Science for CAT RC, in 10 essays

Science passages are dense with terms but built on simple logic: a question, a method, a result and its limits. These essays cover physics, biology, medicine, evolution and the history of science without needing prior knowledge.

Read them in order: they go from easiest to hardest. Answer the questions under each before moving on.

1. 1The Bridge That Resonance Did Not BreakThe collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge is taught as a lesson in resonance. Two engineers argued in 1991 that the lesson was wrong.Medium · 1 min
2. 2The Sugar Dose That Was Never GivenParents who thought their sons had eaten sugar saw wilder behaviour, though no sugar was served. The finding raises a question about how much of what adults observe is brought in from their own expectations.Medium · 1 min
3. 3The Dinosaur That Was Struck Off and Brought BackA famous dinosaur lost its name in 1903 and regained it in 2015. Whether it deserved to depends less on bones than on where scientists draw lines.Medium · 1 min
4. 4The Signal That Wrote Its Own ExclamationFor seventy two seconds in 1977 a telescope heard something that has never come back. An astronomer's one word reaction gave it a name.Medium · 1 min
5. 5The Game With No PlayersFour short rules and a grid of cells produced patterns that move, multiply and compute. Whether that is order or only the appearance of it is harder to say.Medium · 1 min
6. 6The Pump Handle and the Epidemic Already FadingRemoving a pump handle is said to have stopped a cholera outbreak in London. The truth is quieter, and it matters more.Medium · 1 min
7. 7The Canals of Mars That Began as a TranslationA single Italian word, rendered one way in English, helped persuade a generation that Mars was crossed by the works of engineers.Medium · 2 min
8. 8The Baby Who Was Born in a Dish and the Experts Who ObjectedThe first baby conceived outside a human body arrived in 1978 to eminent warnings of harm. Fifty years on, the objections look less like caution than like a prediction that failed.Medium · 2 min
9. 9The Teenager Who Stained a Fortune and Lost an IndustryA failed attempt to make a medicine produced the first synthetic dye. The commercial lead it created lasted a single generation.Medium · 2 min
10. 10The Twins Announced After the Edit and Before the RulesTwo girls were born in 2018 after a scientist edited their embryos, and the world learned of it afterwards. Courts and regulators have been catching up ever since.Medium · 2 min

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