Cross-Text Connections: Agreement and Disagreement

Text 1
Bees trained to associate a colour with sugar will later choose that colour even when no reward is present. Researchers describe the behaviour as a simple stored association: the insect records a pairing and retrieves it. Nothing in the task requires the bee to hold anything like a picture of a flower in mind.

Text 2
In the same colour-training tasks, bees keep choosing the trained colour after long gaps, and they transfer the choice to shapes they have never seen before that carry that colour. A stored pairing explains the first result. The transfer is harder to explain without granting the bee a general rule rather than a fixed pair.

Which choice best describes the relationship between the two texts?

1. Text 2 and Text 1 disagree about whether bees can see colour.
2. Text 2 denies that bees can be trained to associate a colour with a reward.
3. Text 2 supplies an example that illustrates the mechanism Text 1 describes.
4. Text 2 accepts the observation Text 1 reports but argues that a further result calls for a richer explanation than Text 1 offers.

Text 1
Studies of second-language learning report that adults who begin after adolescence rarely reach native-like pronunciation. The pattern has been read as evidence for a critical period: a window early in life after which the neural systems for speech lose plasticity.

Text 2
Late learners differ from early learners in more than age. They typically use a first language daily, hear accented input from other learners, and are corrected less. When the amount and kind of input are matched, the gap between early and late learners narrows sharply, though it does not close.

Which choice best describes the relationship between the two texts?

1. Text 2 disputes the observation Text 1 reports and denies that adult learners keep accents.
2. Text 2 accepts the pattern Text 1 reports but challenges the causal explanation drawn from it.
3. Text 2 supplies a mechanism that explains why a critical period exists.
4. Text 2 argues that adults reach native-like pronunciation more often than children do.

Text 1
Cities that have added protected bicycle lanes report fewer cyclist injuries per trip. Planners take the result as a general argument for separating cyclists from traffic wherever budgets allow.

Text 2
The measured gains come almost entirely from lanes on arterial roads carrying fast traffic. On residential streets where cars rarely exceed thirty kilometres an hour, a protected lane has produced little change, and it consumes the same budget.

Which choice best describes the relationship between the two texts?

1. Text 2 accepts the benefit Text 1 reports but restricts the conditions under which it holds.
2. Text 2 denies that protected lanes reduce injuries anywhere.
3. Text 2 argues that cyclists are safer riding in traffic than in a protected lane.
4. Text 2 offers a second reason to build protected lanes on every street.

Text 1
Reintroducing wolves changed the behaviour of elk in the park, and along some streams young willows have recovered. Ecologists who study the system argue that a predator can reshape vegetation through the fear it creates, not only through the animals it kills.

Text 2
Wolves plainly changed where elk graze. But willow recovery is uneven: strong on some streams, absent on others carrying similar numbers of elk, and beaver activity and the water table differ between them. A story running from predator straight to plant leaves out too much of what varies on the ground.

Based on the texts, both authors would most likely agree with which statement?

1. Willow recovery has been equally strong along every stream in the park.
2. Fear of predators is the main cause of willow recovery in the park.
3. Wolf reintroduction has altered the behaviour of elk in the park.
4. The number of elk in the park has fallen since wolves returned.

Text 1
A poet's manuscripts show that lines now printed as free verse were first written in strict metre and broken up later. Editors who restore the metre argue that the printed lineation was a compositor's convenience rather than the poet's decision.

Text 2
The manuscripts do show metrical drafts. But the poet lived twenty years after publication, reprinted the poems twice, and never restored the lines. Silence across two editions is weak evidence, yet it is evidence, and it points the other way.

Based on the texts, both authors would most likely agree that

1. the manuscripts contain versions of the poems written in strict metre.
2. the printed lineation reflects a compositor's convenience rather than the poet's choice.
3. the poet approved the printed lineation.
4. editors should reprint the poems with the metre restored.

Text 1
The rapid spread of the printing press in Europe is often credited to the machine itself. Yet movable type existed in East Asia centuries earlier without producing the same explosion. What differed was the writing system: a few dozen letters make casting a font cheap, while tens of thousands of characters do not.

Text 2
Printing spread fastest in cities that already had a paper trade in legal and commercial documents — notaries, contracts, licences. The press did not create the demand for standardized paperwork; it met a demand that clerks were already failing to satisfy by hand.

Which choice best describes the relationship between the two texts?

1. Text 2 rejects Text 1's account and shows that the writing system made no difference.
2. Text 2 emphasizes a condition Text 1 does not discuss, without contradicting Text 1's claim about writing systems.
3. Text 2 supplies evidence confirming Text 1's claim about printing in East Asia.
4. Text 2 and Text 1 disagree about where the printing press was invented.

Text 1
Microplastic particles have been found in seawater at every depth sampled. Because the particles carry chemical additives, some researchers treat their presence in fish tissue as a direct threat to human consumers.

Text 2
Particles small enough to cross the gut wall are a small fraction of what a fish ingests, and most of what is swallowed passes through. That does not make the finding harmless — additives can leach without the particle being absorbed — but the route from a particle in seawater to a dose in a person is longer than the headlines suggest.

Based on the texts, both authors would most likely agree that

1. research on microplastics should be paused until better methods exist.
2. most microplastic particles swallowed by fish cross the gut wall.
3. microplastics in seawater pose no measurable risk to human consumers.
4. microplastic particles are present in marine environments and their chemical additives are a legitimate object of concern.