May 2022 International SAT Reading Test (1-10)

The home they bought in Whaletown was built in
a meadowlilk clearing that had been hacked from the
middle of the dense temperate rain forest. A smaller
cottage stood at the foot of the drive where her
⁵ mother would live on all sides, massive Douglas firs,
red cedars, and bigleaf maples surrounded them,
dwarfing everything human, When Ruth first saw
these giant trees, she wept. They rose up around her,
ancient time beings, towering a hundred or two
¹⁰ hundred feet overhead. At five feet five inches, she
had never felt so puny in all her life.
“We’re nothing,” she said,wiping her eyes,“We’re
barely here at all.”
“Yes,” Oliver said.“Isn’t it great? And they can
¹⁵ live to be a thousand years old.”
She leaned against him, tilting her head all the
way back so she could see the treetops, piercing the
sky.
“They’re impossibly tall,” she said.
²⁰ “Not impossibly,” Oliver said,holding her so she
wouldn’t fall- “It’s just a matter of perspective. If you
were that tree, I wouldn’t even reach the bottom of
your anklebone.”

Oliver was overjoyed. He was a tree guy and had
²⁵ no use for tidy vegetable gardens or shallow-rooted
annuals, like lettuce. When they first moved in, he
was still quite ill, prone to dizzy spells and easily
tired, but he started a daily regimen of walking and
soon he was running the trails, and it seemed to Ruth
³⁰ as if the forest were healing him,as if he were
absorbing its inexorable life force. As he ran through
the dense understory Jie could read the signs of
arboreal intrigue the drama and power struggles as
species vied for control over a patch of sunlight, or
³⁵ giant firs and fungal spores opted to work together
for their mutual benefit- He could see time
unfolding here, and history, embedded in the whorls
and fractal forms of nature, and he would come
home, sweating and breathless and tell her what he’d
⁴⁰ seen.

Their house was made of cedar from the forest-
It was a whimsical two-story structure built by
hippies in the 1970s. with a shake roof, deep eaves,
and a sprawling front porch overlooking the small
⁴⁵ meadow and encircled by the tall trees .The real
estate agent had listed the house as having an ocean
view, but the only glimpse of water it afforded was
from a single window in Ruth’s office, where she
could see a tiny patch of sea and sky through a
⁵⁰ U-shaped notch in the treetops which looked like an
inverted tunnel- The real estate agent pointed out
that they could cut down the trees that were blocking
their view, but they never did. Instead, they planted
more.

⁵⁵ In a futile attempt to domesticate the landscape,
Ruth planted European climbing roses around the
house. Oliver planted bamboo. The two species
quickly grew up into a densely tangled thicket, so
that soon it was almost impossible to find the
⁶⁰ entrance to the house if you didn’t already know
where it was. The house seemed in danger of
disappearing, and by then, the meadow was
beginning to shrink, too, as the forest encroached
like a slow-moving coniferous wave, threatening to
⁶⁵ swallow them completely.

Oliver wasn’t worried He took the long view.
Anticipating the effects of global warming on the
native trees, he was working to create a climate-
change forest on a hundred acres of clear-cut, owned
⁷⁰ by a botanist friend. He planted groves of ancient
natives—metasequoia, giant sequoia,coast redwoods,
Juglans, Ulmus^ and gingko-species that had been
indigenous to the area during the Eocene Thermal
Maximum, some 55 million years ago.

⁷⁵ “Imagine,”he said. “Palms and alligators
flourishing once again as far north as Alaska!”
This was his latest artwork,a botanical
intervention he called the NeoEocene. He described
it as collaboration with time and place, whose
⁸⁰ outcome neither he nor any of his contemporaries
would ever live to witness, but he was okay with not
knowing. Patience was part of his nature, and he
accepted his lot as a short-lived mammal, scurrying
in and out amid the roots of the giants.

⁸⁵ But Ruth was neither patient nor accepting,
and she really liked to know. After a few short years
(fifteen, to be exact—brief by his count, interminable
by hers), surrounded by all this vegetative rampancy,
she was feeling increasingly unsure of herself. She
⁹⁰ missed the built environment of New York City.
It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines
and architecture, that she could situate herself in
human time and history. As a novelist she needed
this. She missed people. She missed human intrigue,
⁹⁵ drama and power struggles- She needed her own
species.