It can reasonably be inferred from the passage that some seventeenth-century tulip growers believed tulip breaks were mainly caused by:
\t\t\t\tA. This is NOT the best answer because the passage does not include information about the seventeenth-century growers’ beliefs about tulip storage conditions.
B. This is NOT the best answer because, as the passage indicates, seventeenth-century tulip growers “could not have known” (fourth paragraph) that a virus caused tulip breaks, because the virus carried by Myzus persicae was not discovered until the 1920s (fourth paragraph).
C. This is the best answer because the passage states that some growers went to “extraordinary lengths” (third paragraph) to make their tulips break by using growing techniques that included sprinkling paint powder on the soil (third paragraph).
D. This is NOT the best answer because the passage does not include information about seventeenth-century growers’ beliefs about the potential effects of weather patterns.
","correct_answer":["C"],"equiv_key":"c5cc5a9489adae46840d572d","has_media":false,"has_mathml":false,"has_table":false,"section_label":"Reading","options":[{"label":"A","content_html":"suppliers’ storage conditions.
","ord":0},{"label":"B","content_html":"diseased tulip bulbs.
","ord":1},{"label":"C","content_html":"certain growing techniques.
","ord":2},{"label":"D","content_html":"certain weather patterns.
","ord":3}],"passage":{"id":"act_quizme:reading:q2:passage","source_id":"act_quizme","form_id":null,"section":"reading","number":"2","kind":null,"title":"Reading Quiz 2","content_html":"One crucial element of the beauty of the tulip that intoxicated the Dutch, the Turks, the French, and the English has been lost to us. To them the tulip was a magic flower because it was prone to spontaneous and brilliant eruptions of color. In a planting of a hundred tulips, one of them might be so possessed, opening to reveal the white or yellow ground of its petals painted, as if by the finest brush and steadiest hand, with intricate feathers or flames of a vividly contrasting hue. When this happened, the tulip was said to have “broken,” and if a tulip broke in a particularly striking manner—if the flames of the applied color reached clear to the petal’s lip, say, and its pigment was brilliant and pure and its pattern symmetrical—the owner of that bulb had won the lottery. For the offsets of that bulb would inherit its pattern and hues and command a fantastic price. The fact that broken tulips for some unknown reason produced fewer and smaller offsets than ordinary tulips drove their prices still higher. Semper Augustus was the most famous such break.
\nThe closest we have to a broken tulip today is the group known as the Rembrandts—so named because Rembrandt painted some of the most admired breaks of his time. But these latter-day tulips, with their heavy patterning of one or more contrasting colors, look clumsy by comparison, as if painted in haste with a thick brush. To judge from the paintings we have of the originals, the petals of broken tulips could be as fine and intricate as marbleized papers, the extravagant swirls of color somehow managing to seem both bold and delicate at once. In the most striking examples—such as the fiery carmine that Semper Augustus splashed on its pure white ground—the outbreak of color juxtaposed with the orderly, linear form of the tulip could be breathtaking, with the leaping, wayward patterns just barely contained by the petal’s edge.
\nAnna Pavord recounts the extraordinary lengths to which Dutch growers would go to make their tulips break, sometimes borrowing their techniques from alchemists, who faced what must have seemed a comparable challenge. Over the earth above a bed planted with white tulips, gardeners would liberally sprinkle paint powders of the desired hue, on the theory that rainwater would wash the color down to the roots, where it would be taken up by the bulb. Charlatans sold recipes believed to produce the magic color breaks; pigeon droppings were thought to be an effective agent, as was plaster dust taken from the walls of old houses. Unlike the alchemists, whose attempts to change base metals into gold reliably failed, now and then the would-be tulip changers would be rewarded with a good break, inspiring everybody to redouble their efforts.
\nWhat the Dutch could not have known was that a virus was responsible for the magic of the broken tulip, a fact that, as soon as it was discovered, doomed the beauty it had made possible. The color of a tulip actually consists of two pigments working in concert—a base color that is always yellow or white and a second, laid-on color called an anthocyanin; the mix of these two hues determines the unitary color we see. The virus works by partially and irregularly suppressing the anthocyanin, thereby allowing a portion of the underlying color to show through. It wasn’t until the 1920s, after the invention of the electron microscope, that scientists discovered the virus was being spread from tulip to tulip by Myzus persicae, the peach potato aphid. Peach trees were a common feature of seventeenth-century gardens.
\nBy the 1920s the Dutch regarded their tulips as commodities to trade rather than jewels to display, and since the virus weakened the bulbs it infected (the reason the offsets of broken tulips were so small and few in number), Dutch growers set about ridding their fields of the infection. Color breaks, when they did occur, were promptly destroyed, and a certain peculiar manifestation of natural beauty abruptly lost its claim on human affection.
\nI can’t help thinking that the virus was supplying something the tulip needed, just the touch of abandon the flower’s chilly formality called for. Maybe that’s why the broken tulip became such a treasure in seventeenth-century Holland: the wayward color loosed on a tulip by a good break perfected the flower, even as the virus responsible set about destroying it.
\nOn its face the story of the virus and the tulip would seem to throw a wrench into any evolutionary understanding of beauty.
\nExcerpt from THE BOTANY OF DESIRE: A PLANT’S-EYE VIEW OF THE WORLD by Michael Pollan, copyright © 2001 by Michael Pollan. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
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