12.Practice.Tests.for.the.SAT_2015-2016_1128p

Section 21
Practice Test Two
149
Questions 16-25 are based on the following passage.
Ask any jazz guitarist who his or her biggest
influences are, and odds are good you'll emerge
from the conversation with the name Django
Line Reinhardt. Django, a Rom (gypsy) guitarist born
(5) in a caravan in a small town in Belgium in 1910,
developed a style of music that blended the rhythmic
Romany tones of a musette with American
jazz and swing. The haunting sadness of his music
stood in stark contrast to the bouncy jubilance
(10) of early jazz, as Django, against all odds, singlehandedly
created a style of music that has been
revered and imitated without cease since his death
in 1953.
In Django's case, "single-handedly" isn't just
( 15) lip service. He began playing banjo at the tender
age of 12, picked up guitar at 13, and attained so
uch skill so quickly that at 18 he was already
highly regarded for his natural skill among the
sies. But Django was nothing more than a very
(20) skilled player until 1928, when the event occurred
that changed his style forever and sealed his fate.
One night, Django returned home late to his
caravan, which was filled with celluloid flowers
that his wife had made to sell at the market the
(25) next day. The wick fell out of the candle he was
holding and ignited the highly flammable plastic
flowers, turning the caravan into an inferno in a
matter of seconds. Django and his wife escaped
with their lives, but Django suffered severe burns
(30) to half his body. He nearly lost one leg, and his
left hand was severely crippled-only two of his
five fingers still had full functionality. With his
fingering hand so disfigured, it seemed likely he
would never play the guitar again, and the general
(35) recognition of his talent was already so strong, the
legend goes, that the men of his tribe wept at the
tragedy.
This was the event, however, that focused
and distinguished Django Reinhardt as a musi-
( 40) cian. Faced with the loss of the pastime he loved,
Django refused to give up. At the nursing home
where he recuperated, bedridden for eighteen
months, Django practiced methodically every day,
systematically working out a way to get around
( 45) the loss of three digits. He invented an entirely
new fingering system to compensate for his loss.
In the process, he found chord progressions that
no one had ever played before and a virtuosic
technical skill that was unmatched in the world of
(50) jazz musicians. All of his subsequent innovations
in guitar technique can be traced back to his
"disability"-it set him apart and forced him to
try new things. And the sound was incredible.
Django is not the only artist who owes his
(55) uniqueness to what most people would consider
a setback. There's a fair complement of
geniuses with difficulties-Picasso and his madness,
Beethoven and his mounting deafness,
and Stephen Hawking and his confinement to a
(60) wheelchair. Certainly not every human being who
achieves something great is limited by a disability,
but a surprising percentage of those who have
ltered human thought forever are handicapped
m some way.
(65) These days, it seems that it isn't quite enough
to be very, very good at what you do; to have a
significant impact, you must apparently do something
differently from the way that anyone else in
the world has done it. A guitarist who must learn
(70) to construct chords with only two working fingers
will necessarily stumble across techniques no
musician has ever conceived of before-and why
should another musician be expected to try such a
thing? If gifted with the use of all five fingers, it is
(75) unnecessary to learn to use just two. But without
the two-fingered chords, Django's unique, impossibly
virtuosic style could never have existed.
It may be time to regard people who have
crippling disabilities with something besides the
(BO) pity that so frequently (and, some say, insultingly)
colors the outlooks of the fully able. Those who
are different-really, substantially different-have
access to a whole world that "normal" people
can only dream of. A human being's remark-
(85) able ability to adapt, to invent, and to mutate in
response to the challenges in his environment
is the most impressive thing about our species.
Greater challenges require greater invention, and
the innovation required to do the impossible must
(90) come most quickly when presented inflexibly with
that impossibility.
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