This essay on air travel is representative of the type of reading passage presented on the WPE. The actual writing prompt which asks for a student response to the article follows the essay.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. We were told to expect medium-rare filet mignon and exotic fondues. These I was promised. Knifing through the jet stream at 50,000 feet, I would put up my stockinged feet, take my good wife's gloved hand, beam at our Cleaver-perfect children across the wide aisle and doze as we rocketed safely into our future at 600 miles per hour. This is what we were sold. The new magic carpet for the new American leisure class.
Forty years later, we receive instead a $1,200 coach seat half the width of a human pelvis, a mismatched pair of circus peanuts and the in-flight director's recut of "Bicentennial Man." Behold, air rage. This has been the season of discontent for enraged passengers and the various carriers who brand, herd and ship them from point to point.
There is blame to be laid everywhere, of course. Overcrowding lies at the root of most in-flight incivility: more people going more places means more people in line, more people at the gate, more people trying to lever their washer-dryer combos into the overhead bin while more people trapped in the aisle behind them hiss obscenities. More missed connections, more friction, more heat, more anger. We love our easily cataloged two-syllable catch phrases like "road rage" and "air rage," and we lump them together even though they have nearly opposite causes. In the former case, people go crazy with the illusion of vehicular control; in the latter, they're driven crazy because they have no control at all.
The entire system is "maxed out," say the experts. Why? Didn't the Government or you airlines see this coming? Once you deregulate and start offering discount fares, how can you feign surprise when we all show up?
Their smiling commercials and ads neglect to mention certain things. No mention in the fine print of supercilious [demanding; disdainful] flying waitresses or hostile counter clerks or belligerent, drunken seatmates or the complex nature of the hostage-kidnapper relationship that begins once the airplane door closes. To say nothing of the subminiature dinners and the fictional timetables and the arcane calculus whereby your seat always costs $700 more than the one next to it.
But we, the traveling public, are culpable, too. We are still a nation of suckers after all, trapped in the feedback loop of the advertising cycle, forever consuming goods and services in the half-witted belief that the new soap or the new soup or the aisle seat on the exit row will deliver not only scads of lather, beefy goodness and an on-time arrival rate of 98 percent, but a slimmer, sexier, more fully self-actualized identity as well. The worm at the core of it all, as always with humanity, is want. We want what we were promised-we want the transcendent fantasy world technology keeps failing to deliver.
We are boorish, childish passengers with outrageous expectations, self-important, ill behaved, underdressed, over packed and sublimely oblivious to the fact that a jumbo jet was never intended as a high-altitude dinner theatre.
And while you're all going no place special in such a hurry, try to remember that what you're really trapped in is your own perceptions, and that your anger comes from the common American convictions that the laws of physics and the rules of commerce and their consequent indignities apply to everyone but you. So, don't drink so much when you fly, take your elbow off my armrest and cover your mouth when you cough! Because only by recognizing your flaws can I ever hope to overcome them.
Topic: For your essay, briefly summarize MacGregor's point about air travel. Then explain your position on this issue. Is the fault in our planes or in ourselves?