PSAT Reading Practice Test 27

Questions 1-8 refer to the following information.

This passage is from "Arcology," taken from a journal article written in 2013.

As "low-impact" or "green" architecture grows steadily en vogue into the 21st century, it
will become rapidly apparent that reclaimed building materials and energy-efficient designs
alone cannot offset the backlash of the deleterious customs modern cities have endorsed at
least since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Only a profound and comprehensive rein-
05vention of our homes and communities will carry our societies onward into the coming ages.
Fortunately, a handful of premonitory architects and civil engineers have already been
grappling with this predicament for nearly 100 years. Frank Lloyd Wright—the esteemed
leader of the Prairie School—proposed his solution to chaotic suburban development and
impractical land use in the form of Broadacre City: a preplanned community in which each
10resident would possess one acre of land arranged in such a way as to provide easy access to an
extensive and efficient network of roads and public transportation. Broadacre—which never
evolved beyond the design phase—could hardly be described as "green" by today's standards,
but it constitutes one of the first endeavors of the modern era to integrate fully the residential
and the commercial, the consumer and the consumed, on an efficacious, city-wide scale.
15Arcology, a portmanteau of "architecture" and "ecology", is the term coined by architect
Paolo Soleri to describe the largely theoretical self-contained cities he's been designing since
the late 1950's. Like Broadacre, one goal of an arcological structure is to maximize the effi-
ciency of land use in a community. For Soleri, this means combating "suburban sprawl" by
balancing urban expansion in three dimensions. But by incorporating significant agricul-
20tural and industrial components alongside commercial facilities and residences, arcology
takes civic efficiency a step further than Broadacre. According to Soleri, a true arcological
city would be both economically and ecologically self-sufficient. It would contain all the
resources necessary for power and food production, for climate control, and for air and water
treatment. But perhaps even more radically, it would eliminate the need for private transpr-
25tation through a combination of high-population density housing and carefully calculated
infrastructural design.
Although Soleri has designed hundreds of buildings, to date his only large-scale arcologi-
cal project to be realized—Arcosanti in central Arizona, a town intended to sustain up to 5,000
residents—today houses just 150 individuals. But while the American public's response to
30Soleri's bold innovations is, by and large, resistant, certain facets of arcology have already
permeated more conventional cities. Comprehensive pedestrian skyways like those in down-
town Calgary, Minneapolis, and the Las Vegas strip are derived from arcological notions of
multi-dimensional public transit, and Co-op City in the Bronx, New York, reflects arcologi-
cal influences in its high-density residential construction and self-contained resources which
35include public schools, shopping centers, religious centers, medical facilities, a fire station
and a power plant.
Community projects that embrace the revolutionary precepts of arcology have always
struggled for funding, and all too often are abandoned by their investors prior to completion.
But over the past ten years the world has seen a steady groundswell of interest in "green,"
40arcological structures, with ambitious and novel projects cropping up from Tokyo to Moscow.
In 2006, the United Arab Emirates initiated the construction of Masdar City, which will incor-
porate a fully sustainable "zero-waste and zero-carbon" ecology with a projected metropoli-
tan community of 50,000 inhabitants—all on just six square kilometers of land.