8 ​ Twenty-two-year-old Aaron “Wheelz” Fortheringham from Las Vegas, Nevada, has taken wheelchair stunts to new heights. He performs front and back flips high in the air and has flown across a 50-foot gap in his chair. 9 ​ Inventors will continue to come up with new ideas for sports chairs, making even more opportunities available. As for Aaron Fotheringham, he hopes someday to design the most “wicked” chair in the world.

PASSAGE 2 “Sliding into the Future” by Sachin Waikar
1 Kip St. Germaine inhaled and scraped his stick against the ice. In front of him, the Norwegian team’s goalie leaned forward, waiting. Behind St. Germaine, his teammates watched him, like everyone else in the crowd of more than 8,000 people. The score in the championship match was tied. This was a shootout at the 2002 Paralympic Games.
2 St. Germaine swung his stick back and slapped the puck toward the goal. The black disc whizzed past the goalie’s glove. Goal! St. Germaine had scored Team USA’s winning goal over Norway.
3 St. Germaine and his team moved toward the platform to receive their gold medals for ice sled hockey. But unlike most Olympic medalists, none of these hockey players were standing. St. Germaine, like many of his teammates, is a paraplegic, a person who has lost the use of his legs because of nerve or muscle damage.
(Passage 2 continued..)
First Love​
4 St. Germaine wasn’t always paraplegic. It wasn’t until after he’d finished college that an accident left him paralyzed from the waist down. He was helping to build a house when a five-ton wall fell on him. After the accident, St. Germaine tried to do everything he’d done when he could walk—except sports. Always athletic, St. Germaine had played hockey, baseball, and tennis through high school. He was recruited for his college’s hockey team but was “too busy with classes and other things to play.”
5 After St. Germaine lost the use of his legs, he was reluctant to play popular wheelchair sports because he believed that participating in these meant “admitting you’re disabled.” But when he read a newspaper article about ice sled hockey, he decided to go to the local team’s practice because hockey had always been his first love.
6 Watching the ice sled hockey players practice, St. Germaine felt excited about sports for the first time since the accident. Ice sled hockey (called ice sledge hockey outside of the United States) is played by paraplegics, like St. Germaine, and by amputees, people who have lost one or both legs. Players sit on steel-tube sleds that ride on skate blades, and two shortened hockey sticks to move the puck and their sleds across the ice. They wear uniforms and follows rules similar to those of ice hockey.
Team USA
7 After playing on the local team for some time, St. Germaine tried out for the U. S. national sled hockey team. Because he had less experience than many of the other players, he didn’t expect to make the team. But in January 1995, St. Germaine received a letter welcoming him to Team USA. Then began the hard work of preparing for the Paralympic Games. This international competition is held along with the Olympics every four years.
8 St. Germaine was chosen to be captain of Team USA, and the team traveled to Nagano, Japan, for the 1998 Games. In a match against Canada, St. Germaine scored Team USA’s first-ever goal. But his team finished last out of six teams.
9 Four years later, Team USA arrived in Salt Lake City for its second Paralympic Games. The team was expected to finish last again, but they were confident they could do better. And they did, outscoring their opponents 26 to 6 as they made their way to the championship match against Norway’s team. In the championship, St. Germaine scored the goal that won Team USA the gold medal. “We went from worst to first,” St. Germaine said.
10 In March of 2006, St. Germaine and Team USA defended their top rank at the Paralympic Games in Turin, Italy. Despite outscoring opponents 16 to 10 overall, the team lost a close semifinal match to Norway, and then went on to defeat Germany. They won the bronze medal for third place.
11 Today St. Germaine lives in Massachusetts and speaks to students and other groups about his experience with paralysis and ice sled hockey. He has traveled around the world and visited the White House, where he met the president. Kip St. Germaine never would have guessed that losing the use of his legs would help him take such great steps into the future.

WRITING PROMPT
Write an informational essay in which you discuss how opportunities for disabled athletes have changed and what has led to that change. Your essay must be based upon ideas, concepts, and information that can be determined through analysis of the two passages.
Manage your time carefully so that you can