Reading Comprehension · Science
PrepTest 130 · Section 2 · Passage 2
Questions 8–13
Before you start
Open PrepTest 130, Section 2 in your official copy from LSAC and read the passage for Questions 8–13, using the structure guide below. The passage is not reprinted here.
Structure guide
- P1: introduces one innovator and credits a willingness to borrow ideas from nature for the success, then describes a first breakthrough on a very hard problem that the older approach handled too slowly
- P2: explains why the problem is so demanding, names the main difficulty of the new approach, and shows how a pattern from nature solved it
- P3: describes a second, larger nature-based design and ends with the innovator's own prediction about the future of the field
Step 2 · The kid passage
Nadia and the Ant Trail Plan
Nadia has become the school's best organizer because she will try ideas nobody else would, and she often borrows them from animals. Last fall she solved the library's worst problem: shelving the mountain of returned books after the book fair. Before her, one librarian shelved every book alone, one at a time, which was much too slow. Nadia was the first to try it with a crowd: forty student helpers, all working at once.
Shelving after the fair is hard. Three hundred carts of books come back in one hour, and for each book a helper must check the barcode, the section, the shelf height, and whether it needs tape, all at the same moment. The trouble with using many helpers is that they get in each other's way, crashing carts in the aisles. So Nadia studied ant trails. Ants that survive best, she noted, follow paths that split and rejoin so no two lines collide. She drew the helpers' routes on that pattern, and the books got shelved in record time.
This spring Nadia showed a plan shaped like a spider web for running the whole district book fair, which she says can schedule every class a full year ahead. Nadia thinks future organizers will look to animals more and more for clever answers, and that doing so will help kids understand nature and invent better ways of working.
Step 4 · The courtroom tale
The Case of the Crowded Kitchen
In a made-up town, a pizza shop is sued for copying a rival's delivery system. Mr. Whitfield calls the shop's owner. "Before you, how were orders delivered?" "One driver, one order at a time. Far too slow on game nights." "And you used twenty drivers at once?" "Yes, but they kept blocking each other in the alley. So I studied how geese fly in a V and set the routes the same way." Judge Okafor raises an eyebrow. "Geese?" "Each driver drafts off the one ahead, Your Honor. No collisions." The rival's lawyer sighs: his client never looked at birds. Mr. Whitfield smiles. "Her success came from borrowing nature's design for a hard problem the old way could not handle." Case dismissed.