Practice Exam Answers

Read the quote from Leslie Marmon Silko’s story "The Man to Send Rain Clouds" "Send us rain clouds, Grandfather." They laid the bundle in the back of the pickup and covered it with a heavy tarp before they started back to the pueblo. This quote is located early in the narrative. What does it reveal about Leon?

Read the excerpt from "In Response to Executive Order 9066". My best friend is a white girl named Denise— we look at boys together. She sat in front of me all through grade school because of our names: O’Connor, Ozawa. In the excerpt, Okita reveals significant details about

Read the sentence from an argumentative essay about chemical waste. The chemical waste produced by factories is out of hand, and factory owners should get in trouble. Which revision offers the most improvement in word choice?

Which is a feature of dialect?

According to Objectivism, man exists

Use the following definitions to answer the question. emerge: 1. (verb) to come up, appear immerge: 1. (verb) to sink into, immerse Which sentence contains correct word usage?

What is one advantage of listening to an audio recording as opposed to silently reading a play?

Which is the best definition of the term “magic realism”?

Read the excerpt from part two of Trifles . COUNTY ATTORNEY: Oh, I guess they’re not very dangerous things the ladies have picked up. (Moves a few things about, disturbing the quilt pieces which cover the box. Steps back.) No, Mrs. Peters doesn’t need supervising. For that matter, a sheriff’s wife is married to the law. Ever think of it that way, Mrs. Peters? Which of the following most accurately describes this excerpt?

Read the excerpt from "Harrison Bergeron." “I think I’d make a good Handicapper General.” “Good as anybody else,” said George. “Who knows better’n I do what normal is?” said Hazel. “Right,” said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that. How does the dialogue between George and Hazel develop Kurt Vonnegut’s message that advanced technology dehumanizes individuals?

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?

Read the excerpts from “Take the Tortillas Out of Your Poetry” and “Speaking Arabic.” My friend had concluded that if he took his language and culture out of his poetry, he stood a better chance of receiving a fellowship. He took out his native language, the poetic patois of our reality, the rich mixture of Spanish, English, pachuco and street talk which we know so well. In other words, he took the tortillas out of his poetry, which is to say he took the soul out of his poetry. At a neighborhood fair in Texas, somewhere between the German Oom-pah Sausage Stand and the Mexican Gorditas booth, I overheard a young man say to his friend, “I wish I had a heritage. Sometimes I feel—so lonely for one.” And the tall American trees were dangling their thick branches right down over his head. Which best states how the structures of both excerpts support ideas about cultural diversity?

Read the excerpt from Dispatches . You came to love your life, to love and respect the mere fact of it, but often you became heedless of it in the way that somnambulists are heedless. Being good meant staying alive, and sometimes that was only a matter of caring enough at any given moment. Based on the excerpt, which best describes a good soldier?

Which excerpt from The Great Gatsby best indicates that Nick is not fully content with his life?

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?

Which excerpt from part one of Trifles best develops the motives of the County Attorney?

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 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 Brown v. Board of Education . Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment . Why does the Supreme Court conclude that the plaintiffs have been denied their rights?

Which accurately describes a contrast between Wiesel’s All Rivers Run to the Sea and Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, Maus ?

Read the following excerpt from Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics . There is a tale, “The Ring of Gyges,” that Feldman sometimes tells his economist friends. It comes from Plato’s Republic . A student named Glaucon offered the story in response to a lesson by Socrates—who, like Adam Smith, argued that people are generally good even without enforcement. Glaucon, like Feldman’s economist friends, disagreed. He told of a shepherd named Gyges who stumbled upon a secret cavern with a corpse inside that wore a ring. When Gyges put on the ring, he found that it made him invisible. With no one able to monitor his behavior, Gyges proceeded to do woeful things—seduce the queen, murder the king, and so on. Glaucon’s story posed a moral question: could any man resist the temptation of evil if he knew his acts could not be witnessed? Glaucon seemed to think the answer was no. But Paul Feldman sides with Socrates and Adam Smith—for he knows the answer, at least 87 percent of the time, is yes. Feldman reaches the conclusion that most people are honest without receiving an incentive by

Now, review the prompt for hints about the audience. Who will read your writing?

Read the excerpt from "Mother Tongue." Those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as “Even though Tom was ______, Mary thought he was _____.” And the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for example, “Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous.” Well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and what Mary might have thought of him. So I never did well on tests like that. Which information from the excerpt best supports the inference that achievement tests ignore imagination as an element of language ability?