English Language and Composition

AP® English Language and Composition 2011 Free-Response Questions About the College Board The College Board is a mission-driven not-for-profit organization that connects students to college success and opportunity. Founded in 1900, the College Board was created to expand access to higher education. Today, the membership association is made up of more than 5,900 of the world’s leading educational institutions and is dedicated to promoting excellence and equity in education.
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Admitted Class Evaluation Service and inspiring minds are trademarks owned by the College Board. All other products and services may be trademarks of their respective owners. Visit the College Board on the Web: www. collegeboard. org. Permission to use copyrighted College Board materials may be requested online at: www. collegeboard. org/inquiry/cbpermit. html. Visit the College Board on the Web: www. collegeboard. org. AP Central is the official online home for the AP Program: apcentral. collegeboard. om. 2011 AP® ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION FREE-RESPONSE QUESTIONS ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION SECTION II Total time—2 hours Question 1 (Suggested time—40 minutes. This question counts for one-third of the total essay section score. ) Locavores are people who have decided to eat locally grown or produced products as much as possible. With an eye to nutrition as well as sustainability (resource use that preserves the environment), the locavore movement has become widespread over the past decade.

Imagine that a community is considering organizing a locavore movement. Carefully read the following seven sources, including the introductory information for each source. Then synthesize information from at least three of the sources and incorporate it into a coherent, well-developed essay that identifies the key issues associated with the locavore movement and examines their implications for the community. Make sure that your argument is central; use the sources to illustrate and support your reasoning. Avoid merely summarizing the sources.
Indicate clearly which sources you are drawing from, whether through direct quotation, paraphrase, or summary. You may cite the sources as Source A, Source B, etc. , or by using the descriptions in parentheses. Source A Source B Source C Source D Source E Source F Source G (Maiser) (Smith and MacKinnon) (McWilliams) (chart) (Gogoi) (Roberts) (cartoon) © 2011 The College Board. Visit the College Board on the Web: www. collegeboard. org. GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. -2- 2011 AP® ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION FREE-RESPONSE QUESTIONS Source A Maiser, Jennifer. 10 Reasons to Eat Local Food. ” Eat Local Challenge. Eat Local Challenge, 8 Apr. 2006. Web. 16 Dec. 2009. The following is an article from a group Weblog written by individuals who are interested in the benefits of eating food grown and produced locally. Eating local means more for the local economy. According to a study by the New Economics Foundation in London, a dollar spent locally generates twice as much income for the local economy. When businesses are not owned locally, money leaves the community at every transaction. Locally grown produce is fresher.
While produce that is purchased in the supermarket or a big-box store has been in transit or cold-stored for days or weeks, produce that you purchase at your local farmer’s market has often been picked within 24 hours of your purchase. This freshness not only affects the taste of your food, but the nutritional value which declines with time. Local food just plain tastes better. Ever tried a tomato that was picked within 24 hours? ’Nuff said. Locally grown fruits and vegetables have longer to ripen. Because the produce will be handled less, locally grown fruit does not have to be rugged” or to stand up to the rigors of shipping. This means that you are going to be getting peaches so ripe that they fall apart as you eat them, figs that would have been smashed to bits if they were sold using traditional methods, and melons that were allowed to ripen until the last possible minute on the vine. Eating local is better for air quality and pollution than eating organic. In a March 2005 study by the journal Food Policy, it was found that the miles that organic food often travels to our plate creates environmental damage that outweighs the benefit of buying organic.
Buying local food keeps us in touch with the seasons. By eating with the seasons, we are eating foods when they are at their peak taste, are the most abundant, and the least expensive. Buying locally grown food is fodder for a wonderful story. Whether it’s the farmer who brings local apples to market or the baker who makes local bread, knowing part of the story about your food is such a powerful part of enjoying a meal. Eating local protects us from bio-terrorism. Food with less distance to travel from farm to plate has less susceptibility to harmful contamination.
Local food translates to more variety. When a farmer is producing food that will not travel a long distance, will have a shorter shelf life, and does not have a high-yield demand, the farmer is free to try small crops of various fruits and vegetables that would probably never make it to a large supermarket. Supermarkets are interested in selling “Name brand” fruit: Romaine Lettuce, Red Delicious Apples, Russet Potatoes. Local producers often play with their crops from year to year, trying out Little Gem Lettuce, Senshu Apples, and Chieftain Potatoes.
Supporting local providers supports responsible land development. When you buy local, you give those with local open space—farms and pastures—an economic reason to stay open and undeveloped. Jennifer Maiser, www. eatlocalchallenge. com © 2011 The College Board. Visit the College Board on the Web: www. collegeboard. org. GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. -3- 2011 AP® ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION FREE-RESPONSE QUESTIONS Source B Smith, Alisa, and J. B. MacKinnon. Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally.
New York: Harmony, 2007. Print. The following passage is excerpted from a book written by the creators of the 100-Mile Diet, an experiment in eating only foods grown and produced within a 100-mile radius. Food begins to lose nutrition as soon as it is harvested. Fruit and vegetables that travel shorter distances are therefore likely to be closer to a maximum of nutrition. “Nowadays, we know a lot more about the naturally occurring substances in produce,” said [Cynthia] Sass. It’s not just vitamins and minerals, but all these phytochemicals and really powerful disease-fighting substances, and we do know that when a food never really reaches its peak ripeness, the levels of these substances never get as high. ” . . . Yet when I called to confirm these facts with Marion Nestle, a professor and former chair of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, she waved away the nutrition issue as a red herring. Yes, she said, our 100-mile diet—even in winter—was almost certainly more nutritious than what the average American was eating.
That doesn’t mean it is necessary to eat locally in order to be healthy. In fact, a person making smart choices from the global megamart can easily meet all the body’s needs. “There will be nutritional differences, but they’ll be marginal,” said Nestle. “I mean, that’s not really the issue. It feels like it’s the issue— obviously fresher foods that are grown on better soils are going to have more nutrients. But people are not nutrient-deprived. We’re just not nutrient-deprived. ” So would Marion Nestle, as a dietician, as one of America’s most important critics of dietary policy, advocate for local eating? Absolutely. ” Why? Because she loves the taste of fresh food, she said. She loves the mystery of years when the late corn is just utterly, incredibly good, and no one can say why: it just is. She likes having farmers around, and farms, and farmland. © 2011 The College Board. Visit the College Board on the Web: www. collegeboard. org. GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. -4- 2011 AP® ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION FREE-RESPONSE QUESTIONS Source C McWilliams, James E. “On My Mind: The Locavore Myth. ” Forbes. com. Forbes, 15 Jul. 2009. Web. 16 Dec. 2009.
The following is excerpted from an online opinion article in a business magazine. Buy local, shrink the distance food travels, save the planet. The locavore movement has captured a lot of fans. To their credit, they are highlighting the problems with industrialized food. But a lot of them are making a big mistake. By focusing on transportation, they overlook other energy-hogging factors in food production. Take lamb. A 2006 academic study (funded by the New Zealand government) discovered that it made more environmental sense for a Londoner to buy lamb shipped from New Zealand than to buy lamb raised in the U.
K. This finding is counterintuitive—if you’re only counting food miles. But New Zealand lamb is raised on pastures with a small carbon footprint, whereas most English lamb is produced under intensive factory-like conditions with a big carbon footprint. This disparity overwhelms domestic lamb’s advantage in transportation energy. New Zealand lamb is not exceptional. Take a close look at water usage, fertilizer types, processing methods and packaging techniques and you discover that factors other than shipping far outweigh the energy it takes to transport food.
One analysis, by Rich Pirog of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, showed that transportation accounts for only 11% of food’s carbon footprint. A fourth of the energy required to produce food is expended in the consumer’s kitchen. Still more energy is consumed per meal in a restaurant, since restaurants throw away most of their leftovers. Locavores argue that buying local food supports an area’s farmers and, in turn, strengthens the community. Fair enough. Left unacknowledged, however, is the fact that it also hurts farmers in other parts of the world.
The U. K. buys most of its green beans from Kenya. While it’s true that the beans almost always arrive in airplanes— the form of transportation that consumes the most energy—it’s also true that a campaign to shame English consumers with small airplane stickers affixed to flown-in produce threatens the livelihood of 1. 5 million sub-Saharan farmers. Another chink in the locavores’ armor involves the way food miles are calculated. To choose a locally grown apple over an apple trucked in from across the country might seem easy. But this decision ignores economies of scale.
To take an extreme example, a shipper sending a truck with 2,000 apples over 2,000 miles would consume the same amount of fuel per apple as a local farmer who takes a pickup 50 miles to sell 50 apples at his stall at the green market. The critical measure here is not food miles but apples per gallon. The one big problem with thinking beyond food miles is that it’s hard to get the information you need. Ethically concerned consumers know very little about processing practices, water availability, packaging waste and fertilizer application.
This is an opportunity for watchdog groups. They should make life-cycle carbon counts available to shoppers. Reprinted by Permission of Forbes Media LLC © 2010 © 2011 The College Board. Visit the College Board on the Web: www. collegeboard. org. GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. -5- 2011 AP® ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION FREE-RESPONSE QUESTIONS Source D Loder, Natasha, Elizabeth Finkel, Craig Meisner, and Pamela Ronald. “The Problem of What to Eat. ” Conservation Magazine. The Society for Conservation Biology, July-Sept. 2008. Web. 16 Dec. 2009.
The following chart is excerpted from an online article in an environmental magazine. © 2011 The College Board. Visit the College Board on the Web: www. collegeboard. org. GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. -6- 2011 AP® ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION FREE-RESPONSE QUESTIONS Source E Gogoi, Pallavi. “The Rise of the ‘Locavore’: How the Strengthening Local Food Movement in Towns Across the U. S. Is Reshaping Farms and Food Retailing. ” Bloomberg Businessweek. Bloomberg, 20 May 2008. Web. 17 Dec. 2009. The following is excerpted from an online article in a business magazine.
The rise of farmers’ markets— in city centers, college towns, and rural squares—is testament to a dramatic shift in American tastes. Consumers increasingly are seeking out the flavors of fresh, vine-ripened foods grown on local farms rather than those trucked to supermarkets from faraway lands. “This is not a fringe foodie culture,” says [Anthony] Flaccavento. “These are ordinary, middle-income folks who have become really engaged in food and really care about where their food comes from. ” It’s a movement that is gradually reshaping the business of growing and supplying food to Americans.
The local food movement has already accomplished something that almost no one would have thought possible a few years back: a revival of small farms. After declining for more than a century, the number of small farms has increased 20% in the past six years, to 1. 2 million, according to the Agriculture Dept. . . . The impact of “locavores” (as local-food proponents are known) even shows up in that Washington salute every five years to factory farming, the Farm Bill. The latest version passed both houses in Congress in early May and was sent on May 20 to President George W.
Bush’s desk for signing. Bush has threatened to veto the bill, but it passed with enough votes to sustain an override. Predictably, the overwhelming bulk of its $290 billion would still go to powerful agribusiness interests in the form of subsidies for growing corn, soybeans, and cotton. But $2. 3 billion was set aside this year for specialty crops, such as the eggplants, strawberries, or salad greens that are grown by exactly these small, mostly organic farmers. That’s a big bump-up from the $100 million that was earmarked for such things in the previous legislation.
Small farmers will be able to get up to 75% of their organic certification costs reimbursed, and some of them can obtain crop insurance. There’s money for research into organic foods, and to promote farmers’ markets. Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said the bill “invests in the health and nutrition of American children . . . by expanding their access to farmer’s markets and organic produce. ” Reprinted from the May 20, 2008 issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek by special permission, copyright © 2008 by Bloomberg L. P. © 2011 The College Board. Visit the College Board on the Web: www. ollegeboard. org. GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. -7- 2011 AP® ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION FREE-RESPONSE QUESTIONS Source F Roberts, Paul. The End of Food. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008. Print. The following is excerpted from a book about the food industry. [T]he move toward local food, for all its trendiness (the more adamant adherents, known as “localvores,” strive to buy products that have traveled the least “food miles”), highlights one of the problematic pieces of the modern food economy: the increasing reliance on foods shipped halfway round the world.
Because long-distance food shipments promote profligate fuel use and the exploitation of cheap labor (which compensates for the profligate fuel use), shifting back to a more locally sourced food economy is often touted as a fairly straightforward way to cut externalities, restore some measure of equity between producers and consumers, and put the food economy on a more sustainable footing. Such a shift would bring back diversity to land that has been all but destroyed by chemical-intensive mono-cropping, provide much-needed jobs at a local level, and help to rebuild community,” argues the UK-based International Society for Ecology and Culture, one of the leading lights in the localvore movement. “Moreover, it would allow farmers to make a decent living while giving consumers access to healthy, fresh food at affordable prices. ” While localvorism sounds superb in theory, it is proving quite difficult in practice.
To begin with, there are dozens of different definitions as to what local is, with some advocates arguing for political boundaries (as in Texas-grown, for example), others using quasi-geographic terms like food sheds, and still others laying out somewhat arbitrarily drawn food circles with radii of 100 or 150 or 500 miles. Further, whereas some areas might find it fairly easy to eat locally (in Washington State, for example, I’m less than fifty miles from industrial quantities of fresh produce, corn, wheat, beef, and milk), people in other parts of the country and the world would have to look farther afield.
And what counts as local? Does food need to be purchased directly from the producer? Does it still count when it’s distributed through a mass marketer, as with Wal-Mart’s Salute to America’s Farmer program, which is now periodically showcasing local growers? The larger problem is that although decentralized food systems function well in decentralized societies—like the United States was a century ago, or like many developing nations still are—they’re a poor fit in modern urbanized societies.
The same economic forces that helped food production become centralized and regionalized did the same thing to our population: in the United States, 80 percent of us live in large, densely populated urban areas, usually on the coast, and typically hundreds of miles, often thousands of miles, from the major centers of food production. © 2011 The College Board. Visit the College Board on the Web: www. collegeboard. org. GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. -8- 2011 AP® ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION FREE-RESPONSE QUESTIONS
Source G Hallatt, Alex. “Arctic Circle. ” Comic strip. King Features Syndicate, Inc. 1 Sept. 2008. Web. 12 July 2009. The following is a cartoon from an environmentally themed comic strip. ARCTIC CIRCLE © 2008 MACNELLY. DISTRIBUTED BY KING FEATURES SYNDICATE © 2011 The College Board. Visit the College Board on the Web: www. collegeboard. org. GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. -9- 2011 AP® ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION FREE-RESPONSE QUESTIONS Question 2 (Suggested time—40 minutes.
This question counts for one-third of the total essay section score. ) Florence Kelley (1859-1932) was a United States social worker and reformer who fought successfully for child labor laws and improved conditions for working women. She delivered the following speech before the convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Philadelphia on July 22, 1905. Read the speech carefully. Then write an essay in which you analyze the rhetorical strategies Kelley uses to convey her message about child labor to her audience.
Support your analysis with specific references to the text. We have, in this country, two million children under the age of sixteen years who are earning their bread. They vary in age from six and seven years (in the cotton mills of Georgia) and eight, nine and ten years (in the coal-breakers of Pennsylvania), to fourteen, fifteen and sixteen years in more enlightened states. No other portion of the wage earning class increased so rapidly from decade to decade as the young girls from fourteen to twenty years.
Men increase, women increase, youth increase, boys increase in the ranks of the breadwinners; but no contingent so doubles from census period to census period (both by percent and by count of heads), as does the contingent of girls between twelve and twenty years of age. They are in commerce, in offices, in manufacturing. Tonight while we sleep, several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills, all the night through, in the deafening noise of the spindles and the looms spinning and weaving cotton and wool, silks and ribbons for us to buy.
In Alabama the law provides that a child under sixteen years of age shall not work in a cotton mill at night longer than eight hours, and Alabama does better in this respect than any other southern state. North and South Carolina and Georgia place no restriction upon the work of children at night; and while we sleep little white girls will be working tonight in the mills in those states, working eleven hours at night. In Georgia there is no restriction whatever! A girl of six or seven years, just tall enough to reach the bobbins, may work eleven hours by day or by night.
And they will do so tonight, while we sleep. Nor is it only in the South that these things occur. Alabama does better than New Jersey. For Alabama limits the children’s work at night to eight hours, while New Jersey permits it all night long. Last year New Jersey took a long backward step. A good law was repealed which had required women and [children] to stop work at six in the evening and at noon on Friday. Now, therefore, in New Jersey, boys and girls, after their 14th birthday, enjoy the pitiful privilege of working all night long.
In Pennsylvania, until last May it was lawful for children, 13 years of age, to work twelve hours at night. A little girl, on her thirteenth birthday, could start away from her home at half past five in the afternoon, carrying her pail of midnight luncheon as happier people carry their midday luncheon, and could work in the mill from six at night until six in the morning, without violating any law of the Commonwealth. If the mothers and the teachers in Georgia could vote, would the Georgia Legislature have refused at every session for the last three years to stop the work in the mills of children under twelve years of age?
Would the New Jersey Legislature have passed that shameful repeal bill enabling girls of fourteen years to work all night, if the mothers in New Jersey were enfranchised? Until the mothers in the great industrial states are enfranchised, we shall none of us be able to free our consciences from participation in this great evil. No one in this room tonight can feel free from such participation. The children make our shoes in the shoe factories; they knit our stockings, our knitted underwear in the knitting factories.
They spin and weave our cotton underwear in the cotton mills. Children braid straw for our hats, they spin and weave the silk and velvet wherewith we trim our hats. They stamp buckles and metal ornaments of all kinds, as well as pins and hat-pins. Under the sweating system, tiny children make artificial flowers and neckwear for us to buy. They carry bundles of garments from the factories to the tenements, little beasts of burden, robbed of school life that they may work for us. We do not wish this. We prefer to have our work done by men and women.
But we are almost powerless. Not wholly powerless, however, are citizens who enjoy the right of petition. For myself, I Line 5 45 50 10 55 15 60 20 65 25 70 30 75 35 80 40 © 2011 The College Board. Visit the College Board on the Web: www. collegeboard. org. GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. -10- 2011 AP® ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION FREE-RESPONSE QUESTIONS shall use this power in every possible way until the right to the ballot is granted, and then I shall continue to use both. What can we do to free our consciences? There is one line of action by which we can do much.
We can enlist the workingmen on behalf of our enfranchisement just in proportion as we strive with them to free the children. No labor organization in this country ever fails to respond to an appeal for help in the freeing of the children. For the sake of the children, for the Republic in which these children will vote after we are dead, and for the sake of our cause, we should enlist the workingmen voters, with us, in this task of freeing the children from toil! 85 90 95 © 2011 The College Board. Visit the College Board on the Web: www. collegeboard. org.
GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. -11- 2011 AP® ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION FREE-RESPONSE QUESTIONS Question 3 (Suggested time—40 minutes. This question counts for one-third of the total essay section score. ) The following passage is from Rights of Man, a book written by the pamphleteer Thomas Paine in 1791. Born in England, Paine was an intellectual, a revolutionary, and a supporter of American independence from England. Read the passage carefully. Then write an essay that examines the extent to which Paine’s characterization of America holds true today.
Use appropriate evidence to support your argument. If there is a country in the world, where concord, according to common calculation, would be least expected, it is America. Made up, as it is, of people from different nations, accustomed to different forms and habits of government, speaking different languages, and more different in their modes of worship, it would appear that the union of such a people was impracticable; but by the simple operation of constructing government on the principles of society and the rights of man, every difficulty retires, and all the parts are brought into ordial unison. There, the poor are not oppressed, the rich are not privileged. . . . Their taxes are few, because their government is just; and as there is nothing to render them wretched, there is nothing to engender riots and tumults. STOP END OF EXAM © 2011 The College Board. Visit the College Board on the Web: www. collegeboard. org. -12-