Practice Exam Answers

Read the sentence. The old woman, reflecting on the joyous and heartbreaking events she had experienced over her lifetime, told her granddaughter that life's journey is like riding a rollercoaster. What is being compared in the analogy?

Look at the advertisement. Expand Image Which persuasive media technique is used in this advertisement?

Read this excerpt from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close . I knew I could never let Mom hear the messages, because protecting her is one of my most important raisons d’être , so what I did was I took Dad’s emergency money from on top of his dresser, and I went to the Radio Shack on Amsterdam. It was on a TV there that I saw that the first building had fallen. I bought the exact same phone and ran home and recorded our greeting from the first phone onto it. I wrapped up the old phone in the scarf that Grandma was never able to finish because of my privacy, and I put that in a grocery bag, and I put that in a box, and I put that in another box, and I put that under a bunch of stuff in my closet, like my jewelry workbench and albums of foreign currencies. Which word best describes the tone of this excerpt?

Read the excerpt from Fast Food Nation . Up and down Academy Boulevard, along South Nevada, Circle Drive, and Woodman Road, teenagers like Elisa run the fast food restaurants of Colorado Springs. Fast food kitchens often seem like a scene from Bugsy Malone, a film in which all the actors are children pretending to be adults. No other industry in the United States has a workforce so dominated by adolescents. How does Schlosser effectively build his argument in this excerpt?

Read the excerpt from Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Death by Black Hole.” If you stumbled upon a black hole and found yourself falling feet-first toward its center, then as you got closer, the black hole’s force of gravity would grow astronomically. Curiously, you would not feel this force at all because, like anything in free fall, you are weightless. What you do feel, however, is something far more sinister. While you fall, the black hole’s force of gravity at your two feet, they being closer to the black hole’s center, accelerates them faster than does the weaker force of gravity at your head. Read the excerpt from Billy Collins’s “Man Listening to Disc.” the only true point of view, is full of the hope that he, the hub of the cosmos with his hair blown sideways, will eventually make it all the way downtown. Which choice best describes the differing views Tyson and Collins present of humanity?

Which best explains how the title of A Rumor of War can be considered a paradox?

Read the lines from "Harlem." Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Read the lines from "The Weary Blues." He did a lazy sway . . . He did a lazy sway. Which best describes the relationship between these lines?

Read the excerpt from Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. How does King support this claim?