Question

Passage

The glass of the glasshouse was thick with condensation, blurring the sharp outline of the winter garden outside. Inside, Professor Vane moved down the narrow aisle with a brass caliper in one hand and a leather-bound logbook in the other. He stopped before the stunted *Cattleya* orchid, frowning as he pinched the stem. 'Two millimeters of growth since the first of the month,' Vane muttered, recording the figure with a sharp, decisive stroke of his pencil. 'At this rate, Nicholas, the specimen will fail to meet the standard for the autumn exhibition. The soil acidity must be corrected by precisely two percent.'

Nicholas, who was kneeling by a box of damp moss, looked up and smiled faintly. He reached out to touch the underside of a velvet leaf, where a tiny, pale green shoot was pushing its way through the peat. 'But look at the vigor of the new shoot, Uncle,' Nicholas said softly. 'It has ignored the frost entirely, finding its own path toward the weak afternoon light. Perhaps it does not care for your standards; perhaps it simply wants to live.'

Vane did not look up from his ledger. 'Vigor is a subjective sentiment, Nicholas. In botany, as in life, order is the only metric that survives the winter. If we do not govern the soil, the weeds will govern us.' He turned the page, already dismissing the orchid, while Nicholas remained on the floor, watching the small shoot bend toward the glass.

Question

In the passage, the contrast between Professor Vane’s approach to the orchid and Nicholas’s response to the new shoot primarily serves to do which of the following?