AP® English Language and Composition Free Response Questions
Question 2
(Suggested Time––40 minutes. This question counts for one-third of the total essay section score.)
In this excerpt from the book Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth written in 1995, certified arborist William Bryant
Logan “plows through our planet’s crust… [with] soulful meditations that greatly enrich our concept of that substance
from which we all arise and to which we all must return.” Read the passage carefully. Write an essay that analyzes the
rhetorical choices Logan uses to convey his message about our connection with dirt.
There is a glamour to the study of rock. It is so
old, so hard, and it has taken the entire force of the
planet to produce it. Inside the Earth, heat seeks to
randomize motion; outside, the pressure of gravity
5 restrains it. Between these two forces, the whole
world is extruded, from the bottom of the sea to
the highest mountain. Imagine two hands between
which you even out a mudpie. One pushes down,
one pushes up. That’s the way it is with the Earth.
10 So what we know as the surface is really only a
way station ––a point of equilibrium––between
opposing forces.
And the surface moves. Very slowly to our
eyes, it is true, but one could imagine a being for
15 whom each of our millennia was a second… Such
a creature would observe the shifting and the
collision of continents, the eruption of volcanoes,
the appearance and disappearance of mountain
ranges, the spread and the retreat of ice and whole
20 floras, and the renewal of the sea floor, as clearly
as we observe that a living person’s chest moves
up and down and she blinks, twitches.
The ultimate fate of the land surfaces is the
same as the seafloor’s: it flows, slides, blows,
25 sinks over the edge of the continent and into the
suture that returns it to the underground fire. From
there it is once again digested and circulates to a
weak spot in the crust, where it is pumped upward
again.
30 What part does the soil play in this process? It
is less than foam on waves. Geologists, who love
deep time and the vast forces that make igneous,
metamorphic, and sedimentary rock, scarcely
recognize soil at all. They call it “regolith,”
35 meaning unconsolidated rock, as though it were
simply a moment on the way to the cementation of
real stones.
But the soil is all of the Earth that is really ours.
The seasons, with their heat and their cold, make
40 the soil. The storms make the soil, with water, the
most powerful substance on Earth. The winds
make the soil, spreading dust across thousands of
miles. The tides make the soil, stirring the river
deltas and their fertile slimes. And above all, the
45 trees and the plants, the dead and the digested, the
eaters and the eaten, make the soil.
Dirt is the gift of each to all. It is not so grand
in appearance as even the muddiest shale. An
ancient soil may be not more than a half a million
50 years old, piddling compared to any rock. A
tectonic plate of the Earth’s crust is as much as
fifty miles thick; a soil may be as thin as a lichen.
It would seem incommensurable. The soil is so
young and fragile compared to stones. But youth
55 and fragility are fruitful.
Soil appears where life does, and its
characteristic is to build where erosion destroys.
On the face of a stone a lichen takes hold. The
lichen digests minerals and is itself digested by the
60 microbes in the air. The combined detritus falls,
fills the cleft in the rock. A club moss roots in this
compost, lives, and dies. The cleft overgrows.
Grass seeds blow in, grass grows.
Everywhere, creatures and minerals together
65 make their characteristic soils. Where the grand
circulation exposes different bands of rock in
juxtaposition, so the plant communities that come
to live on them differ, and the resulting soils do
too.
70 On a field trip once, the great soil scientist
Hans Jenny had me drive down a side road in
Sonoma County, California. Beside us ran a field
of wild grass with oaks scattered on the knolls.
Abruptly, the vegetation turned into a scraggly
75 stand of digger pine. We stopped the car to look
for the difference. Beneath the oaks , the broken
rock was schist; underlying the grassland were
sandstones; but the sparse pine grew on a pretty
green stone. Serpentine is the state rock, it’s so
80 attractive, but it is also full of chromium and
nickel, discouraging to most plants.
Here, we used our eyes to conceive of the
livingness of the world. I had driven past that
landscape all my life, my eyes on the road ahead,
85 noticing the “beauties” but really observing
nothing at all. Here, by an oily roadside, with
traffic sweeping by, I stepped out of time and into
beauty, thanks to a ninety-year-old man who
actually knew something. I could feel the Earth
90 spinning on its axis.
We spend our lives hurrying away from the
real, as though it were deadly to us. “It must be
somewhere up there on the horizon,” we think.
And all the time, it is in the soil, right beneath our
95 feet.