Open Practice Tests

Central Ideas and Details — Topic practice

16 exercises · 16 automatically checked · Untimed

Instructions and review guidance

16 questions · Shuffled order · Progress saved locally when available

Identify the evidence for each answer and the specific flaw in its nearest competitor. Complete the four written drills in the lesson before this practice set.

Guide question labels stay the same when the order changes. Check answers when you are ready to review.

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The drill

Question 5

  • Guide question 1.05

A town's repair fair began with volunteers fixing broken lamps and bicycles. Soon visitors brought damaged jackets, asked how to sharpen tools, and exchanged spare parts. Organizers added short demonstrations so people could perform simple repairs themselves. The fair remained a place to mend belongings, but it also became a place to share practical knowledge.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Question 6

  • Guide question 1.06

For a hypothetical exhibition, curator Nia offered visitors either a printed map or a map on a handheld screen. Visitors using either version located the same number of rooms. Those using the printed map more often added handwritten notes. Nia recorded the behavior but did not ask why visitors made notes or whether the notes improved their later recall.

According to the text, what did Nia observe?

Question 7

  • Guide question 1.07

The word 'restoration' can suggest returning an object to one original condition. Yet the imagined bell tower of Harrow Quay had been altered repeatedly: a clock was added, a stairway replaced, and storm damage repaired with different stone. Conservators chose to preserve evidence of these changes. For this tower, restoration meant protecting a history of alteration rather than recreating a single early appearance.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Question 8

  • Guide question 1.08

Eli had planned to show his aunt the finished kite as soon as she arrived. When her car stopped outside, he slid the frame beneath his bed. One corner still sagged. His aunt called from the hall, and he answered that he would be down shortly. Then he lifted the frame again and retested the knot he had already checked three times.

According to the text, what did Eli do after answering his aunt?

Question 9

  • Guide question 1.09

In a hypothetical greenhouse study, seedlings beside pale walls grew more evenly than seedlings beside dark walls. The research team proposed that reflected light reached the pale-wall seedlings from more directions. Because the study did not measure the direction of incoming light, the team treated this account as a possible explanation rather than a confirmed mechanism.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Question 10

  • Guide question 1.10

Historian Ada examines an imagined merchant's ledger listing pottery sales from three workshops. The ledger records prices and quantities but omits buyers' names. Ada can compare the workshops' recorded sales, yet she cannot use this document alone to determine whether their customers came from different social groups. Other surviving documents might help answer that separate question.

According to the text, what can Ada determine from the ledger?

Question 11

  • Guide question 1.11

On her first evening in the apartment, Sora unpacked nothing but a cup. The rooms seemed to belong to the previous tenant: pale rectangles marked absent pictures, and a chair had worn a hollow in the carpet. Then her neighbor knocked, holding a package delivered to the wrong door. They laughed over the nearly identical names on their mailboxes. Afterward, Sora opened the box containing her photographs.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Question 12

  • Guide question 1.12

In a hypothetical translation workshop, bilingual readers rated a literal version of a story as closer to the source's sentence structure than a freer version. A second group, who could read only the translation language, preferred the freer version's readability. Asked about conversational tone, the first group also favored the latter version. Yet neither group answered plot questions more accurately after reading that version. The organizers did not ask either group to rank the translations' overall accuracy.

According to the text, which statement accurately describes the workshop findings?

Question 13

  • Guide question 1.13

An imagined survey of an island's songs once counted every tune absent from printed collections as a recent composition. Later researchers found recordings of older singers performing several such tunes decades earlier. These recordings did not show that every unprinted tune was old; some had demonstrably recent composers. They did show that absence from print could no longer serve as sufficient evidence of recent origin.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Question 14

  • Guide question 1.14

A hypothetical public workshop offered participants either a finished model or a partly assembled model to examine before building their own. Those given the finished model completed construction sooner. Those given the partial model were better at explaining why the pieces fit as they did, although the final constructions were equally accurate across the two groups. The organizers concluded that the better demonstration depended on whether speed or structural explanation was the priority.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Question 15

  • Guide question 1.15

A critic describes an imagined weaver's early rugs as departures from local practice because they arrange familiar motifs in unusually open spaces. The weaver's notebooks reveal extensive study of older rugs, including sketches of their densely repeated borders. Her finished work rarely copies those borders. Instead, she enlarges the gaps between selected motifs, making the inherited forms appear isolated and newly prominent.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Question 16

  • Guide question 1.16

In a hypothetical memory study, adults learned names paired with unfamiliar faces. Half practiced by selecting names from a list; the rest practiced without seeing any options. The following day, everyone took two tests. The first offered answer choices and revealed no performance difference between the practice groups. The second required unaided naming, and those whose practice had omitted options scored higher. Researchers did not test the participants again, so they could not determine whether this difference persisted.

According to the text, which statement accurately describes the later tests?

Question 17

  • Guide question 1.17

An imagined city's market license records suggest that stalls selling prepared food became less common during a decade of street rebuilding. A historian also finds neighborhood diaries describing growing numbers of unlicensed evening food sellers. The diaries cannot establish a citywide total, but they complicate the apparent decline: the official records may partly reflect a shift toward activity they did not capture.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Question 18

  • Guide question 1.18

In an imagined essay on translating jokes, translator Mira calls explanatory notes useful when humor depends on an unfamiliar custom. She objects, however, when a note merely spells out a joke's already accessible surprise. In that case, she writes, an explanation can replace the reader's discovery with instruction. Her objection concerns notes that explain what readers can grasp themselves, not notes as a category.

According to the text, under which circumstance does Mira object to an explanatory note?

Question 19

  • Guide question 1.19

My brother said the old radio was beyond repair. I kept it on the kitchen shelf anyway, turning its silent dial while the kettle warmed. One morning he arrived carrying a small speaker. 'For the shelf,' he said. I moved the radio a few inches to make room. Soon music filled the kitchen, and his shoulders loosened. I had thought he wanted the radio gone. Perhaps he had only wanted the silence gone.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Question 20

  • Guide question 1.20

A hypothetical museum trial replaced chronological labels in one room with labels grouping objects by use. Visitors more often connected objects made centuries apart, but they less often remembered which objects came first. Curators retained the thematic groupings and added a small timeline. They wanted to support comparisons across periods while making chronological relationships easier to recover.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

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