SAT Writing and Language Practice Test 2
Questions 1-11 refer to the following information.
Zombies in the Movies
1 With the rise of movie streaming, the number of movies that are never shown in theaters increases every year. Horror, Western, and Sci-Fi movies are made every year, but the number of movies produced in each genre fluctuates annually. For example, as the number of Westerns has stayed at or below about 25 per year since the 1960s, the number of Zombie and Vampire films has 2 risen, with Zombie films increasing nearly six-fold.
While the saying goes that there's "no accounting for the public's taste," 3 lots of people like lots of different things. Why should the number of Westerns have remained relatively low while the number of Zombie films has skyrocketed? Maybe we should ask the question another way: what do people today get from Zombie films that they don't from Westerns?
Westerns dominated the 1920s. Zombie films have dominated the 1990s and 2000s. 4 Beginning with these facts alone, we can start to see why these films might have been popular in different eras. The 1920s, for instance, was an American moment of crusade. 5 These were crusades altogether distinct from those conducted by the Catholic Church starting in 1095. Only a tough sheriff, the kind one might get in an old-west town, could find the perfect balance between 6 legit action and foul play. Thus, if the world could not be contained by law and order, at least here was an imaginary space that could be in the West.
[1] The 1990s and 2000s, dominated as they are by Zombie films, show that contemporary conflicts are not so far away. [2] Instead, we are interested in and suspicious of the people around us. [3] Although we now have the world at the click of a button, Zombie films show that we are not all that interested in that world. [4] Whether coworkers or fellow students, the people around us, especially when viewed as a mass, can seem almost "dead." [5] And the reasons for this are fairly obvious: our private or online personalities have become so robust that 7 we end up spending a lot of time designing avatars that match our personalities. 8
9 It may seem that genre conventions never change. Because they never change, it probably seems like a Western today follows the same set of rules as a Western from 100 years ago. What the rise in Zombie films shows, however, is that the genres themselves change, and they provide different things to different eras. 10 This is not to say that one genre is better than the other—that it's better, for instance, to watch a tough cowboy fight off a gang of cattle rustlers—but it is to say that these genres hold a lot more than their 11 bloodthirsty entertainment value.
