Writing Test 14

The passage below is from a 1991 autobiography that focuses on an African American woman's adolescent experiences at a prestigious boarding school. The passage describes one pan of a meeting of parents, admissions officers, and prospective students. The story the mother recounts at this meeting took place in 1965.
      My mother began to tell a story about a science award I had won in third grade. She started with the winning, the long, white staircase in the auditorium, and how the Line announcer called my name twice because we were way at (5) the back and it took me so long to get down those steps. 
      Mama's eyes glowed. She was a born raconteur, able to increase the intensity of her own presence and fill the room. She was also a woman who seldom found new audiences for her anecdotes, so she made herself happy, she (10) insisted, with us children, her mother, her sisters, her grandparents -  an entire clan of storytellers competing for a turn on the family stage. This time all eyes were on my mother. Her body, brown and plump and smooth, was shot through with energy. This time the story had a purpose. 
        (15) She told them how my science experiment almost did not get considered in the citywide competition. My third-grade teacher, angry that I'd forgotten to bring a large box for displaying and storing the experiment, made me pack it up to take home. (Our teacher had told us that the boxes (20) were needed to carry the experiments from our class to the exhibition room, and she'd emphasized that she would not be responsible for finding thirty boxes on the day of the fair. Without a box, the experiment would have to go home. Other kids, White kids, had forgotten boxes during the (25) week. They'd brought boxes the next day. I asked for the same dispensation but was denied. The next day was the fair, she said. That was different.) 
        I came out of school carrying the pieces of an experiment my father had picked out for me from a textbook. (30) This was a simple buoyancy experiment where I weighed each object in the air and then in water, to prove they weighed less in water. I had with me the scale, a brick, a piece of wood, a bucket, and a carefully lettered poster. 
        Well, my mother marched me and my armload of (35) buoyant materials right back into school and caught the teacher before she left. The box was the only problem? Just the box? Nothing wrong with the experiment? An excited eight year old had forgotten a lousy, stinking box that you can get from the supermarket and for that, she (40) was out of the running? The teacher said I had to learn to follow directions. My mother argued that I had followed directions by doing the experiment by myself, which was more than you could say for third graders who'd brought dry-cell batteries that lit light bulbs and papier-mache (45) volcanoes that belched colored lava. 
     "Don't you ever put me in a position like that again," Mama said when we were out of earshot of the classroom. "You never know who is just waiting for an excuse to shut us out." 
        (50) We got the box; my experiment went into the fair; I won the prize at school. I won third prize for my age group in the city. 
       When Mama finished her stay, my ears began to burn. I could not help but believe that they would see through (55) this transparent plug, and before I had even laid hands on an application. They'd think we were forward and pushy. I forgot, for the moment, how relieved I'd felt when Mama had stood in front of that teacher defending me with a blinding sense of purpose, letting the teacher (60) know that I was not as small and Black and alone as I seemed, that I came from somewhere, and where I came from, she'd better believe, somebody was home. 
       The other mothers nodded approvingly. My father gave me a wide, clever-girl smile. The officials from (65) the school looked at me deadpan. They seemed amused by my embarrassment. 
         The story was an answer (part rebuke and part condolence) to the school stories that the admissions people told, where no parents figured at all. It was a message (70) about her maternal concerns, and a way to prove that racism was not some vanquished enemy, but a real, live person, up in your face, ready, for no apparent reason, to mess with your kid. When I was in third grade, Mama could do her maternal duty and face down a White teacher (75) who would have deprived me of an award. Who at this new school would stand up for her child in her stead? 

The passage below is from a 1991 autobiography that focuses on an African American woman's adolescent experiences at a prestigious boarding school. The passage describes one pan of a meeting of parents, admissions officers, and prospective students. The story the mother recounts at this meeting took place in 1965.
      My mother began to tell a story about a science award I had won in third grade. She started with the winning, the long, white staircase in the auditorium, and how the Line announcer called my name twice because we were way at (5) the back and it took me so long to get down those steps. 
      Mama's eyes glowed. She was a born raconteur, able to increase the intensity of her own presence and fill the room. She was also a woman who seldom found new audiences for her anecdotes, so she made herself happy, she (10) insisted, with us children, her mother, her sisters, her grandparents -  an entire clan of storytellers competing for a turn on the family stage. This time all eyes were on my mother. Her body, brown and plump and smooth, was shot through with energy. This time the story had a purpose. 
        (15) She told them how my science experiment almost did not get considered in the citywide competition. My third-grade teacher, angry that I'd forgotten to bring a large box for displaying and storing the experiment, made me pack it up to take home. (Our teacher had told us that the boxes (20) were needed to carry the experiments from our class to the exhibition room, and she'd emphasized that she would not be responsible for finding thirty boxes on the day of the fair. Without a box, the experiment would have to go home. Other kids, White kids, had forgotten boxes during the (25) week. They'd brought boxes the next day. I asked for the same dispensation but was denied. The next day was the fair, she said. That was different.) 
        I came out of school carrying the pieces of an experiment my father had picked out for me from a textbook. (30) This was a simple buoyancy experiment where I weighed each object in the air and then in water, to prove they weighed less in water. I had with me the scale, a brick, a piece of wood, a bucket, and a carefully lettered poster. 
        Well, my mother marched me and my armload of (35) buoyant materials right back into school and caught the teacher before she left. The box was the only problem? Just the box? Nothing wrong with the experiment? An excited eight year old had forgotten a lousy, stinking box that you can get from the supermarket and for that, she (40) was out of the running? The teacher said I had to learn to follow directions. My mother argued that I had followed directions by doing the experiment by myself, which was more than you could say for third graders who'd brought dry-cell batteries that lit light bulbs and papier-mache (45) volcanoes that belched colored lava. 
     "Don't you ever put me in a position like that again," Mama said when we were out of earshot of the classroom. "You never know who is just waiting for an excuse to shut us out." 
        (50) We got the box; my experiment went into the fair; I won the prize at school. I won third prize for my age group in the city. 
       When Mama finished her stay, my ears began to burn. I could not help but believe that they would see through (55) this transparent plug, and before I had even laid hands on an application. They'd think we were forward and pushy. I forgot, for the moment, how relieved I'd felt when Mama had stood in front of that teacher defending me with a blinding sense of purpose, letting the teacher (60) know that I was not as small and Black and alone as I seemed, that I came from somewhere, and where I came from, she'd better believe, somebody was home. 
       The other mothers nodded approvingly. My father gave me a wide, clever-girl smile. The officials from (65) the school looked at me deadpan. They seemed amused by my embarrassment. 
         The story was an answer (part rebuke and part condolence) to the school stories that the admissions people told, where no parents figured at all. It was a message (70) about her maternal concerns, and a way to prove that racism was not some vanquished enemy, but a real, live person, up in your face, ready, for no apparent reason, to mess with your kid. When I was in third grade, Mama could do her maternal duty and face down a White teacher (75) who would have deprived me of an award. Who at this new school would stand up for her child in her stead? 

This passage was written in 1996 after the discovery of a meteorite that appeared to contain fossil evidence of microscopic life on Mars.
      The rock that sprang to Martian "life" late last summer did not shock me by offering up apparent fossils of an extinct alien form of life. I had long believed that the universe teems Line with life elsewhere, and that our failure to find it simply (5) results from a lack of exploration. What did amaze me about the potato-size rock that fell from Mars was that it had traveled millions of miles across space to land here, blasted from world to world by a planetary collision of the sort that purportedly killed off our dinosaurs, and had lain waiting (10) for millennia upon an Antarctic ice field, until an observant young woman travelling in an expedition party picked it up, because she figured that it had come from another world. How could she know such a thing? The composition of ALH 84001, as the much scrutinized (15) rock is designated, closely matches the makeup of Martian matter that was analyzed on site in 1976 by miniature chemistry laboratories aboard two Viking Mars lenders. As a result of this positive identification, no astronomer seriously doubts the meteorite's Martian (20) origin. Researchers think they have pinpointed its former resting place to just two possible sites: a region called Sinus Sabaeus, fourteen degrees south of the Martian equator, or a crater east of the Hesperia Planitia region. The bold precision of this assessment is for me the most (25) stunning surprise dealt by the rock from Mars, even more mind-boggling than the suggestive traces of something that might once have lived and died in its microscopic fissures. 
       I cannot resist comparing this new intimacy with our solar system to the shoe box diorama of the planets I designed for (30) my grade-school science fair. I used marbles, jack balls, and Ping-Pong balls, all hanging on strings and painted different colors, all inside a box representing our solar system. This crude assortment of materials allowed a reasonable representation of what was known 40 years (35) ago about the nine planets: Mars was red and had two moons; Jupiter dwarfed the other planets (I should have used a basketball but it wouldn't fit in the box); Saturn had rings. If my school-age daughter were to attempt such a construction today, she'd need handfuls of jelly beans (40) and gum balls to model the newly discovered satellites of the giant planets. She'd want rings around Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, too, not to mention a moon for Pluto. 
       Similarly, our solar system, once considered unique, now stands as merely the first known example of a (45) planetary system in our galaxy. Since October of 1995, astronomers at ground-based observatories in Europe and the United States have announced that they've found evidence of at least seven alien planets orbiting other stars. As yet, not one of these large planets, some of which (50) are many times the mass of Jupiter has actually been seen through a telescope; we know about them indirectly through the gravitational effects they exert on their parent stars. Yet, even though we have no picture of what they look like, enough information has been deduced about (55) their atmospheric conditions to grant the nickname Goldilocks to a planet attending the star 70 Virginis, an appellation suggesting that the cloud-top temperature is "just right," as the storybook Goldilocks would say, for the presence of liquid water. Liquid water, not known to (60) exist anywhere in our solar system now except on Earth, is thought crucial to biological life; thus, only a short leap of faith is needed to carry hopeful scientists from the presence of water to the existence of extraterrestrial life. To raise the specter of the Mars rock once again, (65) the primitive life-forms that pressed their memory inside it likewise suggest an era when dry-as-dust Mars was a wet world, where rivers flowed. 

This passage was written in 1996 after the discovery of a meteorite that appeared to contain fossil evidence of microscopic life on Mars.
      The rock that sprang to Martian "life" late last summer did not shock me by offering up apparent fossils of an extinct alien form of life. I had long believed that the universe teems Line with life elsewhere, and that our failure to find it simply (5) results from a lack of exploration. What did amaze me about the potato-size rock that fell from Mars was that it had traveled millions of miles across space to land here, blasted from world to world by a planetary collision of the sort that purportedly killed off our dinosaurs, and had lain waiting (10) for millennia upon an Antarctic ice field, until an observant young woman travelling in an expedition party picked it up, because she figured that it had come from another world. How could she know such a thing? The composition of ALH 84001, as the much scrutinized (15) rock is designated, closely matches the makeup of Martian matter that was analyzed on site in 1976 by miniature chemistry laboratories aboard two Viking Mars lenders. As a result of this positive identification, no astronomer seriously doubts the meteorite's Martian (20) origin. Researchers think they have pinpointed its former resting place to just two possible sites: a region called Sinus Sabaeus, fourteen degrees south of the Martian equator, or a crater east of the Hesperia Planitia region. The bold precision of this assessment is for me the most (25) stunning surprise dealt by the rock from Mars, even more mind-boggling than the suggestive traces of something that might once have lived and died in its microscopic fissures. 
       I cannot resist comparing this new intimacy with our solar system to the shoe box diorama of the planets I designed for (30) my grade-school science fair. I used marbles, jack balls, and Ping-Pong balls, all hanging on strings and painted different colors, all inside a box representing our solar system. This crude assortment of materials allowed a reasonable representation of what was known 40 years (35) ago about the nine planets: Mars was red and had two moons; Jupiter dwarfed the other planets (I should have used a basketball but it wouldn't fit in the box); Saturn had rings. If my school-age daughter were to attempt such a construction today, she'd need handfuls of jelly beans (40) and gum balls to model the newly discovered satellites of the giant planets. She'd want rings around Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, too, not to mention a moon for Pluto. 
       Similarly, our solar system, once considered unique, now stands as merely the first known example of a (45) planetary system in our galaxy. Since October of 1995, astronomers at ground-based observatories in Europe and the United States have announced that they've found evidence of at least seven alien planets orbiting other stars. As yet, not one of these large planets, some of which (50) are many times the mass of Jupiter has actually been seen through a telescope; we know about them indirectly through the gravitational effects they exert on their parent stars. Yet, even though we have no picture of what they look like, enough information has been deduced about (55) their atmospheric conditions to grant the nickname Goldilocks to a planet attending the star 70 Virginis, an appellation suggesting that the cloud-top temperature is "just right," as the storybook Goldilocks would say, for the presence of liquid water. Liquid water, not known to (60) exist anywhere in our solar system now except on Earth, is thought crucial to biological life; thus, only a short leap of faith is needed to carry hopeful scientists from the presence of water to the existence of extraterrestrial life. To raise the specter of the Mars rock once again, (65) the primitive life-forms that pressed their memory inside it likewise suggest an era when dry-as-dust Mars was a wet world, where rivers flowed. 

The passage below is from a 1991 autobiography that focuses on an African American woman's adolescent experiences at a prestigious boarding school. The passage describes one pan of a meeting of parents, admissions officers, and prospective students. The story the mother recounts at this meeting took place in 1965.
      My mother began to tell a story about a science award I had won in third grade. She started with the winning, the long, white staircase in the auditorium, and how the Line announcer called my name twice because we were way at (5) the back and it took me so long to get down those steps. 
      Mama's eyes glowed. She was a born raconteur, able to increase the intensity of her own presence and fill the room. She was also a woman who seldom found new audiences for her anecdotes, so she made herself happy, she (10) insisted, with us children, her mother, her sisters, her grandparents -  an entire clan of storytellers competing for a turn on the family stage. This time all eyes were on my mother. Her body, brown and plump and smooth, was shot through with energy. This time the story had a purpose. 
        (15) She told them how my science experiment almost did not get considered in the citywide competition. My third-grade teacher, angry that I'd forgotten to bring a large box for displaying and storing the experiment, made me pack it up to take home. (Our teacher had told us that the boxes (20) were needed to carry the experiments from our class to the exhibition room, and she'd emphasized that she would not be responsible for finding thirty boxes on the day of the fair. Without a box, the experiment would have to go home. Other kids, White kids, had forgotten boxes during the (25) week. They'd brought boxes the next day. I asked for the same dispensation but was denied. The next day was the fair, she said. That was different.) 
        I came out of school carrying the pieces of an experiment my father had picked out for me from a textbook. (30) This was a simple buoyancy experiment where I weighed each object in the air and then in water, to prove they weighed less in water. I had with me the scale, a brick, a piece of wood, a bucket, and a carefully lettered poster. 
        Well, my mother marched me and my armload of (35) buoyant materials right back into school and caught the teacher before she left. The box was the only problem? Just the box? Nothing wrong with the experiment? An excited eight year old had forgotten a lousy, stinking box that you can get from the supermarket and for that, she (40) was out of the running? The teacher said I had to learn to follow directions. My mother argued that I had followed directions by doing the experiment by myself, which was more than you could say for third graders who'd brought dry-cell batteries that lit light bulbs and papier-mache (45) volcanoes that belched colored lava. 
     "Don't you ever put me in a position like that again," Mama said when we were out of earshot of the classroom. "You never know who is just waiting for an excuse to shut us out." 
        (50) We got the box; my experiment went into the fair; I won the prize at school. I won third prize for my age group in the city. 
       When Mama finished her stay, my ears began to burn. I could not help but believe that they would see through (55) this transparent plug, and before I had even laid hands on an application. They'd think we were forward and pushy. I forgot, for the moment, how relieved I'd felt when Mama had stood in front of that teacher defending me with a blinding sense of purpose, letting the teacher (60) know that I was not as small and Black and alone as I seemed, that I came from somewhere, and where I came from, she'd better believe, somebody was home. 
       The other mothers nodded approvingly. My father gave me a wide, clever-girl smile. The officials from (65) the school looked at me deadpan. They seemed amused by my embarrassment. 
         The story was an answer (part rebuke and part condolence) to the school stories that the admissions people told, where no parents figured at all. It was a message (70) about her maternal concerns, and a way to prove that racism was not some vanquished enemy, but a real, live person, up in your face, ready, for no apparent reason, to mess with your kid. When I was in third grade, Mama could do her maternal duty and face down a White teacher (75) who would have deprived me of an award. Who at this new school would stand up for her child in her stead? 

The passage below is from a 1991 autobiography that focuses on an African American woman's adolescent experiences at a prestigious boarding school. The passage describes one pan of a meeting of parents, admissions officers, and prospective students. The story the mother recounts at this meeting took place in 1965.
      My mother began to tell a story about a science award I had won in third grade. She started with the winning, the long, white staircase in the auditorium, and how the Line announcer called my name twice because we were way at (5) the back and it took me so long to get down those steps. 
      Mama's eyes glowed. She was a born raconteur, able to increase the intensity of her own presence and fill the room. She was also a woman who seldom found new audiences for her anecdotes, so she made herself happy, she (10) insisted, with us children, her mother, her sisters, her grandparents -  an entire clan of storytellers competing for a turn on the family stage. This time all eyes were on my mother. Her body, brown and plump and smooth, was shot through with energy. This time the story had a purpose. 
        (15) She told them how my science experiment almost did not get considered in the citywide competition. My third-grade teacher, angry that I'd forgotten to bring a large box for displaying and storing the experiment, made me pack it up to take home. (Our teacher had told us that the boxes (20) were needed to carry the experiments from our class to the exhibition room, and she'd emphasized that she would not be responsible for finding thirty boxes on the day of the fair. Without a box, the experiment would have to go home. Other kids, White kids, had forgotten boxes during the (25) week. They'd brought boxes the next day. I asked for the same dispensation but was denied. The next day was the fair, she said. That was different.) 
        I came out of school carrying the pieces of an experiment my father had picked out for me from a textbook. (30) This was a simple buoyancy experiment where I weighed each object in the air and then in water, to prove they weighed less in water. I had with me the scale, a brick, a piece of wood, a bucket, and a carefully lettered poster. 
        Well, my mother marched me and my armload of (35) buoyant materials right back into school and caught the teacher before she left. The box was the only problem? Just the box? Nothing wrong with the experiment? An excited eight year old had forgotten a lousy, stinking box that you can get from the supermarket and for that, she (40) was out of the running? The teacher said I had to learn to follow directions. My mother argued that I had followed directions by doing the experiment by myself, which was more than you could say for third graders who'd brought dry-cell batteries that lit light bulbs and papier-mache (45) volcanoes that belched colored lava. 
     "Don't you ever put me in a position like that again," Mama said when we were out of earshot of the classroom. "You never know who is just waiting for an excuse to shut us out." 
        (50) We got the box; my experiment went into the fair; I won the prize at school. I won third prize for my age group in the city. 
       When Mama finished her stay, my ears began to burn. I could not help but believe that they would see through (55) this transparent plug, and before I had even laid hands on an application. They'd think we were forward and pushy. I forgot, for the moment, how relieved I'd felt when Mama had stood in front of that teacher defending me with a blinding sense of purpose, letting the teacher (60) know that I was not as small and Black and alone as I seemed, that I came from somewhere, and where I came from, she'd better believe, somebody was home. 
       The other mothers nodded approvingly. My father gave me a wide, clever-girl smile. The officials from (65) the school looked at me deadpan. They seemed amused by my embarrassment. 
         The story was an answer (part rebuke and part condolence) to the school stories that the admissions people told, where no parents figured at all. It was a message (70) about her maternal concerns, and a way to prove that racism was not some vanquished enemy, but a real, live person, up in your face, ready, for no apparent reason, to mess with your kid. When I was in third grade, Mama could do her maternal duty and face down a White teacher (75) who would have deprived me of an award. Who at this new school would stand up for her child in her stead? 

The passage below is from a 1991 autobiography that focuses on an African American woman's adolescent experiences at a prestigious boarding school. The passage describes one pan of a meeting of parents, admissions officers, and prospective students. The story the mother recounts at this meeting took place in 1965.
      My mother began to tell a story about a science award I had won in third grade. She started with the winning, the long, white staircase in the auditorium, and how the Line announcer called my name twice because we were way at (5) the back and it took me so long to get down those steps. 
      Mama's eyes glowed. She was a born raconteur, able to increase the intensity of her own presence and fill the room. She was also a woman who seldom found new audiences for her anecdotes, so she made herself happy, she (10) insisted, with us children, her mother, her sisters, her grandparents -  an entire clan of storytellers competing for a turn on the family stage. This time all eyes were on my mother. Her body, brown and plump and smooth, was shot through with energy. This time the story had a purpose. 
        (15) She told them how my science experiment almost did not get considered in the citywide competition. My third-grade teacher, angry that I'd forgotten to bring a large box for displaying and storing the experiment, made me pack it up to take home. (Our teacher had told us that the boxes (20) were needed to carry the experiments from our class to the exhibition room, and she'd emphasized that she would not be responsible for finding thirty boxes on the day of the fair. Without a box, the experiment would have to go home. Other kids, White kids, had forgotten boxes during the (25) week. They'd brought boxes the next day. I asked for the same dispensation but was denied. The next day was the fair, she said. That was different.) 
        I came out of school carrying the pieces of an experiment my father had picked out for me from a textbook. (30) This was a simple buoyancy experiment where I weighed each object in the air and then in water, to prove they weighed less in water. I had with me the scale, a brick, a piece of wood, a bucket, and a carefully lettered poster. 
        Well, my mother marched me and my armload of (35) buoyant materials right back into school and caught the teacher before she left. The box was the only problem? Just the box? Nothing wrong with the experiment? An excited eight year old had forgotten a lousy, stinking box that you can get from the supermarket and for that, she (40) was out of the running? The teacher said I had to learn to follow directions. My mother argued that I had followed directions by doing the experiment by myself, which was more than you could say for third graders who'd brought dry-cell batteries that lit light bulbs and papier-mache (45) volcanoes that belched colored lava. 
     "Don't you ever put me in a position like that again," Mama said when we were out of earshot of the classroom. "You never know who is just waiting for an excuse to shut us out." 
        (50) We got the box; my experiment went into the fair; I won the prize at school. I won third prize for my age group in the city. 
       When Mama finished her stay, my ears began to burn. I could not help but believe that they would see through (55) this transparent plug, and before I had even laid hands on an application. They'd think we were forward and pushy. I forgot, for the moment, how relieved I'd felt when Mama had stood in front of that teacher defending me with a blinding sense of purpose, letting the teacher (60) know that I was not as small and Black and alone as I seemed, that I came from somewhere, and where I came from, she'd better believe, somebody was home. 
       The other mothers nodded approvingly. My father gave me a wide, clever-girl smile. The officials from (65) the school looked at me deadpan. They seemed amused by my embarrassment. 
         The story was an answer (part rebuke and part condolence) to the school stories that the admissions people told, where no parents figured at all. It was a message (70) about her maternal concerns, and a way to prove that racism was not some vanquished enemy, but a real, live person, up in your face, ready, for no apparent reason, to mess with your kid. When I was in third grade, Mama could do her maternal duty and face down a White teacher (75) who would have deprived me of an award. Who at this new school would stand up for her child in her stead? 

This passage was written in 1996 after the discovery of a meteorite that appeared to contain fossil evidence of microscopic life on Mars.
      The rock that sprang to Martian "life" late last summer did not shock me by offering up apparent fossils of an extinct alien form of life. I had long believed that the universe teems Line with life elsewhere, and that our failure to find it simply (5) results from a lack of exploration. What did amaze me about the potato-size rock that fell from Mars was that it had traveled millions of miles across space to land here, blasted from world to world by a planetary collision of the sort that purportedly killed off our dinosaurs, and had lain waiting (10) for millennia upon an Antarctic ice field, until an observant young woman travelling in an expedition party picked it up, because she figured that it had come from another world. How could she know such a thing? The composition of ALH 84001, as the much scrutinized (15) rock is designated, closely matches the makeup of Martian matter that was analyzed on site in 1976 by miniature chemistry laboratories aboard two Viking Mars lenders. As a result of this positive identification, no astronomer seriously doubts the meteorite's Martian (20) origin. Researchers think they have pinpointed its former resting place to just two possible sites: a region called Sinus Sabaeus, fourteen degrees south of the Martian equator, or a crater east of the Hesperia Planitia region. The bold precision of this assessment is for me the most (25) stunning surprise dealt by the rock from Mars, even more mind-boggling than the suggestive traces of something that might once have lived and died in its microscopic fissures. 
       I cannot resist comparing this new intimacy with our solar system to the shoe box diorama of the planets I designed for (30) my grade-school science fair. I used marbles, jack balls, and Ping-Pong balls, all hanging on strings and painted different colors, all inside a box representing our solar system. This crude assortment of materials allowed a reasonable representation of what was known 40 years (35) ago about the nine planets: Mars was red and had two moons; Jupiter dwarfed the other planets (I should have used a basketball but it wouldn't fit in the box); Saturn had rings. If my school-age daughter were to attempt such a construction today, she'd need handfuls of jelly beans (40) and gum balls to model the newly discovered satellites of the giant planets. She'd want rings around Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, too, not to mention a moon for Pluto. 
       Similarly, our solar system, once considered unique, now stands as merely the first known example of a (45) planetary system in our galaxy. Since October of 1995, astronomers at ground-based observatories in Europe and the United States have announced that they've found evidence of at least seven alien planets orbiting other stars. As yet, not one of these large planets, some of which (50) are many times the mass of Jupiter has actually been seen through a telescope; we know about them indirectly through the gravitational effects they exert on their parent stars. Yet, even though we have no picture of what they look like, enough information has been deduced about (55) their atmospheric conditions to grant the nickname Goldilocks to a planet attending the star 70 Virginis, an appellation suggesting that the cloud-top temperature is "just right," as the storybook Goldilocks would say, for the presence of liquid water. Liquid water, not known to (60) exist anywhere in our solar system now except on Earth, is thought crucial to biological life; thus, only a short leap of faith is needed to carry hopeful scientists from the presence of water to the existence of extraterrestrial life. To raise the specter of the Mars rock once again, (65) the primitive life-forms that pressed their memory inside it likewise suggest an era when dry-as-dust Mars was a wet world, where rivers flowed. 

This passage was written in 1996 after the discovery of a meteorite that appeared to contain fossil evidence of microscopic life on Mars.
      The rock that sprang to Martian "life" late last summer did not shock me by offering up apparent fossils of an extinct alien form of life. I had long believed that the universe teems Line with life elsewhere, and that our failure to find it simply (5) results from a lack of exploration. What did amaze me about the potato-size rock that fell from Mars was that it had traveled millions of miles across space to land here, blasted from world to world by a planetary collision of the sort that purportedly killed off our dinosaurs, and had lain waiting (10) for millennia upon an Antarctic ice field, until an observant young woman travelling in an expedition party picked it up, because she figured that it had come from another world. How could she know such a thing? The composition of ALH 84001, as the much scrutinized (15) rock is designated, closely matches the makeup of Martian matter that was analyzed on site in 1976 by miniature chemistry laboratories aboard two Viking Mars lenders. As a result of this positive identification, no astronomer seriously doubts the meteorite's Martian (20) origin. Researchers think they have pinpointed its former resting place to just two possible sites: a region called Sinus Sabaeus, fourteen degrees south of the Martian equator, or a crater east of the Hesperia Planitia region. The bold precision of this assessment is for me the most (25) stunning surprise dealt by the rock from Mars, even more mind-boggling than the suggestive traces of something that might once have lived and died in its microscopic fissures. 
       I cannot resist comparing this new intimacy with our solar system to the shoe box diorama of the planets I designed for (30) my grade-school science fair. I used marbles, jack balls, and Ping-Pong balls, all hanging on strings and painted different colors, all inside a box representing our solar system. This crude assortment of materials allowed a reasonable representation of what was known 40 years (35) ago about the nine planets: Mars was red and had two moons; Jupiter dwarfed the other planets (I should have used a basketball but it wouldn't fit in the box); Saturn had rings. If my school-age daughter were to attempt such a construction today, she'd need handfuls of jelly beans (40) and gum balls to model the newly discovered satellites of the giant planets. She'd want rings around Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, too, not to mention a moon for Pluto. 
       Similarly, our solar system, once considered unique, now stands as merely the first known example of a (45) planetary system in our galaxy. Since October of 1995, astronomers at ground-based observatories in Europe and the United States have announced that they've found evidence of at least seven alien planets orbiting other stars. As yet, not one of these large planets, some of which (50) are many times the mass of Jupiter has actually been seen through a telescope; we know about them indirectly through the gravitational effects they exert on their parent stars. Yet, even though we have no picture of what they look like, enough information has been deduced about (55) their atmospheric conditions to grant the nickname Goldilocks to a planet attending the star 70 Virginis, an appellation suggesting that the cloud-top temperature is "just right," as the storybook Goldilocks would say, for the presence of liquid water. Liquid water, not known to (60) exist anywhere in our solar system now except on Earth, is thought crucial to biological life; thus, only a short leap of faith is needed to carry hopeful scientists from the presence of water to the existence of extraterrestrial life. To raise the specter of the Mars rock once again, (65) the primitive life-forms that pressed their memory inside it likewise suggest an era when dry-as-dust Mars was a wet world, where rivers flowed. 

The passage below is from a 1991 autobiography that focuses on an African American woman's adolescent experiences at a prestigious boarding school. The passage describes one pan of a meeting of parents, admissions officers, and prospective students. The story the mother recounts at this meeting took place in 1965.
      My mother began to tell a story about a science award I had won in third grade. She started with the winning, the long, white staircase in the auditorium, and how the Line announcer called my name twice because we were way at (5) the back and it took me so long to get down those steps. 
      Mama's eyes glowed. She was a born raconteur, able to increase the intensity of her own presence and fill the room. She was also a woman who seldom found new audiences for her anecdotes, so she made herself happy, she (10) insisted, with us children, her mother, her sisters, her grandparents -  an entire clan of storytellers competing for a turn on the family stage. This time all eyes were on my mother. Her body, brown and plump and smooth, was shot through with energy. This time the story had a purpose. 
        (15) She told them how my science experiment almost did not get considered in the citywide competition. My third-grade teacher, angry that I'd forgotten to bring a large box for displaying and storing the experiment, made me pack it up to take home. (Our teacher had told us that the boxes (20) were needed to carry the experiments from our class to the exhibition room, and she'd emphasized that she would not be responsible for finding thirty boxes on the day of the fair. Without a box, the experiment would have to go home. Other kids, White kids, had forgotten boxes during the (25) week. They'd brought boxes the next day. I asked for the same dispensation but was denied. The next day was the fair, she said. That was different.) 
        I came out of school carrying the pieces of an experiment my father had picked out for me from a textbook. (30) This was a simple buoyancy experiment where I weighed each object in the air and then in water, to prove they weighed less in water. I had with me the scale, a brick, a piece of wood, a bucket, and a carefully lettered poster. 
        Well, my mother marched me and my armload of (35) buoyant materials right back into school and caught the teacher before she left. The box was the only problem? Just the box? Nothing wrong with the experiment? An excited eight year old had forgotten a lousy, stinking box that you can get from the supermarket and for that, she (40) was out of the running? The teacher said I had to learn to follow directions. My mother argued that I had followed directions by doing the experiment by myself, which was more than you could say for third graders who'd brought dry-cell batteries that lit light bulbs and papier-mache (45) volcanoes that belched colored lava. 
     "Don't you ever put me in a position like that again," Mama said when we were out of earshot of the classroom. "You never know who is just waiting for an excuse to shut us out." 
        (50) We got the box; my experiment went into the fair; I won the prize at school. I won third prize for my age group in the city. 
       When Mama finished her stay, my ears began to burn. I could not help but believe that they would see through (55) this transparent plug, and before I had even laid hands on an application. They'd think we were forward and pushy. I forgot, for the moment, how relieved I'd felt when Mama had stood in front of that teacher defending me with a blinding sense of purpose, letting the teacher (60) know that I was not as small and Black and alone as I seemed, that I came from somewhere, and where I came from, she'd better believe, somebody was home. 
       The other mothers nodded approvingly. My father gave me a wide, clever-girl smile. The officials from (65) the school looked at me deadpan. They seemed amused by my embarrassment. 
         The story was an answer (part rebuke and part condolence) to the school stories that the admissions people told, where no parents figured at all. It was a message (70) about her maternal concerns, and a way to prove that racism was not some vanquished enemy, but a real, live person, up in your face, ready, for no apparent reason, to mess with your kid. When I was in third grade, Mama could do her maternal duty and face down a White teacher (75) who would have deprived me of an award. Who at this new school would stand up for her child in her stead?