Digital ACT Reading Practice Question #1681

As it is used in the passage, the phrase "patient record" serves to emphasize that: Passage Excerpt (Literary Narrative): On the wind-scoured mesa overlooking the canyonlands, Teresa knelt beside her tripod, her brass transit catching the sharp desert sun. For three seasons she had been charting the uncharted drainage basins of the Escalante for the geological survey. Her notebooks were swollen with sketches of sandstone buttresses and notes on soil porosity. In town, land speculators viewed the canyon as an obstacle—a jagged rupture requiring bridges, culverts, and timber flumes. But to Teresa, every contour line represented an ancient hydrology, a patient record written by flash floods over twenty million years. When her crosshairs aligned with Navajo Mountain, she felt less like an engineer surveying real estate and more like a translator reading an ancient stone scroll.