READING ARTICLES SET 9

Article 1

Genre: Science

The following passage is an excerpt from the article titled ‘Fossils and mathematical
modelling are helping to answer long-standing questions about Pterosaurs’, written by
Michael B Habib, was published in Scientific American in 2019.

The Mesozoic era, which spanned the time from 251 million to 66 million years ago, is often
referred to as the age of dinosaurs. But although dinosaurs reigned supreme on land back
then, they did not rule the air. Instead the skies were the dominion of an entirely different
group of beasts: the pterosaurs.

Pterosaurs were the first vertebrate creatures to evolve powered flight and conquer the air—
long before birds took wing. They prevailed for more than 160 million years before vanishing
along with the nonbird dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period, around 66 million years
ago. In that time, they evolved some of the most extreme anatomical adaptations of any
animal, living or extinct. The smallest of these aerial predators was the size of a sparrow.
The largest had a wingspan that rivaled that of an F-16 fighter jet. Many possessed heads
larger than their bodies, making them, in essence, flying jaws of death. Pterosaurs patrolled
every ocean and continent on Earth. No animal in the Mesozoic would have been safe from
their gaze.

Unlike dinosaurs, which are survived today by birds, pterosaurs left behind no living
descendants. As a result, all that palaeontologists know about pterosaurs comes from the
fossil record. And that record has been frustratingly fragmentary, leaving us with just a

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glimmer of their former glory and a host of questions about their bizarre anatomy and ill fate.
Palaeontologists have scratched their heads over these mysteries for decades. Now new
fossil discoveries, combined with mathematical modelling methods in which anatomical
structures are simplified just enough that equations of physical properties can be applied to
get best estimates of strength, weight, speed, and so forth, are finally generating insights.
And what scientists are finding is that pterosaurs were even more extraordinary than we ever
imagined.

One of the enduring mysteries of pterosaurs is how the largest members of this group
became airborne. Giants such as Quetzalcoatlus, first discovered in Texas, and
Hatzegopteryx, from modern-day Romania, stood as tall as a giraffe and had wingspans of
more than 30 feet. These animals possessed jaws twice the length of those belonging to
Tyrannosaurus rex. Their upper arms would have been nearly as large around as the torso of
an average-sized adult human. They were true behemoths, attaining weights exceeding 650
pounds. For comparison, the largest bird to ever take to the air— Argentavis, living six million
years ago in Argentina—most likely weighed less than 165 pounds.

The discrepancy between the biggest members of each of these groups is so vast, in fact, that
multiple researchers have suggested that the largest pterosaurs could not fly at all (although
this would be puzzling given their many anatomical adaptations for flight). Others have
suggested that they could fly but only under very special air and surface conditions—if the
atmosphere in their day were denser than it is today, for instance. After all, it seems
unfathomable that birds of such sizes could fly. In fact, recent power-scaling studies
from several researchers, including me, have demonstrated that supersized birds would have
insufficient power to launch themselves into the air in the first place.

But pterosaurs were not birds. Indeed, over the past decade my colleagues and I have carried
out numerous calculations of pterosaur launch and flight power, showing not only that giant

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pterosaurs could launch and fly but also that they probably did not need any special
circumstances to do so. In line with these conclusions, we now know from geochemical
analyses of sedimentary rocks and microanatomical analyses of plant fossils that air and
surface conditions in the Late Cretaceous—the heyday of enormous pterosaurs—were not
remarkably different from what we experience today. What was different, and unique,
was the anatomy of pterosaurs.

There are three things that an animal needs to be able to fly at gigantic sizes. The first is a
skeleton with a very high ratio of strength to weight, which translates to a skeleton with large
volume but low density. Pterosaurs and birds both have such skeletons: many of their bones
are quite hollow. The walls of the upper arm bone of Quetzalcoatlus, for example, were about
0.12 inch thick—comparable to an ostrich eggshell—yet the bone had a diameter of
more than 10.5 inches at the elbow.

The second thing that a giant flier needs is a high maximum lift coefficient. This number
describes how much lift the wings produce for a given speed and wing area. At a high lift
coefficient, an animal can be heavier because its wings will support more weight at a lower
speed. This relation, in turn, means the creature needs less speed on take off, which makes
a huge difference in the muscle power required for launch. Membrane wings, such as those
of pterosaurs and bats, produce more lift per unit speed and area than the feathered wings
of birds. This additional lift improves slow-speed manoeuvring capability, which for
small animals helps with making tighter turns and for big animals facilitates takeoff and
landing.

The third and most important prerequisite is launch power. Even with very efficient, large
wings, a big flier still needs to produce lots of leaping power to become airborne. Flying
animals do not flap their way into the air or use gravity to take off from an elevated location
such as a cliff. Wings do not produce much lift at low speeds, and gravity launching would

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mean trying to take off by accelerating in the wrong direction—a dangerous prospect.
Instead, a powerful jump provides critical speed and height to begin flight. Increased leaping
power yields better launching power. Large fliers therefore need to be good jumpers.

Many birds can manage impressive leaps. They are constrained by their heritage as theropod
dinosaurs, however: like their theropod ancestors, all birds are bipedal, meaning they have
only their hind limbs to use for jumping. Pterosaurs, in contrast, were quadrupedal on the
ground. Their wings folded up and served as walking, and therefore jumping, limbs.
Numerous exquisitely preserved fossil trackways confirm this odd aspect of pterosaur
anatomy. Being quadrupedal drastically changes the maximum size of a flying
animal. Pterosaurs could use not only their hind limbs for launch but also their much larger
forelimbs, thereby more than doubling the available power for take off. They had the perfect
combination of adaptations to become aerial behemoths.

Previous studies have modelled bipedal launches for giant pterosaurs. For example, in 2004
Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and his colleague worked out how Quetzalcoatlus
could propel itself into the air using only its hind limbs. But the researchers determined that
for that approach to work, the animal could not weigh more than 165 pounds and had to run
downhill into a headwind. The quadrupedal launch allows for more realistic body weight
and less restrictive environmental conditions. […]

Article 2

Genre: Science

This article titled ‘How the Cold War Created Astrobiology: Life, death, and Sputnik’ written
by Caleb Scharf, was published in Nautilus in 2014.

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Astronomy and biology have been circling each other with timid infatuation since the first
time a human thought about the possibility of other worlds and other suns. But the melding
of the two into the modern field of astrobiology really began on Oct. 4, 1957, when a 23-inch
aluminium sphere called Sputnik 1 lofted into low Earth orbit from the desert steppe of the
Kazakh Republic. Over the following weeks its gently beeping radio signal heralded a new and
very uncertain world. Three months later it came tumbling back through the atmosphere,
and humanity’s small evolutionary bump was set on a trajectory never before seen in 4 billion
years of terrestrial history.

At the time of the ascent of Sputnik, a 32-year-old American called Joshua Lederberg was
working in Australia as a visiting professor at the University of Melbourne. Born in 1925 to
immigrant parents in New Jersey, Lederberg was a prodigy. Quick-witted, generous, and with
an incredible ability to retain information, he blazed through high school and was enrolled at
Columbia University by the time he was 15. Earning a degree in zoology and moving on to
medical studies, his research interests diverted him to Yale. There, at age 21, he helped
research the nascent field of microbial genetics, with work on bacterial gene transfer that
would later earn him a share of the 1958 Nobel Prize.

Like the rest of the planet, Australia was transfixed by the Soviet launch; as much for the
show of technological prowess as for the fact that a superpower was now also capable of
easily lobbing thermonuclear warheads across continents. But, unlike the people around him,
Lederberg’s thoughts were galvanized in a different direction. He immediately knew that
another type of invisible wall had been breached, a wall that might be keeping even
more deadly things at bay, as well as incredible scientific opportunities.

If humans were about to travel in space, we were also about to spread terrestrial organisms
to other planets, and conceivably bring alien pathogens back to Earth. As Lederberg saw it,
either we were poised to destroy indigenous life forms across our solar system, or ourselves.

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Neither was an acceptable option. When he returned to the United States he quickly threw
himself into learning all he could about astronomy and rocketry, and began writing urgent
letters to the National Academy of Sciences, alerting his colleagues to the imminent danger.

By the spring of 1958, Lederberg’s warning of a “cosmic catastrophe” was starting to make
people sit up and pay attention. But this pot-stirring wasn’t just about scaring researchers
and policy makers. It also marked the birth of a new type of science that could take place
outside the usual bounds of the planet. In his own words, “I was the only biologist at the time
who seemed to take the idea of extraterrestrial exploration seriously.” His considerable
reputation didn’t hurt, and in the following years Lederberg managed to place
biological investigations squarely on a fledgling NASA’s agenda, coining a new term along
the way, “exobiology”—the study of life beyond the Earth.

Exobiology profoundly influenced the way space exploration was conducted. Strict protocols
were developed for the sterilization of spacecraft, and for quarantines to restrict what they
might bring back. NASA built clean rooms, and technicians swabbed and baked equipment
before sealing it up for launch. Scientists got to work and hurriedly computed the acceptable
risks for biological contamination of other worlds. One of the standards developed
stated that a mission must present no more than a 1 in 10,000 chance of disrupting an alien
ecosystem, a somewhat arbitrary choice that perhaps says more about our tolerance for
messing up planets than anything else.

Later, upon the triumphant return of Apollo 11, instead of being paraded, the astronauts
were promptly locked up in a converted Airstream trailer for three weeks of careful isolation.
There is a well-known picture of President Nixon grinning at Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins,
all safely behind the trailer’s airtight window, and perhaps happier for it. Eventually, after
Apollo 14, it became clear that the lunar surface environment was effectively sterile, and so
future quarantines were skipped.

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Lederberg wasn’t finished though. He and the young Carl Sagan had become friends in the
early 1960s, and together they helped define the emerging fields of solar system exploration
and the search for extraterrestrial life. In 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 spacecraft sped by Mars,
sending back the first close up images of a desolate and cratered world, an arid desert planet.
No vegetation, no civilization, barely an atmosphere. It was a pivotal moment, far removed
from earlier optimism about life in our solar system, and it made clear how demanding
biological exploration was going to be—if there were clues to life out there, they were going
to be found with a microscope. In light of this information Lederberg, Sagan, and others
spurred advanced conceptual and experimental work on microbial and chemical assays that
would culminate with the spectacular Viking missions to Mars in 1976. These twin landers
carried highly sensitive automated wet labs, specifically for incubating and
detecting microbial organisms that could be lurking in its red soil—one of the last reasonable
refuges for life in this inhospitable place.

However, for all their sophistication, in many respects the Viking missions to Mars also
represented the end of Lederberg’s brand of exobiology. The landers’ attempts to spot
microorganisms, or any sort of organisms, didn’t pan out. The biological tests gave confusing
and unexpected results, now generally considered to be a consequence of the rather
fearsome chemistry of the upper soil—full of nasty oxidants akin to substances used in rocket
fuel. Viking made it clear that finding life beyond the Earth was going to be vastly
more challenging than hoped—or feared.

Partly in response, partly as a natural evolution, the specialized study of exobiology began
morphing into a much larger scientific fishing net. It co-opted everything, from terrestrial
microbiology and the origins of life, to interstellar chemistry, planetary physics, and even a
smattering of cosmology. This wasn’t an easy transformation. It was a field with pitifully little
data. But much of the impetus of Lederberg’s original vision remained; these were

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profound questions, and appetites had been whetted. In the U.S., NASA stuck to its
guns, supporting an unprecedented array of interdisciplinary studies ranging
from evolutionary biology to astrochemistry; actively seeking out science that
would otherwise fall through the cracks of conventional funding programs.

In the late 1970s and into the ’80s, scientists’ imaginations were reignited by the discovery
of terrestrial organisms living in remarkably extreme environments. Microbes and larger
creatures were found supping the noxious super-heated effluvia of volcanic vent systems,
kilometers down in the world’s oceans. Elsewhere, bacteria were identified that readily
survived desiccation, ionizing radiation, and freezing. Carl Woese and other scientists
identified the great domain of archaea and provoked a host of new ideas on the origins of
life, and Thomas Gold talked about the insinuation of life into subsurface
planetary environments. There was a sense that we had overlooked much about life on Earth,
and that meant we might have overlooked much about life elsewhere too.

By the 1990s the term exobiology was barely adequate to convey the scope of scientists’
questions, and the effort was re-branded as “astrobiology,” a full-on merger of astronomy
and biology. It had become the quest to understand life as a truly cosmic phenomenon—a
pan-disciplinary adventure that started taking shape just as the first bona fide planets were
discovered orbiting other Sun-like stars in 1995.

In retrospect, it was an incredibly fortuitous chain of events that led up to this point,
beginning with bacteria and Sputnik, and ending with exoplanets. Had the timing been
different we could have unwittingly bumbled around contaminating the solar system left and
right, far beyond any natural diaspora. In doing so we’d have hindered, possibly squandered,
the opportunity to examine the indigenous life that might exist on other worlds.

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Instead, we sipped a cocktail of Cold War posturing and paranoia, garnished with Lederberg’s
quick-witted thinking. This put the superpower space race into a bio-containment lockdown,
but it also bought time to look more closely and carefully at other worlds. And had we not
quickly sobered up with those early visits to Mars, and even Venus, we’d have missed the
deeper implications about life’s abundance. Life is not a given, its frequency on the cosmic
stage is a vital statistic to learn, but gaining that knowledge is one of the greatest
scientific challenges of all time. For these reasons astrobiology is arguably both the luckiest
and the unluckiest scientific field of the past hundred years. The venture can still be a slightly
uneasy partnership; biologists and astronomers don’t always see eye-to-eye on scientific
priorities. But we deal with it, because in many respects Lederberg’s original motivation to
protect and preserve is also more urgent than ever. We’re not just looking to discover
life’s cosmic abundance, we’re also looking to place our own world in proper context, to
understand it well enough to try to plot a stable course through the environmental changes
that we’re carelessly, and probably needlessly, making.

Here too is a hint to the greatest union, the one yet to come. We now know for a fact that
Mars has at times been a far more temperate place. We also know that our solar system does
not harbor the kinds of planets that may be most numerous in the galaxy, those a little larger
than Earth. Such worlds exhibit extraordinary diversity, even when examined with our
currently primitive data. Some are dense and rocky, or strange places with gas-rich
envelopes. Others perhaps have radically different geochemistry, where carbon, not silicon,
is the bedrock. One day soon we’ll have to find a way to explain our place within
that planetary menagerie, and maybe we’ll have to explain our place within an extra
terrestrial biological menagerie too. That will be the ultimate merger of knowledge, the
placement of Earth’s life on the cosmic stage—when astrobiology finally comes out of the
cold.

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Article 3

Genre: Social Studies / Soft Science

This passage is an excerpt from the article titled ‘Future Reading’, written by Craig Mod, was
published in Aeon Essays in 2020.

[…] But in the past two years, something unexpected happened: I lost the faith. Gradually at
first and then undeniably, I stopped buying digital books. I realised this only a few months
ago, when taking stock of my library, both digital and physical. Physical books – most of all,
works of literary fiction – I continue to acquire voraciously. I split my time between New York
and Tokyo, and know that with each New York trip I’ll pick up a dozen or more volumes
from bookstores or friends. My favourite gifts, to give and to receive, are still physical books.
The allure of the curated front tables at McNally Jackson or Three Lives and Company is too
much to resist.

The great irony, of course, is that I’ve never read more digitally in my life. Each day, I spend
hours reading on my iPhone – news articles, blog posts and essays. Short to mid-length
content feels indigenous to the size, resolution and use cases of smartphones, and many
online publications (such as this very site) display their content with beautiful typography
and layouts that render consistently on any computer, tablet or smartphone. Phones also
allow us to share articles with minimal effort. The easy romance between our
smartphones and short-to-mid-length articles and video is part of the reason why
venture capitalists have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into New York publishing
upstarts such as Vox, Vice and Buzzfeed. The smartphone coupled with the open web creates
a near-perfect container for distributing journalism at a grand scale.

But what of digital books? What accounts for my unconscious migration back to print?

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Once bought by a reader, a book moves through a routine. It is read and underlined, dog-
eared and scuffed and, most importantly, reread. To read a book once is to know it in passing.
To read it over and over is to become confidants. The relationship between a reader and a
book is measured not in hours or minutes but, ideally, in months and years.

As a consumer of digital books I feel delighted, but as a reader, I feel crestfallen. All of the
consumption parts of the Kindle experience are pitch perfect: a boundless catalogue, instant
distribution, reasonable prices (perhaps once too reasonable, now less so with recently
updated contracts). It’s easy to forget that Amazon doesn’t just frustrate publishers, it also
powers a huge chunk of the internet – hosting files and providing servers for many of
the largest companies in the world. That business alone accounts for nearly $2 billion of their
bottom line. So it’s no surprise that Amazon has built seamless, efficient plumbing for digital
books. But after a book has made its way through the plumbing and onto the devices, the
once-fresh experience now feels neglected.

Take for example the multistep process of opening a well-made physical edition. The
Conference of the Birds (2009), designed by Farah Behbehani and published by Thames and
Hudson, is a masterclass in welcoming the reader into the text.

The object – a dense, felled tree, wrapped in royal blue cloth – requires two hands to hold.
The inner volume swooshes from its slipcase. And then the thing opens like some blessed
walking path into intricate end pages, heavy stock half titles, and multi-page die-cuts,
shepherding you towards the table of contents. Behbehani utilitises all the qualities of print
to create a procession. By the time you arrive at chapter one, you are entranced.

Contrast this with opening a Kindle book – there is no procession, and often no cover. You
are sometimes thrown into the first chapter, sometimes into the middle of the front matter.
Wherein every step of opening The Conference of the Birds fills one with delight – delight at

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what one is seeing and what one anticipates to come – opening a Kindle book frustrates.
Often, you have to swipe or tap back a dozen pages to be sure you haven’t missed anything.

Because the Kindle ecosystem makes buying books one-click effortless, it can be easy to
forget about your purchases. Unfortunately, Kindle’s interface makes it difficult to keep tabs
on those expanding digital libraries: at best, we can see a dozen titles at a time, all as
inscrutably small book covers. Titles that fall off the first-page listing on a Kindle cease to
exist. Compare that with standing in front of a physical bookshelf: the eye takes in hundreds
of spines or covers at once, all equally at arm’s length. I’ve found that it’s much more
effortless to dip back into my physical library – for inspiration or reference – than my digital
library. The books are there. They’re obvious. They welcome me back.

The pile of unread books we have on our bedside tables is often referred to as a graveyard
of good intentions. The list of unread books on our Kindles is more of a black hole of fleeting
intentions.

But it shouldn’t be a black hole, especially not after nearly a decade. Aside from revamping
digital book covers and the library browsing interface, Kindles could remind us of past
purchases – books either bought but left unread, or books we read passionately and should
reread. And, in doing so, trump the unnetworked isolation of physical books. Thanks to our
in-app reading statistics, Kindle knows when we can’t put a book down, when we plunge
ourselves into an author’s world far too late into the night, on a weeknight, when the next
day is most definitely not a holiday. Kindle knows when we are hypnotised,
possessed, gluttonous; knows when we consume an entire feast of words in a single
sitting. Knows that others haven’t been so ravenous with a particular story, but we were,
and so Kindle can intuit our special relationship with the text. It certainly knows enough to
meaningfully resurface books of that ilk. It could be as simple as an email. Kindle could help
foster that act of returning, of rereading. It could bring a book back from the periphery of our

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working library into the core, ‘into the bloodstream’, as Susan Sontag put it. And yet it
doesn’t.

To return to a book is to return not just to the text but also to a past self. We are embedded
in our libraries. To reread is to remember who we once were, which can be equal parts scary
and intoxicating. Other services such as Timehop offer ways to return to past photos or past
tweets. They, too, are unexpectedly evocative. Far more so than you might think. They allow
us to measure and remeasure ourselves. And if a resurfaced tweet has an emotional
resonance of x, than a passage in a book by which you were once moved must resonate at
100x.

All is not well on the digital book design front. Until recently, the Kindle iOS application still
lacked the ability – nearly five years after its launch – to hyphenate words at the end of lines
in books as they appear on the screen; this was a small ‘problem’, but it’s one that should
have been solved years ago. And that’s only one of many deeper usability and design issues.
Amazon’s long-term neglect of the Kindle continues to be worrying to me, both as a designer
and a reader.

It seems as though Amazon has been disincentivised to stake out bold explorations by
effectively winning a monopoly (deservedly, in many ways) on the market. And worse still,
the digital book ‘stack’ – the collection of technology upon which our digital book ecosystems
are built – is mostly closed, keeping external innovators away. […]

Article 4

Genre: Social Studies / Soft Science

This article titled ‘How to think about moral hazard during a pandemic’, written by the
Editorial Board, was published in The Economist in 2016.

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Covid-19 confronts humanity with a host of testing moral decisions. When hospital capacity
is limited, which patients should get access to life-saving equipment? For how long should
virus-limiting restrictions on public activity remain in place, given the immense cost of such
measures? To this list, some add another: how generous should public assistance to
struggling households and firms be, when such aid could encourage the abuse of state-
provided safety nets? Worries like these, concerning what social scientists call moral
hazard, have been relatively muted during the pandemic, and appropriately so. But
hard questions about risk and responsibility cannot be put off for ever.

Moral hazard describes situations in which the costs of risky behaviour are not entirely borne
by those responsible for that behaviour, so encouraging excessive risk-taking in the future. A
fire-insurance policy, for example, might lead homeowners to behave more recklessly—say,
by not changing the batteries in their smoke detectors—because the cost of any damage is
partly covered by the insurer. Moral-hazard worries often arise during crises, when
governments face pressure to save struggling institutions for the sake of the economy as a
whole. Overly generous support for teetering banks might limit the short-term cost of a crisis
but could lead to more risk-taking and worse crises in the future, if financiers bet that the
government will save their skins again the next time. Walter Bagehot, a former editor of this
newspaper, coined his famous rule for lenders of last resort—to lend freely against good
collateral in times of crisis, but at a penalty rate—in an effort to balance these competing
concerns.

Rarely has the scope for moral hazard seemed as massive as now. To slow the spread of
covid-19, countries have shuttered much of their economies. And in order to prevent lost
sales and jobs from translating into spikes in bankruptcies and poverty, governments have
pumped huge amounts of aid to households and firms. Economists at the IMF reckon that
governments across advanced economies could run fiscal deficits that, on average, exceed

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10% of gdp in 2020. America’s deficit is projected to widen to as much as 15% of GDP. On
top of direct spending measures, many countries have made available a vast amount of loans
and loan guarantees. Rich countries have also extended assistance to others, by allowing
some poor countries to delay their debt payments, for example.

Central banks, too, have acted. For the first time, America’s Federal Reserve is buying risky
high-yielding debt and bonds issued by state and local governments. It has done so in order
to prevent markets from seizing up and leading to cascading defaults and economic
catastrophe. But its involvement in new markets could shift perceptions of risk in the future.
Lending standards for some debt securities had already deteriorated in the years before the
pandemic. The possibility of a standing Fed backstop could lead to far more borrowing
on dubious terms. State governments facing long-term budget crunches may tackle those
problems with less urgency in the expectation of Fed help, increasing the cost of any future
default or bail-out. Robert Kaplan, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, has
expressed concern that the Fed’s extraordinary actions could let institutions that had
borrowed recklessly before the pandemic off the hook. Similar worries have arisen in other
contexts. A handful of Republican senators, for instance, have fretted that more
generous unemployment-insurance payments could create a mob of workers eager to
be laid off.

Economists, though, have been remarkably relaxed about the risks of moral hazard from
pandemic-fighting measures, for a number of reasons. For a start, these policies shield people
and institutions from the full costs of the pandemic by design. Without them, people and
firms might try to get by as they normally do, spreading the virus and prolonging the
outbreak. Timing matters, too. Preventing economic devastation and market panic as
lockdowns were imposed required massive, urgent action. Interventions crafted to minimise
moral hazard—by directing help to the most deserving individuals and firms, and closely

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monitoring their actions to detect and stop bad behaviour—would have distributed aid too
slowly, and stingily, to avert catastrophic economic harm.

Moreover, moral-hazard worries apply to risks that may reasonably be reduced—by putting
batteries in the smoke detector, say. Even the most prudent firm or household, though,
would struggle to withstand a shock that deprives them of nearly all their income for months
on end. Assistance in these times is less likely to distort future behaviour than are bail-outs
during more mundane periods of hardship. Governments can claim that the help is a one-off,
warranted by an unprecedented disaster.

Questions of moral hazard cannot be put off for ever, though. Some will become more
pressing as the pandemic ebbs. Economies will need plenty of support to recover. Aid at that
point will have to be crafted carefully in order to provide reasonable assistance while also
establishing when special, pandemic era rules no longer apply. If some guarantees or public
assistance cannot be rolled back, new oversight and regulatory capacity might be needed to
prevent bad behaviour.

In the years after the pandemic, even harder choices loom. Covid-19 may seem a uniquely
devastating and global disaster. But the threat posed by climate change means that such
extraordinary natural calamities might not be so infrequent. It might thus become harder for
governments to credibly declare that aid provided during such disasters is a one-off, as is
needed to discourage reckless behaviour and to stop dangerous risks from
accumulating. Governments are right to help without hesitation now, but the years ahead
will force societies to demand more personal, and collective, responsibility.

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Article 5

Genre: World History

The following is an excerpt from the speech ‘Our God is Marching On’ delivered by Dr Martin
Luther King Jr. on 25 Mar 1965 in Montgomery, AL. Dr King, a civil right icon, had earlier
delivered his most famous speech ‘I have a dream’ on 28 Aug 1963.

My dear and abiding friends, Ralph Abernathy, and to all of the distinguished Americans
seated here on the rostrum, my friends and co-workers of the state of Alabama, and to all of
the freedom-loving people who have assembled here this afternoon from all over our nation
and from all over the world: Last Sunday, more than eight thousand of us started on a mighty
walk from Selma, Alabama. We have walked through desolate valleys and across the trying
hills. We have walked on meandering highways and rested our bodies on rocky by ways. Some
of our faces are burned from the outpourings of the sweltering sun. Some have literally slept
in the mud. We have been drenched by the rains. Our bodies are tired and our feet are
somewhat sore.

But today as I stand before you and think back over that great march, I can say, as Sister
Pollard said—a seventy-year-old Negro woman who lived in this community during the bus
boycott—and one day, she was asked while walking if she didn’t want to ride. And when she
answered, "No," the person said, "Well, aren’t you tired?" And with her ungrammatical
profundity, she said, "My feets is tired, but my soul is rested." And in a real sense this
afternoon, we can say that our feet are tired, but our souls are rested.

They told us we wouldn’t get here. And there were those who said that we would get here
only over their dead bodies, but all the world today knows that we are here and we are
standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama saying, "We ain’t goin’ let nobody
turn us around."

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Now it is not an accident that one of the great marches of American history should terminate
in Montgomery, Alabama. Just ten years ago, in this very city, a new philosophy was born of
the Negro struggle. Montgomery was the first city in the South in which the entire Negro
community united and squarely faced its age-old oppressors. Out of this struggle, more than
bus [de]segregation was won; a new idea, more powerful than guns or clubs was born.
Negroes took it and carried it across the South in epic battles that electrified the nation and
the world.

Yet, strangely, the climactic conflicts always were fought and won on Alabama soil. After
Montgomery’s, heroic confrontations loomed up in Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and
elsewhere. But not until the colossus of segregation was challenged in Birmingham did the
conscience of America begin to bleed. White America was profoundly aroused by Birmingham
because it witnessed the whole community of Negroes facing terror and brutality with
majestic scorn and heroic courage. And from the wells of this democratic spirit, the nation
finally forced Congress to write legislation in the hope that it would eradicate the stain of
Birmingham. The Civil Rights Act of1964 gave Negroes some part of their rightful dignity, but
without the vote it was dignity without strength.

Once more the method of nonviolent resistance was unsheathed from its scabbard, and once
again an entire community was mobilized to confront the adversary. And again the brutality
of a dying order shrieks across the land. Yet, Selma, Alabama, became a shining moment in
the conscience of man. If the worst in American life lurked in its dark streets, the best of
American instincts arose passionately from across the nation to overcome it. There never was
a moment in American history more honorable and more inspiring than the pilgrimage of
clergymen and laymen of every race and faith pouring into Selma to face danger at the side
of its embattled Negroes.

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The confrontation of good and evil compressed in the tiny community of Selma generated the
massive power to turn the whole nation to a new course. A president born in the South had
the sensitivity to feel the will of the country, and in an address that will live in history as one
of the most passionate pleas for human rights ever made by a president of our nation, he
pledged the might of the federal government to cast off the centuries-old blight. President
Johnson rightly praised the courage of the Negro for awakening the conscience of the nation.

On our part we must pay our profound respects to the white Americans who cherish their
democratic traditions over the ugly customs and privileges of generations and come forth
boldly to join hands with us. From Montgomery to Birmingham, from Birmingham to Selma,
from Selma back to Montgomery, a trail wound in a circle long and often bloody, yet it has
become a highway up from darkness. Alabama has tried to nurture and defend evil, but evil
is choking to death in the dusty roads and streets of this state. So I stand before you this
afternoon with the conviction that segregation is on its deathbed in Alabama, and the only
thing uncertain about it is how costly the segregationists and Wallace will make the funeral.

Our whole campaign in Alabama has been centred around the right to vote. In focusing the
attention of the nation and the world today on the flagrant denial of the right to vote, we are
exposing the very origin, the root cause, of racial segregation in the Southland. Racial
segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the
races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then. And as
the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly
points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the
emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern
labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses
working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor
white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill

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owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less.
Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.

Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened. That is what
was known as the Populist Movement. The leaders of this movement began awakening the
poor white masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by
the emerging Bourbon interests. Not only that, but they began uniting the Negro and white
masses into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command
posts of political power in the South.

To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this
development of a segregated society. I want you to follow me through here because this is
very important to see the roots of racism and the denial of the right to vote. Through their
control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the
thinking of the poor white masses with it, thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved
in the Populist Movement. They then directed the placement on the books of the South of
laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. And
that did it. That crippled and eventually destroyed the Populist Movement of the nineteenth
century.

If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro
Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the
world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. He gave him Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled
stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a
psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white
man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow. And when his undernourished children
cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim

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Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his
children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion.

Thus, the threat of the free exercise of the ballot by the Negro and the white masses alike
resulted in the establishment of a segregated society. They segregated southern money from
the poor whites; they segregated southern mores from the rich whites; they segregated
southern churches from Christianity; they segregated southern minds from honest thinking;
and they segregated the Negro from everything. That’s what happened when the Negro and
white masses of the South threatened to unite and build a great society: a society of justice
where none would pray upon the weakness of others; a society of plenty where greed and
poverty would be done away; a society of brotherhood where every man would respect the
dignity and worth of human personality.

We’ve come a long way since that travesty of justice was perpetrated upon the American
mind. James Weldon Johnson put it eloquently. He said:

We have come over a way

That with tears hath been watered.

We have come treading our paths

Through the blood of the slaughtered.

Out of the gloomy past,

Till now we stand at last

Where the white gleam

Of our bright star is cast.

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Today I want to tell the city of Selma, today I want to say to the state of Alabama, today I want
to say to the people of America and the nations of the world, that we are not about to turn
around. We are on the move now.

Yes, we are on the move and no wave of racism can stop us. We are on the move now. The
burning of our churches will not deter us. The bombing of our homes will not dissuade us. We
are on the move now. The beating and killing of our clergymen and young people will not
divert us. We are on the move

now. The wanton release of their known murderers would not discourage us. We are on the
move now. Like an idea whose time has come, not even the marching of mighty armies can
halt us. We are moving to the land of freedom.

Let us therefore continue our triumphant march to the realization of the American dream.
Let us march on segregated housing until every ghetto or social and economic depression
dissolves, and Negroes and whites live side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary housing. Let
us march on segregated schools until every vestige of segregated and inferior education
becomes a thing of the past, and Negroes and whites study side-by-side in the socially-healing
context of the classroom.

Let us march on poverty until no American parent has to skip a meal so that their children
may eat. March on poverty until no starved man walks the streets of our cities and towns in
search of jobs that do not exist. Let us march on poverty until wrinkled stomachs in Mississippi
are filled, (That's right) and the idle industries of Appalachia are realized and revitalized, and
broken lives in sweltering ghettos are mended and remolded.

Let us march on ballot boxes, march on ballot boxes until race-baiters disappear from the
political arena. Let us march on ballot boxes until the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs
will be transformed into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens. Let us march on ballot

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boxes until the Wallaces of our nation tremble away in silence. Let us march on ballot boxes
until we send to our city councils, state legislatures, and the United States Congress, men who
will not fear to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God. […]

Article 6

Genre: Literature

The following story titled ‘The Lottery’ was written by Shirley Jackson and was published in
1948.

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full Summer day;
the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the
village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten
o'clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to
be started on June 26th. But in this village, where there were only about three hundred
people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o'clock in the
morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.

The children assembled first, of course. School was recently over for the summer, and the
feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them; they tended to gather together quietly for a
while before they broke into boisterous play, and their talk was still of the classroom and the
teacher, of books and reprimands. Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of
stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest
stones; Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix the villagers pronounced this name
"Dellacroy" eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded
it against the raids of the other boys. The girls stood aside, talking among themselves, looking

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over their shoulders at the boys, and the very small children rolled in the dust or clung to the
hands of their older brothers or sisters.

Soon the men began to gather, surveying their own children, speaking of planting and rain,
tractors and taxes. They stood together, away from the pile of stones in the corner, and their
jokes were quiet, and they smiled rather than laughed. The women, wearing faded house
dresses and sweaters, came shortly after their menfolk. They greeted one another and
exchanged bits of gossip as they went to join their husbands. Soon the women, standing by
their husbands, began to call to their children, and the children came reluctantly, having to be
called four or five times. Bobby Martin ducked under his mother's grasping hand and ran,
laughing, back to the pile of stones. His father spoke up sharply, and Bobby came quickly and
took his place between his father and his oldest brother.

The lottery was conducted - as were the square dances, the teen club, the Halloween
program- by Mr. Summers who had time and energy to devote to civic activities. He was a
round-faced, jovial man and he ran the coal business, and people were sorry for him because
he had no children and his wife was a scold. When he arrived in the square, carrying the black
wooden box, there was a murmur of conversation among the villagers, and he waved and
called, "Little late today, folks." The postmaster, Mr. Graves, followed him, carrying a three
legged stool, and the stool was put in the centre of the square and Mr. Summers set the black
box down on it. The villagers kept their distance, leaving a space between themselves and
the stool, and when Mr. Summers said, "Some of you fellows want to give me a hand?" there
was a hesitation before two men, Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter, came forward to
hold the box steady on the stool while Mr. Summers stirred up the papers inside it.

The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago, and the black box now
resting on the stool had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in
town, was born. Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but

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no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box. There was
a story that the present box had been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded
it, the one that had been constructed when the first people settled down to make a village
here. Every year, after the lottery, Mr. Summers began talking again about a new box, but
every year the subject was allowed to fade off without anything's being done. The black
box grew shabbier each year: by now it was no longer completely black but splintered badly
along one side to show the original wood colour, and in some places faded or stained.

Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter, held the black box securely on the stool until Mr.
Summers had stirred the papers thoroughly with his hand. Because so much of the ritual had
been forgotten or discarded, Mr. Summers had been successful in having slips of paper
substituted for the chips of wood that had been used for generations. Chips of wood, Mr.
Summers had argued. had been all very well when the village was tiny, but now that the
population was more than three hundred and likely to keep on growing, it was necessary to
use something that would fit more easily into the black box. The night before the lottery, Mr.
Summers and Mr. Graves made up the slips of paper and put them in the box, and it was then
taken to the safe of Mr. Summers' coal company and locked up until Mr. Summers was ready
to take it to the square next morning. The rest of the year, the box was put way, sometimes
one place, sometimes another; it had spent one year in Mr. Graves' barn and another year
underfoot in the post office, and sometimes it was set on a shelf in the Martin grocery and
left there.

There was a great deal of fussing to be done before Mr. Summers declared the lottery open.
There were the lists to make up-of heads of families, heads of households in each family,
members of each household in each family. There was the proper swearing-in of Mr.
Summers by the postmaster, as the official of the lottery; at one time, some people
remembered, there had been a recital of some sort, performed by the official of the lottery,

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a perfunctory. tuneless chant that had been rattled off duly each year; some people believed
that the official of the lottery used to stand just so when he said or sang it, others believed
that he was supposed to walk among the people, but years and years ago this part of the
ritual had been allowed to lapse. There had been, also, a ritual salute, which the official of the
lottery had had to use in addressing each person who came up to draw from the box, but this
also had changed with time, until now it was felt necessary only for the official to speak to
each person approaching. Mr. Summers was very good at all this; in his clean white shirt and
blue jeans, with one hand resting carelessly on the black box, he seemed very proper and
important as he talked interminably to Mr. Graves and the Martins.

Just as Mr. Summers finally left off talking and turned to the assembled villagers, Mrs.
Hutchinson came hurriedly along the path to the square, her sweater thrown over her
shoulders, and slid into place in the back of the crowd. "Clean forgot what day it was," she
said to Mrs. Delacroix, who stood next to her, and they both laughed softly. "Thought my old
man was out back stacking wood," Mrs. Hutchinson went on. "And then I looked out the
window and the kids was gone, and then I remembered it was the twenty-- seventh and came
a-running." She dried her hands on her apron, and Mrs. Delacroix said, "You're in time,
though. They're still talking away up there."

Mrs. Hutchinson craned her neck to see through the crowd and found her husband and
children standing near the front. She tapped Mrs. Delacroix on the arm as a farewell and
began to make her way through the crowd. The people separated good-humouredly to let
her through: two or three people said, in voices just loud enough to be heard across the
crowd, "Here comes your, Missus, Hutchinson," and "Bill, she made it after all."
Mrs. Hutchinson reached her husband, and Mr. Summers, who had been waiting, said
cheerfully, "Thought we were going to have to get on without you, Tessie." Mrs. Hutchinson
said, grinning, "Wouldn't have me leave m'dishes in the sink, now, would you. Joe?" and soft

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laughter ran through the crowd as the people stirred back into position after Mrs.
Hutchinson's arrival.

"Well, now." Mr. Summers said soberly, "guess we better get started, get this over with, so's
we can go back to work. Anybody ain't here?"

"Dunbar." several people said. "Dunbar. Dunbar."

Mr. Summers consulted his list. "Clyde Dunbar." he said. "That's right. He's broke his leg,
hasn't he? Who's drawing for him?"

"Me. I guess," a woman said, and Mr. Summers turned to look at her. "Wife draws for her
husband." Mr. Summers said. "Don't you have a grown boy to do it for you, Janey?" Although
Mr. Summers and everyone else in the village knew the answer perfectly well, it was the
business of the official of the lottery to ask such questions formally. Mr. Summers waited
with an expression of polite interest while Mrs. Dunbar answered.

"Horace's not but sixteen vet." Mrs. Dunbar said regretfully. "Guess I gotta fill in for the old
man this year."

"Right," Mr. Summers said. He made a note on the list he was holding. Then he asked,
"Watson boy drawing this year?"

A tall boy in the crowd raised his hand. "Here," he said. "I’m drawing for my mother and me."
He blinked his eyes nervously and ducked his head as several voices in the crowd said things
like "Good fellow, Jack." and "Glad to see your mother's got a man to do it."

"Well," Mr. Summers said, "guess that's everyone. Old Man Warner make it?" "Here," a voice
said, and Mr. Summers nodded.

A sudden hush fell on the crowd as Mr. Summers cleared his throat and looked at the list.
"All ready?" he called. "Now, I'll read the names-heads of families first-and the men come up

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and take a paper out of the box. Keep the paper folded in your hand without looking at it
until everyone has had a turn. Everything clear?"

The people had done it so many times that they only half listened to the directions: most of
them were quiet, wetting their lips, not looking around. Then Mr. Summers raised one hand
high and said, "Adams." A man disengaged himself from the crowd and came forward.
"Hi. Steve." Mr. Summers said and Mr. Adams said, "Hi. Joe." They grinned at one another
humourlessly and nervously. Then Mr. Adams reached into the black box and took out a
folded paper. He held it firmly by one corner as he turned and went hastily back to his place
in the crowd, where he stood a little apart from his family, not looking down at his hand.

"Allen." Mr. Summers said. "Anderson.... Bentham."

"Seems like there's no time at all between lotteries anymore," Mrs. Delacroix said to Mrs.
Graves in the back row.

"Seems like we got through with the last one only last week." "Time sure goes fast,” Mrs.
Graves said. "Clark.... Delacroix"

"There goes my old man." Mrs. Delacroix said. She held her breath while her husband went
forward.

"Dunbar," Mr. Summers said, and Mrs. Dunbar went steadily to the box while one of the
women said. "Go on, Janey," and another said, "There she goes."

"We're next." Mrs. Graves said. She watched while Mr. Graves came around from the side of
the box, greeted Mr. Summers gravely and selected a slip of paper from the box. By now, all
through the crowd there were men holding the small folded papers in their large hand,
turning them over and over nervously Mrs. Dunbar and her two sons stood together,
Mrs. Dunbar holding the slip of paper.

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"Harburt.... Hutchinson."

"Get up there, Bill," Mrs. Hutchinson said, and the people near her laughed. "Jones."

"They do say," Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner, who stood next to him, "that over in the
north village they're talking of giving up the lottery."

Old Man Warner snorted. "Pack of crazy fools," he said. "Listening to the young folks,
nothing's good enough for them. Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living
in caves, nobody work any more, live hat way for a while. Used to be a saying about 'Lottery
in June, corn be heavy soon.' First thing you know, we'd all be eating stewed chickweed and
acorns. There's always been a lottery," he added petulantly. "Bad enough to see young Joe
Summers up there joking with everybody."

"Some places have already quit lotteries." Mrs. Adams said.

"Nothing but trouble in that," Old Man Warner said stoutly. "Pack of young fools."

"Martin." And Bobby Martin watched his father go forward. "Overdyke.... Percy."

"I wish they'd hurry," Mrs. Dunbar said to her older son. "I wish they'd hurry." "They're almost
through," her son said.

"You get ready to run tell Dad," Mrs. Dunbar said.

Mr. Summers called his own name and then stepped forward precisely and selected a slip
from the box. Then he called, "Warner."

"Seventy-seventh year I been in the lottery," Old Man Warner said as he went through the
crowd. "Seventy-seventh time."

"Watson" The tall boy came awkwardly through the crowd. Someone said, "Don't be nervous,
Jack," and Mr. Summers said, "Take your time, son."

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"Zanini."

After that, there was a long pause, a breathless pause, until Mr. Summers, holding his slip of
paper in the air, said, "All right, fellows." For a minute, no one moved, and then all the slips
of paper were opened. Suddenly, all the women began to speak at once, saving. "Who is it?"
"Who's got it?" "Is it the Dunbars?" "Is it the Watsons?" Then the voices began to say,
"It's Hutchinson. It's Bill," "Bill Hutchinson's got it."

"Go tell your father," Mrs. Dunbar said to her older son.

People began to look around to see the Hutchinsons. Bill Hutchinson was standing quiet,
staring down at the paper in his hand. Suddenly, Tessie Hutchinson shouted to Mr. Summers.
"You didn't give him time enough to take any paper he wanted. I saw you. It wasn't fair!"

"Be a good sport, Tessie," Mrs. Delacroix called, and Mrs. Graves said, "All of us took the same
chance."

"Shut up, Tessie," Bill Hutchinson said.

"Well, everyone," Mr. Summers said, "that was done pretty fast, and now we've got to be
hurrying a little more to get done in time." He consulted his next list. "Bill," he said, "you draw
for the Hutchinson family. You got any other households in the Hutchinsons?"

"There's Don and Eva," Mrs. Hutchinson yelled. "Make them take their chance!"

"Daughters draw with their husbands' families, Tessie," Mr. Summers said gently. "You know
that as well as anyone else."

"It wasn't fair," Tessie said.

"I guess not, Joe." Bill Hutchinson said regretfully. "My daughter draws with her husband's
family; that's only fair. And I've got no other family except the kids."

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"Then, as far as drawing for families is concerned, it's you," Mr. Summers said in explanation,
"and as far as drawing for households is concerned, that's you, too. Right?"

"Right," Bill Hutchinson said.

"How many kids, Bill?" Mr. Summers asked formally.

"Three," Bill Hutchinson said.

"There's Bill, Jr., and Nancy, and little Dave. And Tessie and me." "All right, then," Mr.
Summers said. "Harry, you got their tickets back?"

Mr. Graves nodded and held up the slips of paper. "Put them in the box, then," Mr. Summers
directed. "Take Bill's and put it in."

"I think we ought to start over," Mrs. Hutchinson said, as quietly as she could. "I tell you it
wasn't fair. You didn't give him time enough to choose. Everybody saw that."

Mr. Graves had selected the five slips and put them in the box, and he dropped all the papers
but those onto the ground where the breeze caught them and lifted them off.

"Listen, everybody," Mrs. Hutchinson was saying to the people around her.

"Ready, Bill?" Mr. Summers asked, and Bill Hutchinson, with one quick glance around at his
wife and children, nodded.

"Remember," Mr. Summers said. "Take the slips and keep them folded until each person has
taken one. Harry, you help little Dave." Mr. Graves took the hand of the little boy, who came
willingly with him up to the box. "Take a paper out of the box, Davy." Mr. Summers said. Davy
put his hand into the box and laughed. "Take just one paper." Mr. Summers said. "Harry, you
hold it for him." Mr. Graves took the child's hand and removed the folded paper from the
tight fist and held it while little Dave stood next to him and looked up at him wonderingly.

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"Nancy next," Mr. Summers said. Nancy was twelve, and her school friends breathed heavily
as she went forward switching her skirt,

and took a slip daintily from the box "Bill, Jr.," Mr. Summers said, and Billy, his face red and
his feet overlarge, near knocked the box over as he got a paper out. "Tessie," Mr. Summers
said. She hesitated for a minute, looking around defiantly, and then set her lips and went up
to the box. She snatched a paper out and held it behind her.

"Bill," Mr. Summers said, and Bill Hutchinson reached into the box and felt around, bringing
his hand out at last with the slip of paper in it.

The crowd was quiet. A girl whispered, "I hope it's not Nancy," and the sound of the whisper
reached the edges of the crowd.

"It's not the way it used to be." Old Man Warner said clearly. "People ain't the way they used
to be."

"All right," Mr. Summers said. "Open the papers. Harry, you open little Dave's."

Mr. Graves opened the slip of paper and there was a general sigh through the crowd as he
held it up and everyone could see that it was blank. Nancy and Bill Jr. opened theirs at the
same time and both beamed and laughed, turning around to the crowd and holding their slips
of paper above their heads.

"Tessie," Mr. Summers said. There was a pause, and then Mr. Summers looked at Bill
Hutchinson, and Bill unfolded his paper and showed it. It was blank.

"It's Tessie," Mr. Summers said, and his voice was hushed. "Show us her paper, Bill."

Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a
black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil
in the coal company office. Bill Hutchinson held it up, and there was a stir in the crowd.

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"All right, folks." Mr. Summers said. "Let's finish quickly."

Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still
remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there
were stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box.
Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs.
Dunbar. "Come on," she said. "Hurry up."

Mr. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and she said, gasping for breath, "I can't run at
all. You'll have to go ahead, and I'll catch up with you."

The children had stones already. And someone gave little Davy Hutchinson few pebbles.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the centre of a cleared space by now and she held her hands out
desperately as the villagers moved in on her. "It isn't fair," she said. A stone hit her on the
side of the head. Old Man Warner was saying, "Come on, come on, everyone." Steve Adams
was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him. "It isn't fair, it isn't
right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

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