As any good contractor will tell you, a sound structure requires stable materials. But atoms, the building blocks of everything we know and love—bunnies, brownies, and best friends—don’t appear to be models of stability. Why are some atoms, like sodium, so hyperactive while others, like helium, are so aloof? Why do the electrons that inhabit atoms jump around so strangely, from one bizarrely shaped orbital to another? And why do protons, the bits that give atoms their heft and personality, stick together at all? We are told that every atom has a tiny nucleus containing positively charged protons and uncharged neutrons, swarmed by a cloud of speedy electrons. We are also told that like charges, such as protons, repel each other with a force that shoots up to infinity as they get closer. Even worse, you can’t get much closer than two protons in the nucleus of an atom. So what’s keeping atomic nuclei from flying apart? Obviously, some other force must be at work inside the atom, something that we can’t detect at our human scale. Physicists call this the “strong nuclear force.” But where does it come from? In order for this force to account for the binding of protons in the nucleus, it must have certain interesting features. First, it can’t have any sizeable effect beyond the radius of the atom itself, or it would play havoc with the nuclei of adjacent atoms, destroying matter as we know it. Second, it must perfectly balance the repulsive force of electricity at an “equilibrium point” of about 0.7 × 10⁻¹⁵ meters, the average distance between bound protons, in order to create a stable nucleus. Third, it must repel at even shorter distances, or else neutrons (which don’t have any electrostatic repulsion to balance the strong nuclear force) would collapse into each other. The graph shows the behavior of such a force relative to the repulsive electrostatic force. In 1935, Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa proposed that the nuclear force was conveyed by a then-undiscovered heavy subatomic particle he called the pi meson (or “pion”), which (unlike the photon, which conveys the electrostatic force) decays very quickly and therefore conveys a powerful force only over a very short distance. Professor Yukawa’s theory, however, was dealt a mortal blow by a series of experiments conducted at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the early 1990s that demonstrated that pions carry force only over distances greater than the distance between bound protons. The pion was a plumber’s wrench trying to do a tweezer’s job. Current atomic theory suggests that the strong nuclear force is most likely conveyed by massless particles called “gluons” according to the theory of quantum chromodynamics, or QCD for short. According to QCD, protons and neutrons are composed of smaller particles called quarks, which are held together by the aptly named gluons. This quark-binding force has a “residue” that extends beyond the protons and neutrons themselves to provide just enough force to bind the protons and neutrons together. If you’re hoping that QCD ties up atomic behavior with a tidy little bow, you may be just a bit disappointed. As a quantum theory, it conceives of space and time as tiny chunks that occasionally misbehave, rather than smooth predictable quantities, and its mathematical formulas are perhaps as hard to penetrate as the nucleus itself. The primary purpose of the first paragraph is to

By the time we were old enough to read Hemingway, he had become legendary. Like Lord Byron a century earlier, he had learned to play himself, his own best hero, with superb conviction. He was Hemingway of the rugged outdoor grin and the hairy chest posing with the lion he had just shot. He was Tarzan Hemingway, crouching in the African bush with elephant gun ready. He was War Correspondent Hemingway writing a play in the Hotel Florida in Madrid while thirty fascist shells crashed through the roof. Later, he was Task Force Hemingway swathed in ammunition belts and defending his post singlehandedly against fierce German attacks. But even without the legend, the chest-beating, wisecracking pose that was later to seem so incredibly absurd, his impact upon us was tremendous. The feeling he gave us was one of immense expansiveness, freedom, and, at the same time, absolute stability and control. We could follow him, limitless his odd enchantment, through all the doubts and fears of adolescence and come out pure and untouched. The words he put down seemed to us to have been carved from the living stone of life. They conveyed exactly the taste, smell and feel of experience as it was, as it might possibly be. And so we began unconsciously to translate our own sensations into his terms and to impose on everything we did and felt the particular emotions they aroused in us. The Hemingway time was a good time to be young. We had much then that the war later forced out of us, something far greater than Hemingway’s strong formative influence. Later writers who lost or got rid of Hemingway have been able to find nothing to put in his place. They have rejected his time as untrue for them only to fail at finding themselves in their own time. Others, in their embarrassment at the hold he once had over them, have not profited by the lessons he had to teach, and still others were never touched by him at all. These last are perhaps the real unfortunates, for they have been denied access to a powerful tradition. Passage 2 One wonders why Hemingway’s greatest works now seem unable to evoke the same sense of a tottering world that in the 1920s established Ernest Hemingway’s reputation. These novels should be speaking to us. Our social structure is as shaken, our philosophical despair as great, our everyday experience as unsatisfying. We have had more war than Hemingway ever dreamed of. Our violence—physical, emotional, and intellectual—is not inferior to that of the 1920s. Yet Hemingway’s great novels no longer seem to penetrate deeply the surface of existence. One begins to doubt that they ever did so significantly in the 1920s. Hemingway’s novels indulged the dominant genteel tradition in American culture while seeming to repudiate it. They yielded to the functionalist, technological aesthetic of the culture instead of resisting it in the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright. Hemingway, in effect, became a dupe of his culture rather than its moral-aesthetic conscience. As a consequence, the import of his work has diminished. There is some evidence from his stylistic evolution that Hemingway himself must have felt as much, for Hemingway’s famous stylistic economy frequently seems to conceal another kind of writer, with much richer rhetorical resources to hand. So, Death in the Afternoon (1932), Hemingway’s bullfighting opus and his first book after A Farewell to Arms (1929), reveals great uneasiness over his earlier accomplishment. In it, he defends his literary method with a doctrine of ambiguity: "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about." about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them." Hemingway made much the same theoretical point in another way in Death in the Afternoon apparently believing that a formal reduction of aesthetic complexity was the only kind of design that had value. Perhaps the greatest irony of Death in the Afternoon is its unmistakably baroque prose, which Hemingway himself embarrassedly admitted was “flowery.” Reviewers, unable to challenge Hemingway’s expertise in the art of bullfighting, noted that its style was “awkward, tortuous, [and] belligerently clumsy.” Death in the Afternoon is an extraordinarily self-indulgent, unruly, clownish, garrulous, and satiric book, with scrambled chronologies, willful digressions, mock-scholarly apparatuses, fictional interludes, and scathing allusions. Its inflated style can hardly penetrate the façade, let alone deflate humanity. The author of Passage 2 suggests that, in comparison to Hemingway, Frank Lloyd Wright was relatively

By the time we were old enough to read Hemingway, he had become legendary. Like Lord Byron a century earlier, he had learned to play himself, his own best hero, with superb conviction. He was Hemingway of the rugged outdoor grin and the hairy chest posing with the lion he had just shot. He was Tarzan Hemingway, crouching in the African bush with elephant gun ready. He was War Correspondent Hemingway writing a play in the Hotel Florida in Madrid while thirty fascist shells crashed through the roof. Later, he was Task Force Hemingway swathed in ammunition belts and defending his post singlehandedly against fierce German attacks. But even without the legend, the chest-beating, wisecracking pose that was later to seem so incredibly absurd, his impact upon us was tremendous. The feeling he gave us was one of immense expansiveness, freedom, and, at the same time, absolute stability and control. We could follow him, limitless his odd enchantment, through all the doubts and fears of adolescence and come out pure and untouched. The words he put down seemed to us to have been carved from the living stone of life. They conveyed exactly the taste, smell and feel of experience as it was, as it might possibly be. And so we began unconsciously to translate our own sensations into his terms and to impose on everything we did and felt the particular emotions they aroused in us. The Hemingway time was a good time to be young. We had much then that the war later forced out of us, something far greater than Hemingway’s strong formative influence. Later writers who lost or got rid of Hemingway have been able to find nothing to put in his place. They have rejected his time as untrue for them only to fail at finding themselves in their own time. Others, in their embarrassment at the hold he once had over them, have not profited by the lessons he had to teach, and still others were never touched by him at all. These last are perhaps the real unfortunates, for they have been denied access to a powerful tradition. Passage 2 One wonders why Hemingway’s greatest works now seem unable to evoke the same sense of a tottering world that in the 1920s established Ernest Hemingway’s reputation. These novels should be speaking to us. Our social structure is as shaken, our philosophical despair as great, our everyday experience as unsatisfying. We have had more war than Hemingway ever dreamed of. Our violence—physical, emotional, and intellectual—is not inferior to that of the 1920s. Yet Hemingway’s great novels no longer seem to penetrate deeply the surface of existence. One begins to doubt that they ever did so significantly in the 1920s. Hemingway’s novels indulged the dominant genteel tradition in American culture while seeming to repudiate it. They yielded to the functionalist, technological aesthetic of the culture instead of resisting it in the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright. Hemingway, in effect, became a dupe of his culture rather than its moral-aesthetic conscience. As a consequence, the import of his work has diminished. There is some evidence from his stylistic evolution that Hemingway himself must have felt as much, for Hemingway’s famous stylistic economy frequently seems to conceal another kind of writer, with much richer rhetorical resources to hand. So, Death in the Afternoon (1932), Hemingway’s bullfighting opus and his first book after A Farewell to Arms (1929), reveals great uneasiness over his earlier accomplishment. In it, he defends his literary method with a doctrine of ambiguity: "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about." about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them." Hemingway made much the same theoretical point in another way in Death in the Afternoon apparently believing that a formal reduction of aesthetic complexity was the only kind of design that had value. Perhaps the greatest irony of Death in the Afternoon is its unmistakably baroque prose, which Hemingway himself embarrassedly admitted was “flowery.” Reviewers, unable to challenge Hemingway’s expertise in the art of bullfighting, noted that its style was “awkward, tortuous, [and] belligerently clumsy.” Death in the Afternoon is an extraordinarily self-indulgent, unruly, clownish, garrulous, and satiric book, with scrambled chronologies, willful digressions, mock-scholarly apparatuses, fictional interludes, and scathing allusions. Its inflated style can hardly penetrate the façade, let alone deflate humanity. Which statement about Hemingway is supported by both passages?

By the time we were old enough to read Hemingway, he had become legendary. Like Lord Byron a century earlier, he had learned to play himself, his own best hero, with superb conviction. He was Hemingway of the rugged outdoor grin and the hairy chest posing with the lion he had just shot. He was Tarzan Hemingway, crouching in the African bush with elephant gun ready. He was War Correspondent Hemingway writing a play in the Hotel Florida in Madrid while thirty fascist shells crashed through the roof. Later, he was Task Force Hemingway swathed in ammunition belts and defending his post singlehandedly against fierce German attacks. But even without the legend, the chest-beating, wisecracking pose that was later to seem so incredibly absurd, his impact upon us was tremendous. The feeling he gave us was one of immense expansiveness, freedom, and, at the same time, absolute stability and control. We could follow him, limitless his odd enchantment, through all the doubts and fears of adolescence and come out pure and untouched. The words he put down seemed to us to have been carved from the living stone of life. They conveyed exactly the taste, smell and feel of experience as it was, as it might possibly be. And so we began unconsciously to translate our own sensations into his terms and to impose on everything we did and felt the particular emotions they aroused in us. The Hemingway time was a good time to be young. We had much then that the war later forced out of us, something far greater than Hemingway’s strong formative influence. Later writers who lost or got rid of Hemingway have been able to find nothing to put in his place. They have rejected his time as untrue for them only to fail at finding themselves in their own time. Others, in their embarrassment at the hold he once had over them, have not profited by the lessons he had to teach, and still others were never touched by him at all. These last are perhaps the real unfortunates, for they have been denied access to a powerful tradition. Passage 2 One wonders why Hemingway’s greatest works now seem unable to evoke the same sense of a tottering world that in the 1920s established Ernest Hemingway’s reputation. These novels should be speaking to us. Our social structure is as shaken, our philosophical despair as great, our everyday experience as unsatisfying. We have had more war than Hemingway ever dreamed of. Our violence—physical, emotional, and intellectual—is not inferior to that of the 1920s. Yet Hemingway’s great novels no longer seem to penetrate deeply the surface of existence. One begins to doubt that they ever did so significantly in the 1920s. Hemingway’s novels indulged the dominant genteel tradition in American culture while seeming to repudiate it. They yielded to the functionalist, technological aesthetic of the culture instead of resisting it in the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright. Hemingway, in effect, became a dupe of his culture rather than its moral-aesthetic conscience. As a consequence, the import of his work has diminished. There is some evidence from his stylistic evolution that Hemingway himself must have felt as much, for Hemingway’s famous stylistic economy frequently seems to conceal another kind of writer, with much richer rhetorical resources to hand. So, Death in the Afternoon (1932), Hemingway’s bullfighting opus and his first book after A Farewell to Arms (1929), reveals great uneasiness over his earlier accomplishment. In it, he defends his literary method with a doctrine of ambiguity: "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about." about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them." Hemingway made much the same theoretical point in another way in Death in the Afternoon apparently believing that a formal reduction of aesthetic complexity was the only kind of design that had value. Perhaps the greatest irony of Death in the Afternoon is its unmistakably baroque prose, which Hemingway himself embarrassedly admitted was “flowery.” Reviewers, unable to challenge Hemingway’s expertise in the art of bullfighting, noted that its style was “awkward, tortuous, [and] belligerently clumsy.” Death in the Afternoon is an extraordinarily self-indulgent, unruly, clownish, garrulous, and satiric book, with scrambled chronologies, willful digressions, mock-scholarly apparatuses, fictional interludes, and scathing allusions. Its inflated style can hardly penetrate the façade, let alone deflate humanity. Which of the following best describes how each passage characterizes Hemingway?