Writing Test 18

The passage below is excerpted from the introduction to a
collection of essays published in 1994.
My entry into Black women's history was serendipitous.
In the preface to Black Women in America: An Historical
Encyclopedia, I recount the story of exactly how Shirley
Herd (who, in addition to teaching in the local school sys-
tem, was also president of the Indianapolis chapter of the
National Council of Negro Women) successfully provoked
me into changing my research and writing focus. Although
I dedicate this volume to her and to her best friend, fellow
club woman and retired primary school teacher Virtea
Downey, I still blush at the fact that I went to graduate
school to become a historian in order to contribute to the
Black Struggle for social justice and yet met her request to
write a history of Black women in Indiana with condescen-
sion. I had never even thought about Black women as his-
torical subjects with their own relations to a state's history,
and I thought her invitation and phone call extraordinarily
intrusive. Only later did I concede how straightforward
and reasonable had been her request to redress a historical
omission. Black women were conspicuous by their absence.
None of the social studies texts or state histories that Herd
and Downey had used to teach their students made mention
of the contributions of Black women. Since historians had
left them out, Herd reasoned, only a "real" historian could
put them in, and since I was the only tenured Black woman
historian in the state of Indiana at that time, the task was
mine.
Herd rejected my reservations and completely ignored
my admonitions that she could not call up a historian and
order a book the way you drive up to a fast-food restaurant
and order a hamburger. In spite of my assertions of igno-
rance about the history of Black women in Indiana and my
confession of having never studied the subject in any his-
tory course or examined any manuscript sources pertaining
to their lives, Herd persevered. Black women, as historical
subjects and agents, were as invisible to me as they had
been to school textbook writers.
Undaunted by my response, Herd demanded that I con-
nect (thankfully without perfect symmetry) my biology
and autobiography, my race and gender, my being a Black
woman, to my skill as a historian, and write for her and for
the local chapter members of the National Council a history
of Black women in Indiana. I relented and wrote the book,
When the Truth Is Told: Black Women's Culture and
Community in Indiana, 1875-1950, as requested. In the
process, I was both humbled and astounded by the array of
rich primary source materials Herd, Downey, and the other
club women had spent two years collecting. There were
diaries, club notes, church souvenir booklets, photographs,
club minutes, birth, death, and marriage certificates, letters,
and handwritten county and local histories. Collectively
this material revealed a universe I never knew existed in
spite of having lived with Black women all of my life . . . 
and being one myself. Or perhaps more accurately, I knew
a universe of Black women existed. I simply had not envi-
sioned its historical meaning.

This passage, from a short story published in 1978,
describes a visit to a planetarium, a building in which
images of stars, planets, and other astronomical
phenomena are projected onto a domed ceiling.
Inside, we sat on wonderfully comfortable seats that
were tilted back so that you lay in a sort of a hammock,
attention directed to the bowl of the ceiling, which soon
turned dark blue, with a faint rim of light around the edge.
There was some splendid, commanding music. The adults
all around were shushing the children, trying to make them
stop crackling their potato chip bags. Then a man's voice,
an eloquent professional voice, began to speak slowly, out
of the walls. The voice reminded me a little of the way
radio announcers used to introduce a piece of classical
music or describe the progress of the Royal Family to
Westminster Abbey on one of their royal occasions.
There was a faint echo-chamber effect.
The dark ceiling was filled with stars. They came out
not all at once but one after another, the way stars really
do come out at night, though more quickly. The Milky
Way galaxy appeared, was moving closer; stars swam
into brilliance and kept on going, disappearing beyond
the edges of the sky-screen or behind my head. While the
flow of light continued, the voice presented the stunning
facts. From a few light-years away, it announced, the Sun
appears as a bright star, and the planets are not visible.
From a few dozen light-years away, the Sun is not visible,
either, to the naked eye. And that distance - a few dozen
light-years - is only about a thousandth part of the distance
from the Sun to the center of our galaxy, one galaxy, which
itself contains about two hundred billion stars. And is, in
turn, one of millions, perhaps billions, of galaxies. Innu-
merable repetitions, innumerable variations. All this
rolled past my head, too, like balls of lightning.
Now realism was abandoned, for familiar artifice.
A model of the solar system was spinning away in its ele-
gant style. A bright bug took off from the Earth, heading
for Jupiter. I set my dodging and shrinking mind sternly
to recording facts. The mass of Jupiter two and a half
times that of all the other planets put together. The Great
Red Spot. The thirteen moons. Past Jupiter, a glance at
the eccentric orbit of Pluto, the icy rings of Saturn. Back
to Earth and moving in to hot and dazzling Venus. Atmo-
spheric pressure ninety times ours. Moonless Mercury
rotating three times while circling the Sun twice; an odd
arrangement, not as satisfying as what they used to tell us
- that it rotated once as it circled the Sun. No perpetual
darkness after all. Why did they give out such confident
information, only to announce later that it was quite wrong?
Finally, the picture already familiar from magazines: the
red soil of Mars, the blooming pink sky. 
When the show was over I sat in my seat while children
clambered over me, making no comments on anything they
had just seen or heard. They were pestering their keepers
for eatables and further entertainments. An effort had been
made to get their attention, to take it away from canned
drinks and potato chips and fix it on various knowns and
unknowns and horrible immensities, and it seemed to have
failed. A good thing, too, I thought. Children have a natural
immunity, most of them, and it shouldn't be tampered with.
As for the adults who would deplore it, the ones who pro-
moted this show, weren't they immune themselves to the
extent that they could put in the echo-chamber effects,
the music, the solemnity, simulating the awe that they
supposed they ought to feel? Awe - what was that sup-
posed to be? A fit of the shivers when you looked out
the window? Once you knew what it was, you wouldn't
be courting it.

Passage 1
Any wildlife biologist can tell you how many deer
a given area can support - how much browse there is
for the deer to eat before they begin to suppress the
reproduction of trees, before they begin to starve in
the winter. Any biologist can calculate how many
wolves a given area can support too, in part by
counting the number of deer. And so on, up and
down the food chain. It's not an exact science, but
it comes pretty close - at least compared to figuring
out the carrying capacity of Earth for human beings,
which is an art so dark that anyone with any sense
stays away from it.

Passage 2
Estimates of the number of humans that Earth can
sustain have ranged in recent decades from fewer than
a billion to more than a trillion. Such elasticity is prob-
ably unavoidable, since "carrying capacity" is essentially
a subjective term. It makes little sense to talk about carry-
ing capacity in relationship to humans, who are capable of
adapting and altering both their culture and their physical
environment, and can thus defy any formula that might
settle the matter. The number of people that Earth can
support depends on how we on Earth want to live, on
what we want to consume, and on what we regard as
a crowd.

Passage 1
Any wildlife biologist can tell you how many deer
a given area can support - how much browse there is
for the deer to eat before they begin to suppress the
reproduction of trees, before they begin to starve in
the winter. Any biologist can calculate how many
wolves a given area can support too, in part by
counting the number of deer. And so on, up and
down the food chain. It's not an exact science, but
it comes pretty close - at least compared to figuring
out the carrying capacity of Earth for human beings,
which is an art so dark that anyone with any sense
stays away from it.

Passage 2
Estimates of the number of humans that Earth can
sustain have ranged in recent decades from fewer than
a billion to more than a trillion. Such elasticity is prob-
ably unavoidable, since "carrying capacity" is essentially
a subjective term. It makes little sense to talk about carry-
ing capacity in relationship to humans, who are capable of
adapting and altering both their culture and their physical
environment, and can thus defy any formula that might
settle the matter. The number of people that Earth can
support depends on how we on Earth want to live, on
what we want to consume, and on what we regard as
a crowd.

The passage below is excerpted from the introduction to a
collection of essays published in 1994.
My entry into Black women's history was serendipitous.
In the preface to Black Women in America: An Historical
Encyclopedia, I recount the story of exactly how Shirley
Herd (who, in addition to teaching in the local school sys-
tem, was also president of the Indianapolis chapter of the
National Council of Negro Women) successfully provoked
me into changing my research and writing focus. Although
I dedicate this volume to her and to her best friend, fellow
club woman and retired primary school teacher Virtea
Downey, I still blush at the fact that I went to graduate
school to become a historian in order to contribute to the
Black Struggle for social justice and yet met her request to
write a history of Black women in Indiana with condescen-
sion. I had never even thought about Black women as his-
torical subjects with their own relations to a state's history,
and I thought her invitation and phone call extraordinarily
intrusive. Only later did I concede how straightforward
and reasonable had been her request to redress a historical
omission. Black women were conspicuous by their absence.
None of the social studies texts or state histories that Herd
and Downey had used to teach their students made mention
of the contributions of Black women. Since historians had
left them out, Herd reasoned, only a "real" historian could
put them in, and since I was the only tenured Black woman
historian in the state of Indiana at that time, the task was
mine.
Herd rejected my reservations and completely ignored
my admonitions that she could not call up a historian and
order a book the way you drive up to a fast-food restaurant
and order a hamburger. In spite of my assertions of igno-
rance about the history of Black women in Indiana and my
confession of having never studied the subject in any his-
tory course or examined any manuscript sources pertaining
to their lives, Herd persevered. Black women, as historical
subjects and agents, were as invisible to me as they had
been to school textbook writers.
Undaunted by my response, Herd demanded that I con-
nect (thankfully without perfect symmetry) my biology
and autobiography, my race and gender, my being a Black
woman, to my skill as a historian, and write for her and for
the local chapter members of the National Council a history
of Black women in Indiana. I relented and wrote the book,
When the Truth Is Told: Black Women's Culture and
Community in Indiana, 1875-1950, as requested. In the
process, I was both humbled and astounded by the array of
rich primary source materials Herd, Downey, and the other
club women had spent two years collecting. There were
diaries, club notes, church souvenir booklets, photographs,
club minutes, birth, death, and marriage certificates, letters,
and handwritten county and local histories. Collectively
this material revealed a universe I never knew existed in
spite of having lived with Black women all of my life . . . 
and being one myself. Or perhaps more accurately, I knew
a universe of Black women existed. I simply had not envi-
sioned its historical meaning.

This passage, from a short story published in 1978,
describes a visit to a planetarium, a building in which
images of stars, planets, and other astronomical
phenomena are projected onto a domed ceiling.
Inside, we sat on wonderfully comfortable seats that
were tilted back so that you lay in a sort of a hammock,
attention directed to the bowl of the ceiling, which soon
turned dark blue, with a faint rim of light around the edge.
There was some splendid, commanding music. The adults
all around were shushing the children, trying to make them
stop crackling their potato chip bags. Then a man's voice,
an eloquent professional voice, began to speak slowly, out
of the walls. The voice reminded me a little of the way
radio announcers used to introduce a piece of classical
music or describe the progress of the Royal Family to
Westminster Abbey on one of their royal occasions.
There was a faint echo-chamber effect.
The dark ceiling was filled with stars. They came out
not all at once but one after another, the way stars really
do come out at night, though more quickly. The Milky
Way galaxy appeared, was moving closer; stars swam
into brilliance and kept on going, disappearing beyond
the edges of the sky-screen or behind my head. While the
flow of light continued, the voice presented the stunning
facts. From a few light-years away, it announced, the Sun
appears as a bright star, and the planets are not visible.
From a few dozen light-years away, the Sun is not visible,
either, to the naked eye. And that distance - a few dozen
light-years - is only about a thousandth part of the distance
from the Sun to the center of our galaxy, one galaxy, which
itself contains about two hundred billion stars. And is, in
turn, one of millions, perhaps billions, of galaxies. Innu-
merable repetitions, innumerable variations. All this
rolled past my head, too, like balls of lightning.
Now realism was abandoned, for familiar artifice.
A model of the solar system was spinning away in its ele-
gant style. A bright bug took off from the Earth, heading
for Jupiter. I set my dodging and shrinking mind sternly
to recording facts. The mass of Jupiter two and a half
times that of all the other planets put together. The Great
Red Spot. The thirteen moons. Past Jupiter, a glance at
the eccentric orbit of Pluto, the icy rings of Saturn. Back
to Earth and moving in to hot and dazzling Venus. Atmo-
spheric pressure ninety times ours. Moonless Mercury
rotating three times while circling the Sun twice; an odd
arrangement, not as satisfying as what they used to tell us
- that it rotated once as it circled the Sun. No perpetual
darkness after all. Why did they give out such confident
information, only to announce later that it was quite wrong?
Finally, the picture already familiar from magazines: the
red soil of Mars, the blooming pink sky. 
When the show was over I sat in my seat while children
clambered over me, making no comments on anything they
had just seen or heard. They were pestering their keepers
for eatables and further entertainments. An effort had been
made to get their attention, to take it away from canned
drinks and potato chips and fix it on various knowns and
unknowns and horrible immensities, and it seemed to have
failed. A good thing, too, I thought. Children have a natural
immunity, most of them, and it shouldn't be tampered with.
As for the adults who would deplore it, the ones who pro-
moted this show, weren't they immune themselves to the
extent that they could put in the echo-chamber effects,
the music, the solemnity, simulating the awe that they
supposed they ought to feel? Awe - what was that sup-
posed to be? A fit of the shivers when you looked out
the window? Once you knew what it was, you wouldn't
be courting it.

The passage below is excerpted from the introduction to a
collection of essays published in 1994.
My entry into Black women's history was serendipitous.
In the preface to Black Women in America: An Historical
Encyclopedia, I recount the story of exactly how Shirley
Herd (who, in addition to teaching in the local school sys-
tem, was also president of the Indianapolis chapter of the
National Council of Negro Women) successfully provoked
me into changing my research and writing focus. Although
I dedicate this volume to her and to her best friend, fellow
club woman and retired primary school teacher Virtea
Downey, I still blush at the fact that I went to graduate
school to become a historian in order to contribute to the
Black Struggle for social justice and yet met her request to
write a history of Black women in Indiana with condescen-
sion. I had never even thought about Black women as his-
torical subjects with their own relations to a state's history,
and I thought her invitation and phone call extraordinarily
intrusive. Only later did I concede how straightforward
and reasonable had been her request to redress a historical
omission. Black women were conspicuous by their absence.
None of the social studies texts or state histories that Herd
and Downey had used to teach their students made mention
of the contributions of Black women. Since historians had
left them out, Herd reasoned, only a "real" historian could
put them in, and since I was the only tenured Black woman
historian in the state of Indiana at that time, the task was
mine.
Herd rejected my reservations and completely ignored
my admonitions that she could not call up a historian and
order a book the way you drive up to a fast-food restaurant
and order a hamburger. In spite of my assertions of igno-
rance about the history of Black women in Indiana and my
confession of having never studied the subject in any his-
tory course or examined any manuscript sources pertaining
to their lives, Herd persevered. Black women, as historical
subjects and agents, were as invisible to me as they had
been to school textbook writers.
Undaunted by my response, Herd demanded that I con-
nect (thankfully without perfect symmetry) my biology
and autobiography, my race and gender, my being a Black
woman, to my skill as a historian, and write for her and for
the local chapter members of the National Council a history
of Black women in Indiana. I relented and wrote the book,
When the Truth Is Told: Black Women's Culture and
Community in Indiana, 1875-1950, as requested. In the
process, I was both humbled and astounded by the array of
rich primary source materials Herd, Downey, and the other
club women had spent two years collecting. There were
diaries, club notes, church souvenir booklets, photographs,
club minutes, birth, death, and marriage certificates, letters,
and handwritten county and local histories. Collectively
this material revealed a universe I never knew existed in
spite of having lived with Black women all of my life . . . 
and being one myself. Or perhaps more accurately, I knew
a universe of Black women existed. I simply had not envi-
sioned its historical meaning.

This passage, from a short story published in 1978,
describes a visit to a planetarium, a building in which
images of stars, planets, and other astronomical
phenomena are projected onto a domed ceiling.
Inside, we sat on wonderfully comfortable seats that
were tilted back so that you lay in a sort of a hammock,
attention directed to the bowl of the ceiling, which soon
turned dark blue, with a faint rim of light around the edge.
There was some splendid, commanding music. The adults
all around were shushing the children, trying to make them
stop crackling their potato chip bags. Then a man's voice,
an eloquent professional voice, began to speak slowly, out
of the walls. The voice reminded me a little of the way
radio announcers used to introduce a piece of classical
music or describe the progress of the Royal Family to
Westminster Abbey on one of their royal occasions.
There was a faint echo-chamber effect.
The dark ceiling was filled with stars. They came out
not all at once but one after another, the way stars really
do come out at night, though more quickly. The Milky
Way galaxy appeared, was moving closer; stars swam
into brilliance and kept on going, disappearing beyond
the edges of the sky-screen or behind my head. While the
flow of light continued, the voice presented the stunning
facts. From a few light-years away, it announced, the Sun
appears as a bright star, and the planets are not visible.
From a few dozen light-years away, the Sun is not visible,
either, to the naked eye. And that distance - a few dozen
light-years - is only about a thousandth part of the distance
from the Sun to the center of our galaxy, one galaxy, which
itself contains about two hundred billion stars. And is, in
turn, one of millions, perhaps billions, of galaxies. Innu-
merable repetitions, innumerable variations. All this
rolled past my head, too, like balls of lightning.
Now realism was abandoned, for familiar artifice.
A model of the solar system was spinning away in its ele-
gant style. A bright bug took off from the Earth, heading
for Jupiter. I set my dodging and shrinking mind sternly
to recording facts. The mass of Jupiter two and a half
times that of all the other planets put together. The Great
Red Spot. The thirteen moons. Past Jupiter, a glance at
the eccentric orbit of Pluto, the icy rings of Saturn. Back
to Earth and moving in to hot and dazzling Venus. Atmo-
spheric pressure ninety times ours. Moonless Mercury
rotating three times while circling the Sun twice; an odd
arrangement, not as satisfying as what they used to tell us
- that it rotated once as it circled the Sun. No perpetual
darkness after all. Why did they give out such confident
information, only to announce later that it was quite wrong?
Finally, the picture already familiar from magazines: the
red soil of Mars, the blooming pink sky. 
When the show was over I sat in my seat while children
clambered over me, making no comments on anything they
had just seen or heard. They were pestering their keepers
for eatables and further entertainments. An effort had been
made to get their attention, to take it away from canned
drinks and potato chips and fix it on various knowns and
unknowns and horrible immensities, and it seemed to have
failed. A good thing, too, I thought. Children have a natural
immunity, most of them, and it shouldn't be tampered with.
As for the adults who would deplore it, the ones who pro-
moted this show, weren't they immune themselves to the
extent that they could put in the echo-chamber effects,
the music, the solemnity, simulating the awe that they
supposed they ought to feel? Awe - what was that sup-
posed to be? A fit of the shivers when you looked out
the window? Once you knew what it was, you wouldn't
be courting it.

Passage 1
Any wildlife biologist can tell you how many deer
a given area can support - how much browse there is
for the deer to eat before they begin to suppress the
reproduction of trees, before they begin to starve in
the winter. Any biologist can calculate how many
wolves a given area can support too, in part by
counting the number of deer. And so on, up and
down the food chain. It's not an exact science, but
it comes pretty close - at least compared to figuring
out the carrying capacity of Earth for human beings,
which is an art so dark that anyone with any sense
stays away from it.

Passage 2
Estimates of the number of humans that Earth can
sustain have ranged in recent decades from fewer than
a billion to more than a trillion. Such elasticity is prob-
ably unavoidable, since "carrying capacity" is essentially
a subjective term. It makes little sense to talk about carry-
ing capacity in relationship to humans, who are capable of
adapting and altering both their culture and their physical
environment, and can thus defy any formula that might
settle the matter. The number of people that Earth can
support depends on how we on Earth want to live, on
what we want to consume, and on what we regard as
a crowd.

Both passages discuss the issue of the intelligence of dogs.
Passage 1 was adapted from a 2001 book on animal
intelligence. Passage 2 was written in 2001 by a dog
trainer and writer.

Passage 1
It was no accident that nineteenth-century naturalist
Charles Darwin strove to connect the mentality and
emotionality of people with that of dogs, rather than, say,
doves or horses. Neither his theory of evolution nor any
general understanding of biology demanded that he pref-
erentially underline our similarity to dogs over other
species. But politically and emotionally, the choice was
inevitable for an English gentleman who had set himself
the task of making the idea of evolutionary continuity
palatable. Darwin wrote that "dogs possess something
very similar to a conscience. They certainly possess
some power of self-command. . . . Dogs have long been
accepted as the very type of fidelity and obedience."
Darwin was not alone in his beliefs that dogs possess
human virtues. The characteristics of loyalty and obedience,
coupled with an expressive face and body, can account
for why dogs are such popular and valued pets in many
cultures. Depending on the breed and the individual, dogs
can be noble, charming, affectionate, and reliable. But
while all dog owners should rightly appreciate these and
other endearing traits in their pets, nothing says that the
cleverness of a highly intelligent primate such as a chim-
panzee is part of the package. Scientists generally believe
the reasoning abilities of chimps to be considerably greater
than that of dogs. But many people nonetheless believe that
dogs are smarter than chimps precisely because of our
familiarity and emotional ties with the dogs that we love.
We apply the same secret rules to our fellow humans: the
old in-group, out-group story. People in your in-group are
those who are similar to you, either because they belong
to the same organizations as you, or enjoy the same
activities, or, and this is the kicker, because they are simply
around more often. Dogs, because of their proximity to
their owners, are definitely in. The intensity of our
relationship with dogs causes us, quite naturally, to imbue
them with high-level mental abilities, whether they have
earned those extra intelligence points or not. We like them,
so we think well of them.

Passage 2
Every dog trainer that I know had the same childhood, a
childhood filled with the brilliant, heroic dogs of literature.
We read about dogs who regularly traveled thousands of
miles to be reunited with owners who somehow misplaced
them, repeatedly saved people from certain death, and
continually exhibited a better grasp of strategic problem-
solving than the average Ph.D. In the preface to one of his
many dog stories, S. P. Meek a bit shamefacedly remarked
that in writing of dogs "I endeavored to hold these heroes
down to the level of canine intelligence, and to make them,
above all, believable. If at times I seem to have made them
show supercanine intelligence, it is because my enthusiasm
has run away with me." We forgave him, of course.
It was something of a shock, therefore, to discover
how the learning theory "experts" believed dogs think
and learn. I was told that dogs, unlike chimpanzees, have
no real reasoning ability. Dogs don't think: rather, they
learn to avoid the unpleasant (negative reinforcement), seek
the pleasant (positive reinforcement), or some combination
of the two. To contend otherwise was to be guilty of the sin
of anthropomorphizing, the attribution to an animal of
motivations and consciousness that only a human being
could possess.
Yet as a dog trainer, I find myself siding more with the
Meeks than I do with the learning theorists: nobody could
believe dispassionately in the totality of positive and nega-
tive reinforcement after seeing the pure intelligence shining
in the face of a border collie intent upon helping a shepherd
herd sheep. Dogs do think and reason. Granted, a dog might
not be able to run a maze as quickly as a chimp. But a dog
outshines any other animal that I know in the ability to
work willingly with a human being, to communicate with
a puzzling creature who often makes incomprehensible
demands. Researchers have increasingly come to view
intelligence as a complex collection of mental abilities
that cannot be fully captured in any simple way. Dogs
are geniuses at being useful, and it is this usefulness
that we admire when we praise their intelligence. As
Jonica Newby, a specialist in animal-human interaction,
writes, "In some ways intelligence is a matter of match-
ing behavior to environment. To compare intelligence
in creatures that have evolved differently is a bit like
deciding which has hit upon the best mode of travel: the
dolphin or the horse." And it is dogs, not chimps, who
possess the most helpful mode of travel for human beings.