PSAT Reading Practice Question 80

Question: 80

This passage is adapted from Alex Kotlowitz, Never a City So Real. © 2004 by Alex Kotlowitz.
Fourteen miles southeast of the Loop, at the base 
of Lake Michigan, the city's easternmost corner, one 
finds a fistful of neighborhoods with hearty names 
like Irondale, Hegewisch, The Bush, and Slag Valley. 
05This is South Chicago. Apart from Altgeld Gardens—a 
vast public housing complex virtually hidden from the 
rest of the world by towering mountains of garbage 
and often referred to as Chicago's Soweto—South 
Chicago is the city's most isolated community, its most 
10removed. The labor lawyer and author Tom Geoghegan 
has called it "a secret city." The vast majority of 
Chicagoans have never set foot here, and as if to 
ensure such detachment, above the compact redbrick 
bungalows with postage-stamp-size yards looms the 
15Chicago Skyway, a highway on stilts, which takes the 
prosperous to their cottages along the Indiana and 
Michigan shorelines. The neighborhoods below are 
modest in appearance, a collection of small homes and 
small taverns and diners with simple names like Steve's, 
20Pete's Hideaway, Who Cares?, Small World Inn, and 
Maria's Den. There's nothing fanciful about this area. 
As one observer wrote: "Streets named Commercial 
and Exchange offer testimony that people came here to 
make a buck, not admire the scenery."
25And yet the scenery, so to speak, is awe-inspiring, 
the man-made equivalent of the Rockies. Dark, low-
to-the-ground muscular structures, some three times 
the size of a football field, sprawl across the landscape, 
sprouting chimneys so tall that they're equipped 
30with blinking lights to alert wayward aircraft. These 
chimneys shoot full-bodied flames thirty feet into the 
sky; at night they appear almost magical, like giant 
torches heating the moon. Billows of smoke linger in 
the air like phantom dirges. It used to be, when the 
35steel mills were going strong, that these smokestacks 
spat out particles of graphite that would dust the streets 
and cars and rooftops like snow, catching the sun and 
setting the neighborhood aglitter. Suspended conveyor 
belts, pipes, and railroad overpasses weave in, out, and 
40over the behemoth buildings. The noise is crushing, 
the stench of sulfur so powerful that not even a closed 
car window can keep it at bay. Had Rube Goldberg lost 
his sense of humor, this is, I imagine, what he would 
have produced.
45This is the heart of American industrial might, 
or what's left of it. The first of the mills was built in 
the 1850s, and within a hundred years more steel 
was produced in this stretch of land than anywhere 
else in the world. The freighters delivered iron ore 
50from Minnesota's Mesabi Range, and the mills turned 
the mineral into steel, shipping it west by rail and 
eventually east by the St. Lawrence Seaway. By the 
1960s, the mills employed eighty thousand men 
and women; they cascaded in from Poland, from 
55Yugoslavia, from Mexico, and from the American 
South. Steel mills and refineries lined up along the 
dredged Calumet River and along the Lake Michigan 
shoreline, extending twenty-two miles from South 
Chicago to Gary, Indiana. This stretch of boiling steel 
60was the equivalent of an industrial mountain stream, 
the source for can openers and knives, refrigerators 
and cars, bridges and skyscrapers. It fed this country's 
insatiable hunger for consumption and comfort. It was, 
in short, the nation's lifeblood.
65The local population is still so dependent on the 
mills that the daily newspaper in Hammond, Indiana, 
which is just over the Chicago border, runs a box 
score every Wednesday of the region's steel tonnage 
and capacity. Nonetheless, there are only fifteen 
70thousand working in the mills now; the owners grew 
complacent, so accustomed to their oligopoly that they 
forgot how to compete. Between the mills that still 
roll steel, there are hundreds of acres of vacant land 
littered with abandoned factory buildings stripped 
75of their exteriors, brick coke houses collapsing in on 
themselves, and railroad tracks and bridges that have 
turned a muddy brown from rust.

In the context of the passage, the image of steel mills is compared to that of

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