Selective High School Placement Test: Reading

Old maps were often generous with their ignorance. Where explorers had not been, cartographers left the paper blank, or filled it with a sea monster and a shrug. Modern digital maps have no such modesty. Every street appears equally certain, every journey a confident blue line.

This confidence has a cost. A map that never admits doubt invites us to stop looking out of the window. Drivers have followed their screens down closed roads and onto boat ramps, trusting the line above the evidence in front of them.

None of this is an argument for throwing away our phones. A good map remains one of humanity’s finest inventions. But the old cartographers understood something worth remembering: knowing the edge of what you know is itself a kind of knowledge.