=== Passage I === electrical transmission for what it was, whereas I had special knowledge available to me: I knew there were 45 little people living inside the radio’s shell, the obliging citizens of a miniature village that clung to a steep dark mountain. From my mother I developed my love of flowers. Their shapes came folded inside tiny seeds, so small that fifty of them filled the bottom of a flat seed packet. They were miraculously encoded from the beginning, 5 little specks of dark matter that we shook into our hands, then sowed into flower beds. They sprouted, then opened out in a studied and careful program of increments. Now, that was astonishing, all those compressed unfoldings and burstings, but no one said so. 10 No one made a fuss when the seeds actually performed: sprouts, leaves, the long rivery stems, and finally the intricacy of blossoms. I liked to tear the silk of the petals between my fingers, rubbing the pollen into my hands. “But that isn’t nice, Reta,” my mother said. 15 “Why would you want to hurt a beautiful flower?” I didn’t believe this, that flowers hurt, but nevertheless I didn’t do it again. I was the inept child searching for those moments of calm when I would find adult validation or at least respite from my endless uncertainty. 20 I once scratched the banister with a spoon. My mother rubbed it with butter, and the scratch went away. She had no idea I had done it, her little girl wouldn’t do a thing like that. With great good nature they laughed when I said eggshells were made of plastic, and also when I asked my father if we could buy some icicles, long sculptured fingers of silvery ice that lasted all winter. “Our little Reta,” they said, laughing. 25 I was afraid of drowning in their approval. There was nothing hard to hang on to. 30 I had no siblings, but I closely observed small babies who entered our house, the children of my parents’ friends. There they lay, tiny, bundled, smelling like spoiled milk, wound tight in fleece blankets. From the beginning I saw that they possessed a patient even- 35 ness of curiosity that reduced and simplified the mysteries thronging our household. They didn’t worry as I did about the halo around the head of the baby Jesus, what it was made of, what kept it hovering over his head and traveling along with him wherever he went. 40 They put their small hands on the plastic-ribbed face of the radio in the kitchen and laughed at the vibrations that poured out. I could see that they accepted simple truths about the universe while I felt troubled by deeper questions. === Passage II === SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil by Tom Mueller. “If I were a king, I’d eat nothing but fat.” Thus a seventeenth-century farmer expressed his longing for triglycerides, both saturated and unsaturated, five centuries before they fell from medical and culinary favor—and before hydrogenation made them dangerous. Fats and oils are a remarkably efficient fuel, not only for lamps and furnaces and the olive’s germinating seed, but for people as well. In times of unrelenting labor and ever-present cold, when most people’s main preoccupation was how to fill their bellies, fatty foods were associated with health and prosperity. But which fat to choose—saturated or unsaturated? Animal fat or olive oil? By the late Middle Ages in Europe, the battle line between these ancient antagonists more or less followed the modern border between Tuscany to the south and Emilia-Romagna to the north. South of this line, olive oil was the favored condiment for vegetables, soups, and fish both grilled and fried. To the north, in Italy and beyond the Alps, where olive trees didn’t thrive because of the cold, a few olive oil aficionados existed among the upper classes, but animal fat held sway among the masses except during Lent and fast days. Northern Europeans had mixed emotions about olive oil. They prized it for its sacred symbolism and medicinal properties, yet disliked its bitterness and bite, so different from the sweet animal fats used to season their native comfort foods. If they ate olive oil at all, they preferred milder oils like those grown on the shores of Lake Garda, but often enough they simply kept the substance well away from their mouths. Hildegard of Bingen, the German abbess, mystic, poet, and polymath, spoke for many northerners when she concluded that olive oil was excellent medicine but miserable food, which “causes nausea when eaten, and ruins other foods when cooked together with them.” Or perhaps Hildegard and her sisters were getting bad oil. Thomas Platter, an English traveler of the late sixteenth century, observed that only low-grade olive oil reached northern Europe, pressed from the lees after the good oil had already been extracted. A new campaign in the enduring culinary war between olive oil and animal fat began in the fifteenth century, with the triumphant arrival of butter. This invasion came about through subtle changes in dietary custom, and a gradual loosening of Rome’s grip on food that occurred in the run-up to the Reformation. In certain areas of northern Europe, where no olives grew and residents had little taste for oil, modifications in canon law permitted the consumption of butter during Lent and fast days, opening the door to widespread substitution of butter for olive oil. French and English cooks began to replace olive oil with this milder-tasting fat, long a part of their cooking traditions. === Passage A === During the 1960s I had the honor of being Oscar Peterson’s private student. He and some colleagues had started a school for contemporary music, and though there had to be around fifty students, after about two or three weeks he took me under his wing. From that time on, I saw him three or four times a week, instead of the usual once. He gave me the key to his studio so I could practice on his piano. That was necessary, because he had me practicing thirteen hours a day. Yet, as soon as the keyboard was within reach, he thrust out his right arm and grabbed a handful of notes; at that signal, the bass player, drummer, and guitarist launched into their first number. And suddenly there was that sound. He still had it—a musical personality as large as life, steeped in tradition yet recognizably, unmistakably all its own. For dazzling technique, he followed the lessons of the European classical tradition, culled from childhood sessions first with his sister, Daisy, then with local pianist Louis Hooper and the Hungarian teacher Paul de Marky. He was so serious about his lessons as a young boy that he would practice for up to eighteen hours at a time, he said, on days 'when my mother didn’t drag me off the stool.' De Marky was a good model: he had studied in Budapest with Stefan Thomán, who had studied with the great Franz Liszt—a musical titan of his day and the founder of modern piano technique. De Marky trained Peterson in that great tradition, and assigned the pianist other staples of the repertoire, such as Chopin’s treacherously difficult Etudes. And as he taught Peterson, Paul de Marky honed in on Chopin’s most important trait. 'I don’t hear the melody singing,' he would tell his student. 'The melody is choppy. Make it sing.' And so the works of the celebrated classical composers—great improvisers, all—served as his training ground. So Oscar Peterson didn’t let his students play like him—or like anybody else, for that matter. One day I was using chord voicings like those of Bill Evans and he yelled: 'You know that’s not you!' He had a formula for achieving beautiful results at the piano. He called it 'the five T’s': touch, time, tone, technique, and taste. Of course, he had them all. Paul de Marky also encouraged Oscar Peterson’s immersion in the jazz canon. Peterson remembered, 'What I loved about him was that he was not shortsighted. He was a fantastic classical pianist. But I would come to him for a lesson, and he’d be playing jazz records'—greats like Teddy Wilson, Nat 'King' Cole, and Duke Ellington. 'Their playing served as my rudiments,' he reported. Oscar Peterson’s rise to the top of the jazz pantheon was based on a formula that merged the classical European tradition and the homespun American one. But he focused especially on a common denominator he had found in the approach of all the greats: their refusal to settle for anything less than a full command of their resources. 'I never tried to sound like a trumpet or a clarinet,' he said. 'I was taught to respect [this instrument'...