hard · Enhanced ACT reading
Paired Passages — Passage A: "A map's value lies in what it omits. A map that recorded every pebble would be useless; cartography is the art of strategic forgetting, and the user trusts the map precisely because it has decided, on her behalf, what does not matter." Passage B: "We are told a map is honest when it admits its omissions. But a map cannot annotate everything it leaves out — to list the excluded is itself a selection. The reader is therefore never warned about the omissions that would most mislead her, since those are exactly the ones the mapmaker did not think to flag."
Both passages agree that a map necessarily omits information, but they differ in that, unlike Passage A, Passage B treats the map's selectivity as:
- an unavoidable feature that mapmakers should disclose more fully to their readers
- a source of hidden risk precisely because its most consequential gaps go unmarked
- a deliberate deception by mapmakers who conceal what they know the reader needs
- a strength that, like strategic forgetting, frees the reader from irrelevant detail
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