Is AP English Language hard?

This passage was written for this course. It imagines an opinion column in a city newspaper, published while the city's library board considers plans to renovate the main public library.

The plans for the renovated Central Library went on display last week, and they are, for the most part, wonderful. There will be a workshop with sewing machines and a laser cutter. There will be a recording studio, a children's wing with a climbing wall, and a café whose espresso machine, I am told, was chosen by committee. The architects call the new building "a living room for the city." I have no quarrel with the phrase. My quarrel is with what the plans leave out.

On the third floor of the old building, behind two sets of doors, is the Reading Room. It has forty oak tables, green-shaded lamps, and a rule older than anyone who works there: no talking. Under the new plan, the room becomes "flexible collaborative space." The tables will be replaced by movable pods. The doors will come off.

I understand why. Libraries are fighting for their lives, and a library that hushes its patrons can seem like a relic, a place that serves the few who already love it. The new library will welcome teenagers who would never have climbed to the third floor, and new arrivals practicing English aloud, and toddlers who are, by temperament, opposed to silence. All of that is good. A library that stays quiet by staying empty has not preserved anything worth keeping.

But noise is not a neutral ingredient that we can add to a building without taking something away. Consider who uses the Reading Room on a weekday morning. I went last Tuesday and counted. There was a man studying for a nursing exam, a woman working through a stack of benefit forms, two college students, a retiree reading a fat history of the Erie Canal, and a teenager who, the librarian told me, comes every day because his apartment holds six people and one table. None of them were there for the books, exactly. They were there for the quiet, which most of them could not find anywhere else.

We talk about access to information as though it were the only kind of access a library provides. It is not. Silence, too, is unevenly distributed. People with money buy it all the time: they buy it in large houses, in private offices, in noise-canceling headphones, in cabins at the end of long roads. People without money mostly go without. For them, the Reading Room is not a quaint tradition. It is the one room in their lives where the world agrees, by rule, to leave them alone.

The fix is not hard, and it does not require undoing the architects' good work. Keep one room. It need not be the grandest room or the largest. Put doors on it, put a sign on the doors, and let the rest of the building be as loud and alive as the city it serves. A living room is a fine thing for a city to have. So is a place to think.

The library board votes on the final plans next month. Its members should remember that a library's oldest promise was never to entertain us, or even to inform us. It was to give us somewhere to sit down and attend to something harder than our surroundings. That promise can share a building with a climbing wall. It cannot survive a building with no doors.