AP English Language

(1) Members of the council, I have worked at the Eastside branch for nineteen years, and I have never once asked this body for anything. (2) I am asking now. (3) The proposal before you would close our doors at five o'clock instead of nine. (4) On paper, that saves four hours a day. (5) In our reading room, it erases the only hours when a night-shift nurse can help her son with algebra, when a man who drives a delivery van can finish the résumé he cannot type on his phone, when a girl whose apartment has no quiet corner can study for her exams. (6) You will hear that these patrons can simply come earlier. (7) They cannot; that is precisely why they come late. (8) I do not doubt that the budget is tight. (9) I ask only that, before you balance it, you count the people who will pay for the savings.

(1) My grandfather navigated Istanbul by landmarks: the bakery with the green awning, the mosque whose minaret leaned slightly toward the sea, the corner where the tram bell always rang twice. (2) I navigate it by a blue dot. (3) The dot is never wrong, and that is exactly the problem. (4) Because it never fails, I never have to notice anything; because I never notice anything, the city has become, for me, a series of instructions rather than a place. (5) I am not proposing that we throw away our phones. (6) Maps on screens have saved me from more wrong turns than I can count. (7) But a tool that removes every chance of getting lost also removes the chance of finding what we were not looking for.

(1) In 1999, NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter because one team's software reported thruster data in imperial units while another team's software expected metric units. (2) The mathematics on both sides was sound; what failed was the agreement about what the numbers meant. (3) The failure lived in the space between the teams. (4) Engineering students often imagine that the hard part of their future work will be the mathematics. (5) It will not be. (6) The hard part will be making sure that what you mean is what your colleague understands—across departments, across languages, across time zones. (7) Learn your equations, by all means. (8) Then learn to write a sentence that cannot be misread.

(1) It is a common complaint of our age that men have no leisure; yet I suspect the truer complaint would be that they have leisure enough, and know not what to do with it. (2) The merchant who rises before the lamplighter has finished his rounds will tell you that he has not an hour to call his own; but follow him of an evening, and you shall find him turning the pages of three newspapers, each of which informs him of the same fire, the same election, and the same misfortune at sea. (3) He is not idle, he will protest; he is keeping himself acquainted with the world. (4) I do not quarrel with the newspaper. (5) It is a useful servant, and a nation that could not read of its own affairs would soon cease to have any affairs worth reading of. (6) But a servant who is suffered to sit at the head of the table will in time forget that he is a servant. (7) The mind, like the stomach, is not nourished by the quantity it receives but by the portion it digests; and he who swallows the whole of the day's intelligence before breakfast may find himself, by supper, as hungry and as ignorant as he began. (8) Consider the farmer of my boyhood, who owned four books and had read each of them, I believe, a dozen times. (9) He could not have told you the price of cotton in Liverpool, but he could reason upon any question you put to him with a steadiness that would have shamed a parliament. (10) His knowledge was narrow, but it was his own; ours is broad, and it belongs to the printer. (11) I would not have my reader burn his papers, nor retire to a hillside with four volumes and a cow. (12) I would only ask him, before he takes up the next sheet, to put to himself a plain question: what will I know when I have finished it that I shall still know at the end of the week? (13) If the answer be nothing, let him lay it down, and take a walk, or take up a book that has survived its author; for the hours he saves will be the only leisure he has ever truly possessed.

(1) Last July, on the hottest afternoon of the year, two thermometers sat four kilometers apart in our city. (2) The one on Değirmen Street, beneath a row of sixty-year-old plane trees, read 31 degrees Celsius. (3) The one in the parking lot behind the new shopping center, where the trees had been removed to make room for 400 additional spaces, read 39. (4) Eight degrees is not a statistic; it is the difference between an afternoon an elderly person can survive at home and one she cannot. (5) Researchers have measured this effect in cities around the world, and the pattern is consistent: on the hottest days, neighborhoods with dense tree cover are several degrees cooler than neighborhoods without it. (6) In our own city, the municipal health office reported that of the 23 heat-related hospital admissions last summer, 17 came from the three districts with the least tree cover. (7) Critics of the proposed planting program raise two objections, and both deserve an answer. (8) The first is cost: the program would spend roughly 14 million lira over five years. (9) That is a real sum. (10) But it is less than the city spent last year repaving roads that buckled in the heat—roads that, under shade, would have lasted longer. (11) The second objection is time: a sapling planted today will not shade anyone for a decade. (12) This is true, and it is precisely the reason to begin now. (13) The plane trees on Değirmen Street were not planted by people who expected to sit beneath them. (14) They were planted by people who understood that a city is not the possession of a single generation but a loan held in trust for the next. (15) The council will vote on the planting program next month. (16) I ask each member to stand, before that vote, for ten minutes in each of those two places, and then decide.

(1) My father kept a drawer he called "the hospital." (2) Into it went the radio with the loose dial, the lamp that flickered, the toaster that browned only one side of the bread. (3) On Sunday afternoons he would open the drawer, choose a patient, and spread its parts across the kitchen table on a sheet of newspaper. (4) Not every patient survived. (5) But I learned, watching him, that a machine is not a sealed mystery; it is a set of decisions someone made, and decisions can be understood. (6) That lesson is harder to learn today, and not because children are less curious. (7) Many of the devices we own are glued rather than screwed together; their batteries cannot be replaced without special tools; their manuals, if they exist at all, advise the owner to "contact an authorized service provider." (8) Manufacturers defend these designs, and some of their reasons are sound: a sealed phone resists water, and a thinner case is lighter in the hand. (9) Yet a design that keeps water out can also keep the owner out, and the second effect is rarely advertised. (10) The cost is not only the price of a new device when the old one could have been mended. (11) It is the slow disappearance of a habit of mind—the expectation that when something breaks, one might look inside and find out why. (12) A society that loses that expectation does not merely throw away more toasters. (13) It becomes a society that accepts, a little more readily each year, that the workings of things are someone else's business. (14) I am not nostalgic for the flickering lamp. (15) I am nostalgic for the Sunday afternoon, for the newspaper spread across the table, and for the quiet assumption, which my father never thought to put into words, that understanding was something an ordinary person was allowed to attempt.

(1) Every day, the vending machines in our cafeteria sell bottled water to students who could drink it for free. (2) Last month, the student council counted the empty bottles in the recycling bins near the cafeteria: about 1,400 in a single week. (3) Refill stations, which filter tap water and display how many bottles they have saved, cost less than many people assume. (4) A nearby school installed two stations last year. (5) Its weekly bottle count fell by more than half within one semester. (6) Our school should get refill stations. (7) Some students worry that tap water tastes worse, but the stations filter the water before it reaches the spout.

(1) On a summer afternoon, an asphalt parking lot can be far hotter than a shaded park only a few streets away. (2) Multiplied across a whole city, such hot surfaces produce what scientists call the urban heat island effect: cities stay warmer than the countryside around them. (3) Trees reduce this effect in two ways: their canopies block sunlight before it reaches the pavement, and they release water vapor that cools the surrounding air. (4) I personally love trees because they are beautiful. (5) Cities that have expanded their tree cover have reported lower surface temperatures in newly planted neighborhoods. (6) Planting trees, therefore, is not merely decoration; it is public-health infrastructure.

(1) Hey! (2) I'm a high school student in Istanbul and I'm super interested in your Mechanical Engineering program. (3) I have completed AP Calculus AB, and I am currently studying AP Physics C: Mechanics. (4) I would like to know whether AP scores can be used to meet any of the program's admission requirements. (5) Thanks a lot!!

(1) Some shop owners on Elm Avenue argue that the proposed bike lanes will hurt their businesses by removing parking spaces. (2) This concern deserves a serious answer. (3) Bike lanes always increase sales for every shop on the street. (4) Cyclists tend to spend less per visit than drivers. (5) They visit more often, so their total monthly spending can be similar or higher. (6) The city council will vote in March. (7) The vote will decide whether the lanes are built.

(1) Every June, the hallway outside the physics lab fills with abandoned equipment: calculators with cracked screens, headphones missing one ear, a desk lamp that flickers like a nervous candle. (2) Most of these objects are not broken beyond saving. (3) They are broken beyond our patience. (4) A repair club, meeting once a week in the lab, would teach students to diagnose faults, to solder loose connections, and replacing worn batteries safely. (5) The club would also save the school money, the equipment budget has been cut twice in three years. (6) Our teachers have offered to supervise. (7) What we need now is a room, a toolbox, and a willingness to look at a broken thing and ask how it works.

(1) In our experiment, we measured the speed of sound in air using a resonance tube partly filled with water. (2) By raising and lowering the water level, the first two resonance positions were located for a 512 Hz tuning fork. (3) The distance between these positions equals half a wavelength, so the wavelength was 0.67 m. (4) Multiplying the wavelength by the frequency gave a speed of 343 m/s, which is real close to the accepted value at room temperature. (5) Our result has a small uncertainty. (6) The largest source of error was judging by ear exactly where the sound was loudest. (7) Future groups could reduce this error by using a microphone connected to a data logger.