MCAS Practice Test 13

Text 1: from *The Rooftop Year* by Clara Bustamante

¹The hives sat on the roof of the building like three white filing cabinets, humming. Gabriela had lived beneath them for two months before she agreed to go up.

²“They know you're scared,” her grandmother said, buckling the veil over Gabriela's face. “That's all right. Scared is fine. Fast is the problem.”

³Up close the sound was different—not a buzz but a thousand small engines idling at once, a sound she felt in her chest more than heard. Bees stitched back and forth across the tar paper, landing, lifting, landing. Beyond the low wall at the roof's edge the city went about its morning: a bus sighing at the corner, someone's radio, the clank of a gate.

⁴Her grandmother lit the smoker, a tin can with a bellows attached, and puffed a little gray cloud at the entrance of the first hive. Then she lifted the lid as calmly as if she were opening a cupboard. Gabriela took one step back. Then another.

⁵“Watch my hands,” Luz said.

⁶Gabriela watched. Her grandmother's hands moved as if underwater—slowly, deliberately, never hurrying even when a dozen bees walked across her knuckles. She pried up a frame thick with comb, and the bees on it shifted like a living carpet but did not rise. She tilted the frame toward the light. “There. See the ones with their heads in the cells? Feeding the babies. And there—the long one. That's the queen.”

⁷Gabriela leaned in despite herself. Then a bee landed on the mesh of her veil, an inch from her eye, and every muscle in her body told her to swat it.

⁸She did. She flung her arm up, and the frame in her grandmother's hands tipped, and suddenly the air was full of bees, and there was a sharp smell, sweet and strange, like overripe bananas. Something hot pierced the back of her wrist where her glove had slid down.

⁹“Walk,” said her grandmother. “Don't run. Walk to the door.”

¹⁰Gabriela walked. It was the hardest thing she had ever done. At the stairwell, with the door shut behind her, she peeled off the glove and stared at the small red welt, the tiny barbed sting still in it, pulsing.

¹¹Her grandmother came down a few minutes later, unhurried, and scraped the sting out with the edge of a fingernail. “She died for that, you know,” Luz said. “The one who stung you. She thought you were going to hurt her home.”

¹²“I wasn't.”

¹³“I know. She didn't.” Luz smoothed the hair back from Gabriela's forehead. “Tomorrow we try again. Slower.”

¹⁴Gabriela looked at her wrist and then at the door to the roof, behind which the hum had already settled back to its steady idle. She was surprised to find that she wanted to.

Text 2: “Why Beekeepers Move Slowly” by Hugo Ferreira

¹To an observer, a beekeeper at work can look almost unnaturally calm. Experienced keepers move slowly, keep their voices low, and avoid sudden gestures even when bees crawl across their gloves. This is not a matter of personality. It is a practical response to the way a honeybee colony defends itself.

²A healthy hive in summer may contain tens of thousands of bees, nearly all of them female workers. Only a small share serve as guards at any given time. Guard bees patrol the entrance, inspecting arriving bees by scent and watching for threats. Bees detect movement especially well, so quick motion near the hive can register as an attack.

³When a guard senses danger, it may sting—and it may also raise an alarm. Honeybees communicate largely through chemical signals called pheromones. A stinging worker releases an alarm pheromone, and guards can release it as well. One of its main ingredients smells, to human noses, much like bananas. The scent spreads quickly through the air and recruits other bees to defend the colony. A single sting, in other words, can mark a target for many more.

⁴For a worker honeybee, stinging a person is usually fatal. Her stinger is barbed, and in the thick skin of a mammal it catches and tears away from her body when she tries to pull free. This is one reason honeybees are generally defensive rather than aggressive: most will sting only when they sense a threat to the colony. Away from the hive, a foraging bee on a flower is unlikely to sting unless it is stepped on or trapped.

⁵Beekeepers have developed several techniques to work with, rather than against, this defense system. The most familiar is smoke. A few puffs at the hive entrance seem to mask the alarm pheromone, making it harder for bees to signal one another. Smoke also prompts many bees to eat honey, possibly in preparation to abandon the hive if there were a fire; bees with full stomachs tend to be less defensive. Keepers also choose their timing: bees are often calmer on warm, sunny afternoons, when many foragers are away from the hive, than on cold or stormy days.

⁶Above all, keepers learn to control themselves. A swat, a jerk of the hand, or a frame dropped onto the hive can turn a quiet inspection into a cloud of defenders. Many beekeepers say the hardest lesson for beginners is not learning about bees but learning to stay still while a bee walks across a veil a few inches from their eyes. The bees, it turns out, teach patience whether the keeper wants the lesson or not.