created the warp in our galaxy.

It can reasonably be inferred from the passage that the small satellite galaxy referred to in paragraph 3 is: