medium · Enhanced ACT reading
The river does not so much flow as negotiate. Where the engineers laid their straight concrete channel, the water obeyed for a season, then began, grain by grain, to deposit silt against one wall and scour the other, until a curve reappeared where they had forbidden one. They dredged; it returned. What they read as the river's defiance was only the river's memory of every floodplain it had ever crossed, a memory written in sediment that no straightedge could erase. In time the city stopped fighting the bend and built a park along it.
The phrase 'the river's memory' as used in the passage most nearly refers to:
- the city's eventual decision to preserve and celebrate the river's natural curve.
- the long-accumulated physical tendencies that lead the river to reshape any straight channel.
- the engineers' detailed written records of exactly where the river had flooded in previous decades.
- a deep sentimental human attachment among longtime residents to the river's older, wilder, untamed course.
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