Practice Test Answers

Read the excerpt from Fast Food Nation . English is now the second language of at least one-sixth of the nation’s restaurant workers, and about one-third of that group speaks no English at all. The proportion of fast food workers who cannot speak English is even higher. Which type of evidence does the author use in this excerpt?

Read the excerpt from Hidden Figures . Men gave the orders and women took notes. Unless an engineer was given a compelling reason to evaluate a woman as a peer, she remained in his blind spot, her usefulness measured against the limited task at hand, any additional talents undiscovered. Read Cameron’s paraphrase of the excerpt. Student Work Women completed the tasks assigned to them. Unless an engineer was forced to consider a woman his peer, he never paid attention to her. Men were only concerned with completing the tasks that were right in front of them. Which paraphrasing mistake does Cameron make?

Read the following excerpt from Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Death by Black Hole.” That’s the gory moment when your body snaps into two segments, breaking apart at your midsection. Upon falling further, the difference in gravity continues to grow, and each of your two body segments snaps into two segments. Shortly thereafter, those segments each snap into two segments of their own, and so forth, and so forth, bifurcating your body into an ever-increasing number of parts: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc. Read the following excerpt from Billy Collins’s “Man Listening to Disc.” The music is loud yet so confidential I cannot help feeling even more like the center of the universe than usual as I walk along to a rapid little version of “The Way You Look Tonight,” What do these two excerpts reveal about the difference in ideas presented by Tyson and Collins?

Read the excerpt from "Keynote Address." Crime has increased so that we are told one of every three Americans is afraid to walk in his own neighborhood after dark. Which best describes an appeal Inouye makes in this excerpt?

Which excerpt from "Keynote Address" includes an example of an allusion?

Which clue words or phrases should be used in compare/contrast text structure?

Read the following excerpt from Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics . In the real world, Feldman learned to settle for less than 95 percent. He came to consider a company “honest” if its payment rate was above 90 percent. He considered a rate between 80 and 90 percent “annoying but tolerable.” If a company habitually paid below 80 percent, Feldman might post a hectoring note, like this one: The cost of bagels has gone up dramatically since the beginning of the year. Unfortunately, the number of bagels that disappear without being paid for has also gone up. Don’t let that continue. I don’t imagine that you would teach your children to cheat, so why do it yourselves? The excerpt serves as which type of support for the authors’ argument?

Read the following excerpt from Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics . The bagel data also reflect how much personal mood seems to affect honesty. Weather, for instance, is a major factor. Unseasonably pleasant weather inspires people to pay at a higher rate. Unseasonably cold weather, meanwhile, makes people cheat prolifically; so do heavy rain and wind. Worst are the holidays. The week of Christmas produces a 2 percent drop in payment rates—again, a 15 percent increase in theft, an effect on the same magnitude, in reverse, as that of 9/11. Thanksgiving is nearly as bad; the week of Valentine’s Day is also lousy, as is the week straddling April 15. There are, however, a few good holidays: the weeks that include the Fourth of July, Labor Day, and Columbus Day. The difference in the two sets of holidays? The low-cheating holidays represent little more than an extra day off from work. The high-cheating holidays are fraught with miscellaneous anxieties and the high expectations of loved ones. Which of the following best summarizes the main idea of this paragraph?

Having a counterclaim in an argumentative essay allows the author of the essay to

Which text structure should be used to show the order of events?