hard · 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:

1. the city's eventual decision to preserve the river's natural curve.
2. the long-accumulated physical tendencies that lead the river to reshape any straight channel.
3. the engineers' written records of where the river had flooded in the past.
4. a sentimental human attachment to the river's older, wilder course.

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