Reading Comprehension

Directions Read the following selections and examine the visual representation. Then
answer the questions that follow.
Transcendentalism is an intellectual movement that developed in the United States in the
nineteenth century. Henry David Thoreau was an important transcendentalist.
from Wild Fruits
Henry David Thoreau
Most of us are still related to our native fields as the navigator to
undiscovered islands in the sea. We can any afternoon discover a new fruit there
which will surprise us by its beauty or sweetness. So long as I saw in my walks one
or two kinds of berries whose names I did not know, the proportion of the
unknown seemed indefinitely, if not infinitely, great.
As I sail the unexplored sea of Concord, many a dell and swamp and
wooded hill is my Ceram and Amboyna. Famous fruits imported from the East or
South and sold in our markets—as oranges, lemons, pine-apples, and bananas—do
not concern me so much as many an unnoticed wild berry whose beauty annually
lends a new charm to some wild walk or which I have found to be palatable to an
outdoor taste. We cultivate imported shrubs in our front yards for the beauty of
their berries, while at least equally beautiful berries grow unregarded by us in the
surrounding fields.
The tropical fruits are for those who dwell within the tropics. Their fairest
and sweetest parts cannot be imported. Brought here, they chiefly concern those
whose walks are through the marketplace. It is not the orange of Cuba but rather
the checkerberry of the neighboring pasture that most delights the eye and the
palate of the New England child. For it is not the foreignness or size or nutritive
qualities of a fruit that determine its absolute value.
We do not think much of table fruits. They are especially for aldermen and
epicures. They do not feed the imagination as these wild fruits do, but it would
starve on them. The bitter-sweet of a white-oak acorn which you nibble in a bleak
November walk over the tawny earth is more to me than a slice of imported pine-
apple. The South may keep her pine-apples, and we will be content with our
strawberries, which are, as it were, a pine-apple with “going-a-strawberrying”
stirred into them, infinitely enhancing their flavor. What are all the oranges
imported into England to the hips and haws in her hedges? She could easily spare
the one, but not the other. Ask Wordsworth, or any of her poets who knows, which
is the most to him.
The value of these wild fruits is not in the mere possession or eating of
them, but in the sight and enjoyment of them. The very derivation of the word
“fruit” would suggest this. It is from the Latin fructus , meaning “that which is used
or enjoyed .” If it were not so, then going a-berrying and going to market would be
nearly synonymous experiences. Of course, it is the spirit in which you do a thing
which makes it interesting, whether it is sweeping a room or pulling turnips.
Peaches are unquestionably a very beautiful and palatable fruit, but the gathering
of them for the market is not nearly so interesting to the imaginations of men as
the gathering of huckleberries for your own use.
A man fits out a ship at a great expense and sends it to the West Indies
with a crew of men and boys, and after six months or a year it comes back with a
load of pineapples; now, if no more gets accomplished than the speculator
commonly aims at, if it simply turns out what is called a successful venture, I am
less interested in this expedition than in some child’s first excursions a-
huckleberrying, in which it is introduced into a new world, experiences a new
development, though it brings home only a gill of berries in its basket. I know that
the newspapers and the politicians declare otherwise—other arrivals are reported
and other prices quoted by them—but that does not alter the fact. Then I think that
the fruit of the latter’s expedition was finer than that of the former. It was a more
fruitful expedition. What the editors and politicians lay so much stress upon is
comparatively moonshine.
The value of any experience is measured, of course, not by the amount of
money, but the amount of development we get out of it. If a New England boy’s
dealings with oranges and pine-apples have had more to do with his development
than picking huckleberries or pulling turnips have, then he naturally and rightly
thinks more of the former; otherwise not. No, it is not those far-fetched fruits which
the speculator imports that concern us chiefly, but rather those which you have
fetched yourself in the hold of a basket from some far hill or swamp, journeying all
the long afternoon, the first of the season, consigned to your friends at home.
Commonly, the less you get, the happier and the richer you are. The rich
man’s son gets cocoa-nuts and the poor man’s pignuts, but the worst of it is that the
former never goes a-cocoa-nutting and so never gets the cream of the cocoa-nut, as
the latter does the cream of the pignut. That on which commerce seizes is always
the very coarsest part of a fruit—the mere bark and rind, in fact, for her hands are
very clumsy. This is what fills the holds of ships, is exported and imported, pays
duties, and is finally sold in the shops.
It is a grand fact that you cannot make the fairer fruits or parts of fruits
matter of commerce; that is, you cannot buy the highest use and enjoyment of
them. You cannot buy that pleasure which it yields to him who truly plucks it. You
cannot buy a good appetite, even. In short, you may buy a servant or slave, but you
cannot buy a friend.

In describing the motivations for their experiment in eating only food produced
within a hundred-mile radius of their home, journalists Smith and MacKinnon refer to
an “ugly statistic”: “the food we eat now typically travels between 1,500 and 3,000
miles from farm to plate.” Smith speaks in the following excerpt.
from Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally
Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon
It was time for a closer look at the ugly statistic about the distances that
food now
travels from farm to plate. I sat down at my 1950s wooden desk; my office is only
two feet from my bed, making it the world’s shortest commute. I phoned Rich
Pirog, the food systems program leader for the Leopold Center at Iowa State
University, and the man responsible for the statistic. The explanation for long-
distance eating, he said, comes down to two familiar words: cheap oil. It might not
seem that way when we’re filling up with gas, but even if you ship a tomato from
Florida to the Midwest, the transportation costs are only 6.3 percent of the retail
price. According to a 2001 study for which Pirog was the lead author, shipping food
nationally uses seventeen times more fuel than a regional food system.
Pirog has seen his 1,500-mile statistic reach far and wide through the
media. But look more closely, he said. The study only covered fresh produce, not
packaged goods that each can contain a laundry list of ingredients from across the
continent and around the world. What’s more, the study only measured the
distances the foodstuffs had traveled within North America. A more recent Leopold
Center examination of a humble container of strawberry yogurt, produced and sold
in Iowa from Iowa milk, required endless patience phoning processors and
producers, along with a whole new mathematical formula. The weighted total
source distance” turned out to be 2,216 miles—without considering the plastic
container, foil, or box. Meanwhile, international imports form a greater and greater
part of our daily nourishment. In 1970, Pirog noted, only 21 percent of America’s
fresh fruit was imported. By 2001 the figure had nearly doubled. Building on the
Leopold Center methodology, new research into the “food miles” traveled by
produce and a few simple processed foods is likely more accurate. The public
health department of Waterloo, Ontario, puts the typical distance from farm to
plate at more like 2,500 miles—the distance from San Francisco to Miami by direct
flight, or, more interestingly, from London, England, to Baku, Azerbaijan. In other
words, worlds apart.
Pirog confirmed that the number is only increasing. “China wants to be the
main produce provider for the world,” he said. The implications are huge. Cheap
Chinese labor will produce mountains of “bargain” lettuce to be shipped by
freighter around the world. More and more, North American consumers will eat
produce from distant places they will never visit, though they might easily have
grown the vegetables in their own backyards. In fact, they might be eating that
imported produce at exactly the same time that it’s growing just a few miles away.
This is called “redundant trade”; consider, for example, the fact that international
imports to California peak during that state’s strawberry season.
All that food comes with a hidden price. The economic term for these
invisible costs is “externalities,” which The Economist magazine refers to as a form
of “market failure.” I had a ready example lodged uncomfortably in my mind.
Reading Mark Reisner’s Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing
Water, I had learned that California built 1,200 major river dams en route to
becoming the world’s number-five agricultural producer. Some California rivers
are drained nearly dry by the time they reach the coast—85 percent of all water in
the state is used for agricultural purposes. In exchange for this staggering
ecological assault, I am able to buy California lettuce year-round. I don’t have to pay
for the dams, the wild places given over to reservoirs and farms, and the resulting
decimation of species from Chinook salmon to the least Bell’s vireo to all of the
plants of the bunchgrass prairies. Furthermore, I don’t chip in on the cost of
cleaning water wrecked by the pesticides and herbicides used in intensive
industrial farming; the health-care costs of water pollution; the greenhouse gas
emissions produced in the manufacture of nitrogen-based fertilizers, which may
have been shipped from the other side of the world; or the fossil-fuel emissions,
five times greater per mile than those from a cargo truck if the produce came to
town by refrigerated jumbo jet, as it increasingly does. The list goes on. By the time
you’re eating a salad the backstory is pretty bleak—what economists who calculate
externalities call the “true cost” of a product. Meanwhile, down at the grocery store
and outside the world of theory, the lettuce stays cheap.

Comprehension
Directions Answer the following questions about the excerpt from Wild Fruits.

1. The prefix un- means “not.” In line 1, undiscovered most likely means

2. “As long as I still find fruits unknown to me, I feel that I have much, if not everything, to
learn” best paraphrases the sentence in which lines?

3. The prefix un- means “not.” In line 6, unexplored most likely means

4. The Latin word annus means “year.” In line 9, annually most likely means

5. The prefix un- means “not.” In line 9, unnoticed most likely means

6. The sentence in which lines shows that the transcendentalists valued our relationship to
wild nature?

7. The sentence in which lines best expresses Thoreau’s theme?

8. The sentence in which lines makes a satirical point about imported fruit?
9 “I question whether peaches sold in the market are as delicious as the huckleberries that
men pick in the wild” best paraphrases the sentence in which lines?

10. Lines 48–55 reveal the author’s transcendentalist perspective that

11. Which expresses both transcendentalism and the author’s perspective in the last
paragraph?

COMPREHENSION
Directions Answer the following questions about the excerpt from Plenty.

12. The phrase “ugly statistic” suggests that the authors’ attitude toward the growth of the
distance from farm to table is

13. “Gas may seem expensive to motorists, but shipping produce across country adds little
to its cost” best paraphrases the sentence in which lines?

14. “An example of ‘redundant trade’ is that California imports the most strawberries
during its own strawberry season” best paraphrases the sentence in which lines?

15. The sentence “All that food comes with a hidden price” expresses which aspect of this
excerpt?

16. Which sentence makes a satirical point about produce consumption?

17. What word best describes the tone of this excerpt?

18. Which is the focus of satire in the last paragraph?

19. Which best expresses the author’s perspective in this excerpt?

Comprehension
Directions Answer the following questions about both selections.

20. Compare the authors’ perspectives in the excerpts from Wild Fruits and Plenty.

21. Compare the themes in the excerpts from Wild Fruits and Plenty.

Comprehension
Directions Answer the following questions about the visual representation.

22. The images of fruits and vegetables create a feeling of

23. The image of the truck suggests