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AP English Language: Style (Drill 2)

Drill 2 · Reading · Style

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About This Drill

AP English Language: Style (Drill 2) is a Reading practice drill covering Style. It contains 5 original questions created by Brian Stewart, a Barron's test prep author with over 20 years of tutoring experience.

Read the passage carefully, then answer all five questions. This drill focuses on a passage with a distinctive voice, with questions that ask you to analyze how specific stylistic choices, sentence length variation, figurative language, and deliberate repetition, contribute to the passage's overall effect.

Passage

The following text is adapted from an address delivered by marine biologist and science writer Dr. Eleanor Marsh to the National Association of Science Journalists in Washington, D.C., in 2004. I am often asked whether I believe in the obligations of the scientist to explain her work to the public. The question troubles me, because it implies that such explanation is optional, a kindness the scientist may or may not choose to extend, like an afterthought appended to the real work. I do not think it is optional. I think it is inseparable from the work itself. We live in a world shaped at every level by scientific knowledge, a world in which the food we eat, the air we breathe, the medicines we take, the land we inhabit have all been profoundly altered by decisions made in laboratories and research stations most people will never visit, by processes most people do not understand. The scientist who withholds that knowledge, who retreats into professional language, who addresses only colleagues, who considers the general public unworthy of the complexity, is not being rigorous. She is being irresponsible. I want to say something harder than that. It is not enough to explain. Explanation without wonder is a kind of condescension, the presentation of facts to people who are expected to receive them passively, to nod and be grateful and ask no difficult questions. What science communication at its best offers is not information but invitation: an invitation into the habits of mind that make scientific understanding possible. Curiosity. Tolerance for uncertainty. The willingness to revise a conclusion when the evidence demands it. These are not specialist skills. They are the foundations of good thinking in any domain, and the public has both the capacity and the right to practice them. The natural world offers the best argument I know for this kind of communication. A child who has been taught to see a tidal pool, not as a collection of organisms to be catalogued, but as a set of relationships to be wondered at, has been given something that no subsequent lesson can easily take away. She has been given the habit of noticing. And the habit of noticing is the beginning of everything. I am sometimes told that the public cannot handle complexity. I have spent my career betting against this assumption, and I have not lost yet. What the public cannot handle, what none of us can handle, is being talked at by experts who have forgotten that the point of knowledge is not its accumulation but its use: in living more wisely, in protecting what we value, in asking better questions about the world we inhabit together.

Questions & Explanations

Question 1. Dr. Marsh's diction in the second paragraph, particularly the verbs 'retreats,' 'addresses,' and 'considers', contributes to the passage's argument primarily by

  • A) casting the scientist who withholds knowledge as an active agent making a series of deliberate choices, not merely a passive figure. ✓
  • B) establishing a contrast between the active role of the public and the passive role of the scientific community.
  • C) suggesting that scientific language is inherently inaccessible and requires simplification before it can be shared.
  • D) introducing an ironic tone in which Marsh praises scientific rigor while subtly mocking professional conventions.

Explanation: Choice A is correct. By using active verbs, 'retreats,' 'addresses,' 'considers', Marsh frames withholding knowledge as a series of deliberate decisions carrying moral weight. Choice B inverts the passage's logic. Choice C is not supported. Choice D misreads the tone; Marsh is direct, not ironic.

Question 2. The sentence 'Explanation without wonder is a kind of condescension' is best understood as

  • A) a concession that scientific explanation, while necessary, is always somewhat patronizing toward lay audiences.
  • B) an argument that scientists should prioritize emotional engagement over factual accuracy in public communication.
  • C) a critique of science journalists who sensationalize findings to generate public interest.
  • D) a distinction between merely transmitting information and inviting the public into genuine scientific thinking. ✓

Explanation: Choice D is correct. Marsh distinguishes between delivering facts to a passive audience (condescension) and inviting the public into habits of mind, curiosity, tolerance for uncertainty, that make science meaningful (wonder). Choice A misreads 'condescension.' Choice B mischaracterizes her argument. Choice C introduces science journalists not mentioned in the passage.

Question 3. Marsh's description of a child learning to see a tidal pool 'as a set of relationships to be wondered at' rather than 'a collection of organisms to be catalogued' primarily functions to

  • A) argue that field observation is a more rigorous scientific method than laboratory experimentation.
  • B) provide a concrete image that illustrates the difference between passive information reception and active intellectual engagement. ✓
  • C) suggest that science education should focus exclusively on natural environments rather than classroom instruction.
  • D) demonstrate that children are inherently more capable of scientific wonder than adults.

Explanation: Choice B is correct. The tidal pool example gives sensory specificity to Marsh's abstract distinction between information transfer and invitation into scientific habits of mind. Choice A introduces a lab-vs-field debate not present. Choice C overgeneralizes. Choice D attributes a claim about children vs. adults that Marsh does not make.

Question 4. The phrase 'I have spent my career betting against this assumption, and I have not lost yet' is best described as

  • A) understatement, in which Marsh minimizes her accomplishments to avoid appearing arrogant.
  • B) irony, in which Marsh implies that she has actually failed to communicate science to the public.
  • C) confident personal testimony that grounds her refutation of the 'public cannot handle complexity' claim in lived experience. ✓
  • D) an appeal to authority that asks the audience to defer to Marsh's expertise rather than evaluate her argument independently.

Explanation: Choice C is correct. Marsh responds to the 'public cannot handle complexity' claim with evidence from her own career; she has bet against that assumption and won. Choice A misreads the register; the phrase is confident, not self-deprecating. Choice B is contradicted by 'I have not lost yet.' Choice D mischaracterizes the move; Marsh is offering evidence, not asking for deference.

Question 5. The overall tone of the address can best be described as

  • A) urgent and principled, pressing a moral case for science communication with confidence and conviction. ✓
  • B) tentative and exploratory, raising questions about the scientist's obligations without reaching firm conclusions.
  • C) adversarial and accusatory, directly attacking named scientists for their failure to communicate with the public.
  • D) nostalgic and elegiac, mourning an earlier era when scientists were more connected to the natural world.

Explanation: Choice A is correct. Marsh makes direct, confident moral claims throughout, science communication is 'inseparable from the work,' withholding knowledge is 'irresponsible,' explanation without wonder is 'condescension.' Choice B misreads the address; Marsh reaches firm conclusions. Choice C overstates the confrontation. Choice D is contradicted by the forward-looking tone.