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READING Passage IX HUMANITIES: The passage below is an excerpt from American Houses by Philip Langdon (© 1987 by Philip Langdon, published by Stewart, Tabori & Chang, Inc.). People carry in their minds a picture of what constitutes an “American house.” For most of us, it is and has long been a freestanding dwelling that rises from its own piece of land. | ACT Practice Test 3 READING Passage IX HUMANITIES The passage below is an excerpt from American Houses by Philip Langdon 1987 by Philip Langdon published by Stewart Tabori Chang Inc. . People carry in their minds a picture of what constitutes an American house. For most of us it is and has long been a freestanding dwelling that rises from its own piece of land. Whether that piece of land is a 5 40-foot-wide lot on a city street or an expanse of farmland stretching off toward the horizon is almost irrelevant what matters is that the house stands as an individual object separate from the walls of its neigh- 10 bors. This may not be the sort of dwelling in which every American actually lives mil-lions inhabit apartment buildings and blocks of row houses yet the detached house holds such an allure for the imagina- 15 tion that it remains a national ideal in good times and bad in periods both of dense urban development and of outward suburban dispersal. So deeply embedded in the country s consciousness is the ideal of a 20 freestanding dwelling that even young children when asked to draw a house will unhesitatingly make a sketch of a familysized dwelling with a pitched roof on top a few windows in its facade and a prominent 25 front door. Some of the details that embellish this notion of the American house have of course changed greatly with the passage of time. In the 1850s when landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing was exerting a major influence on residential design the image of an American house would have 30 included verandas and vestibules parlors and pantries. In the 1920s a decade 35 enchanted by Old English architecture but also gripped by a concern for cleanliness it often summoned up a picturesque even quaint exterior with arched doorways and a steeply pitched roof yet with a shiny white- 40 surfaced kitchen and bathroom within. In the 1960s the prevailing vision was of a house that had substituted a back patio or deck for the front porch and had added a
