Six SHSAT Questions

Excerpt from “How We Made the First Flight”

by Orville Wright

In 1903 brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright conducted experiments related to flying machines. These experiments would eventually lead to air travel becoming a reliable form of transportation.

During the night of December 16, 1903, a strong cold wind blew from the north. When we arose on the morning of the 17th, the puddles of water, which had been standing about camp since the recent rains, were covered with ice. The wind had a velocity of 10 to 12 meters per second (22 to 27 miles an hour). We thought it would die down before long, and so remained indoors the early part of the morning. But when ten o’clock arrived, and the wind was as brisk as ever, we decided that we had better get the machine out and attempt a flight. We hung out the signal for the men of the Life Saving Station.¹ We thought that by facing the flyer into a strong wind, there ought to be no trouble in launching it from the level ground about camp. We realized the difficulties of flying in so high a wind, but estimated that the added dangers in flight would be partly compensated for by the slower speed in landing.

Final Preparations

We laid the track on a smooth stretch of ground about one hundred feet north of the new building. The biting cold wind made work difficult, and we had to warm up frequently in our living room, where we had a good fire in an improvised stove made of a large carbide² can. By the time all was ready, J. T. Daniels, W. S. Dough and A. D. Etheridge, members of the Kill Devil³ Life Saving Station; W. C. Brinkley of Manteo, and Johnny Moore, a boy from Nags Head,⁴ had arrived.

We had a “Richard” hand anemometer with which we measured the velocity of the wind. Measurements made just before starting the first flight showed velocities of 11 to 12 meters per second, or 24 to 27 miles per hour. . . .

Audacity—and Calculation

Wilbur having used his turn in the unsuccessful attempt on the 14th, the right to the first trial now belonged to me. After running the motor a few minutes to heat it up, I released the wire that held the machine to the track, and the machine started forward in the wind. Wilbur ran at the side of the machine, holding the wing to balance it on the track. Unlike the start on the 14th, made in a calm, the machine, facing a 27-mile wind, started very slowly. Wilbur was able to stay with it till it lifted from the track after a forty-foot run. One of the Life Saving men snapped the camera for us, taking a picture just as the machine had reached the end of the track and had risen to a height of about two feet. The slow forward speed of the machine over the ground is clearly shown in the picture by Wilbur’s attitude. He stayed along beside the machine without any effort.

Flight

The course of the flight up and down was exceedingly erratic, partly due to the irregularity of the air, and partly to lack of experience in handling this machine. The control of the front rudder was difficult on account of its being balanced too near the center. This gave it a tendency to turn itself when started; so that it turned too far on one side and then too far on the other. As a result the machine would rise suddenly to about ten feet, and then as suddenly dart for the ground. A sudden dart when a little over a hundred feet from the end of the track, or a little over 120 feet from the point at which it rose into the air, ended the flight. As the velocity of the wind was over 35 feet per second and the speed of the machine over the ground against this wind ten feet per second, the speed of the machine relative to the air was over 45 feet per second, and the length of the flight was equivalent to a flight of 540 feet made in calm air. This flight lasted only 12 seconds, but it was nevertheless the first in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it started.

From “How We Made the First Flight” by Orville Wright—Public Domain/Federal Aviation Administration

¹Life Saving Station: one of the rescue stations along the Atlantic coastline that provided assistance to mariners in distress

²carbide: a very hard material composed of carbon and other heavy metals

³Kill Devil: the town of Kill Devil Hills in eastern North Carolina

⁴Nags Head: a town in eastern North Carolina

A Memory Revolution

A high school senior logs on to a computer at the library to double-check the application due date listed on a college admissions website. Nearby, a librarian helps a group of biology students use a database to search for recent studies about mammals. In the past few decades, the Internet has become an integral component of daily life for many people. The seemingly limitless power of search engines made the Internet search extremely common, and today people increasingly rely on the Internet’s vast accumulation of sources to access all types of information. Scientists are beginning to examine how this reliance is modifying the strategies people use to store and prioritize information in their mind.

A Dependable and Valuable Asset

Psychologist Benjamin Storm from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and researchers Sean Stone and Aaron Benjamin devised an experiment to study students’ tendency to depend on the Internet for facts. To begin, the scientists divided sixty participants into multiple groups, including an “Internet” group and a “memory” group, and placed them in front of computers. The Internet group was required to use the search engine Google to answer eight challenging trivia questions. In contrast, participants in the memory group were permitted to use only their personal knowledge to answer the questions. In the second round, the researchers administered notably easier questions. This time, they allowed each group the option of using Google as they answered. Their results showed that 83 percent of the Internet group continued to consult Google in the second round, while only 63 percent of the memory group chose to do so.

People’s growing inclination to rely on the Internet in order to retrieve information, particularly facts and figures, is called cognitive offloading. Canadian researcher Evan F. Risko and British researcher Sam Gilbert, who have written extensively about the topic, say a similar process has been taking place for centuries. In the past, people used resources like encyclopedias to assist their memories; however, today the Internet, serving as a vast extended memory, allows people to digitally access and retrieve much larger volumes of information. Consequently, people’s minds are free for other cognitive feats, such as connecting data, learning new information, or solving problems.

Filing Information Away

The use of the Internet also appears to be modifying the strategies people use to store information in their mind. Researchers Betsy Sparrow from Columbia University, Jenny Liu from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Daniel Wegner from Harvard University conducted several studies to discover how people efficiently manage their information intake.

To begin, the researchers examined how people evaluate which information deserves their effort to remember. For this experiment, participants read forty trivia facts, such as “An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain,” and typed the statements into a computer file. Half the participants had been previously told the file would be saved, while half believed it would be erased. Next, the participants wrote down every fact they could recall. Those who believed the information would be erased and no longer available could recall 40 percent more facts than those who thought the information would be saved.

In another experiment, the same researchers tested the ability of study participants to remember where to access information. For this trial, participants read and typed trivia statements, which they saved in folders with generic names such as “Facts” and “Items.” After spending ten minutes writing down all the facts they could recall from memory, participants were asked which folder contained a particular fact based on a keyword. For example, “Which folder has the fact about ostriches?” Overall, participants recalled the information’s location more often than the content itself, correctly identifying 49 percent of the folders for specific facts while remembering only 23 percent of the actual trivia. The researchers concluded that our memory is adapting to the Internet age by prioritizing where to locate information even when the specific details are forgotten. According to Sparrow, the Internet has become an important form of transactive memory, an external source of the recollections and associative networks that constitute memory.

As the Internet’s resources continue to expand our “external” memory, some question whether the process may cause people to depend too heavily on technology. However, Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, says, “Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.”

Excerpt from In Search of the Unknown

by Robert W. Chambers

It was at that time the policy of the trustees and officers of the Zoological Gardens neither to employ collectors nor to send out expeditions in search of specimens. The society decided to depend upon voluntary contributions, and I was always busy, part of the day, in dictating answers to correspondents who wrote offering their services as hunters of big game, collectors of all sorts of fauna, trappers, snarers, and also to those who offered specimens for sale, usually at exorbitant rates.

To the proprietors of . . . mangy lynxes, moth-eaten coyotes, and dancing bears I returned courteous but uncompromising refusals—of course, first submitting all such letters, together with my replies, to Professor Farrago.

One day towards the end of May, however, just as I was leaving Bronx Park to return to town, Professor Lesard, of the reptilian department, called out to me that Professor Farrago wanted to see me a moment; so I . . . retraced my steps to the temporary, wooden building occupied by Professor Farrago, general superintendent of the Zoological Gardens. The professor, who was sitting at his desk before a pile of letters and replies submitted for approval by me, pushed his glasses down and looked over them at me with a whimsical smile that suggested amusement, impatience, annoyance, and perhaps a faint trace of apology.

“Now, here’s a letter,” he said, with a deliberate gesture towards a sheet of paper impaled on a file—“a letter that I suppose you remember.” He disengaged the sheet of paper and handed it to me.

“Oh yes,” I replied, with a shrug; “of course the man is mistaken—or—”

“Or what?” demanded Professor Farrago, tranquilly, wiping his glasses.

“—Or a liar,” I replied.

After a silence he leaned back in his chair and bade me read the letter to him again, and I did so with a contemptuous tolerance for the writer, who must have been either a very innocent victim or a very stupid swindler. I said as much to Professor Farrago, but, to my surprise, he appeared to waver.

“I suppose,” he said, with his near-sighted, embarrassed smile, “that nine hundred and ninety-nine men in a thousand would throw that letter aside and condemn the writer as a liar or a fool?”

“In my opinion,” said I, “he’s one or the other.”

“He isn’t—in mine,” said the professor, placidly.

“What!” I exclaimed. “Here is a man living all alone on a strip of rock and sand between the wilderness and the sea, who wants you to send somebody to take charge of a bird that doesn’t exist!”

“How do you know,” asked Professor Farrago, “that the bird in question does not exist?”

“It is generally accepted,” I replied, sarcastically, “that the great auk has been extinct for years. Therefore I may be pardoned for doubting that our correspondent possesses a pair of them alive.”

“Oh, you young fellows,” said the professor, smiling wearily, “you embark on a theory for destinations that don’t exist.”

He leaned back in his chair, his amused eyes searching space for the imagery that made him smile.

“Like swimming squirrels, you navigate with the help of Heaven and a stiff breeze, but you never land where you hope to—do you?”

Rather red in the face, I said: “Don’t you believe the great auk to be extinct?”

“Audubon saw the great auk.”

“Who has seen a single specimen since?”

“Nobody—except our correspondent here,” he replied, laughing.

I laughed, too, considering the interview at an end, but the professor went on, coolly:

“Whatever it is that our correspondent has—and I am daring to believe that it is the great auk itself—I want you to secure it for the society.”

When my astonishment subsided my first conscious sentiment was one of pity. Clearly, Professor Farrago was on the verge of dotage—ah, what a loss to the world!

I believe now that Professor Farrago perfectly interpreted my thoughts, but he betrayed neither resentment nor impatience. I drew a chair up beside his desk—there was nothing to do but to obey, and this fool’s errand was none of my conceiving.

Together we made out a list of articles necessary for me and itemized the expenses I might incur, and I set a date for my return, allowing no margin for a successful termination to the expedition.

“Never mind that,” said the professor. “What I want you to do is to get those birds here safely. Now, how many men will you take?”

“None,” I replied, bluntly; “it’s a useless expense, unless there is something to bring back. If there is I’ll wire you, you may be sure.”

“Very well,” said Professor Farrago, good-humoredly, “you shall have all the assistance you may require. Can you leave to-night?”

The old gentleman was certainly prompt. I nodded, half-sulkily, aware of his amusement.

“So,” I said, picking up my hat, “I am to start north to find a place called Black Harbor, where there is a man named Halyard who possesses, among other household utensils, two extinct great auks—”

We were both laughing by this time. I asked him why on earth he credited the assertion of a man he had never before heard of.

“I suppose,” he replied, with the same half-apologetic, half-humorous smile, “it is instinct. I feel, somehow, that this man Halyard has got an auk—perhaps two. I can’t get away from the idea that we are on the eve of acquiring the rarest of living creatures. It’s odd for a scientist to talk as I do; doubtless you’re shocked—admit it, now!”

But I was not shocked; on the contrary, I was conscious that the same strange hope that Professor Farrago cherished was beginning, in spite of me, to stir my pulses, too.

“If he has—” I began, then stopped.

The professor and I looked hard at each other in silence.

“Go on,” he said, encouragingly.

But I had nothing more to say, for the prospect of beholding with my own eyes a living specimen of the great auk produced a series of conflicting emotions within me which rendered speech profanely superfluous.

From IN SEARCH OF THE UNKNOWN by Robert W. Chambers—Public Domain

Audubon: John James Audubon, an ornithologist and artist who created scientific illustrations of birds
dotage: a loss of reasoning brought about by old age