ACT Reading — Comparative Passages — Drill 1

NATURAL SCIENCE — COMPARATIVE PASSAGES: The following passages are adapted from two articles about urban rewilding published in Environmental Science Today (©2021). PASSAGE A Urban rewilding — the practice of reintroducing native species and ecological processes into city environments — offers measurable benefits that planners can no longer afford to ignore. Cities that have removed concrete channels from rivers and replanted native vegetation along banks have documented reductions in downstream flooding, improved water filtration, and the return of bird and insect species absent for decades. Green corridors connecting parks allow animals to move, feed, and reproduce across what would otherwise be isolated fragments of habitat. These are not sentimental gestures. They are infrastructure investments that reduce long-term maintenance costs, improve air quality, and build resilience against climate disruption. The science is clear: functioning ecosystems perform services that engineered systems cannot replicate at any price. Cities that embrace rewilding are not trading development for nature — they are making their development more durable. PASSAGE B The enthusiasm for urban rewilding, while understandable, tends to outpace both the evidence and the logistics. Most rewilding success stories involve mid-sized or smaller cities with available land, cooperative landowners, and limited political resistance. Scaling these efforts to dense urban cores — where every square meter is contested — is a different problem entirely. The reintroduction of large predators, a prominent element of rewilding theory in rural contexts, is plainly impractical within city limits. And even modest interventions, like native plantings, require sustained maintenance that cash-strapped municipalities routinely underfund. Rewilding advocates sometimes conflate correlation with causation, pointing to biodiversity gains that may reflect broader regional trends rather than their specific interventions. The concept deserves further study. But treating it as a proven policy solution, ready for wide deployment, misrepresents the current state of the research.