Advanced Practice Test 2

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 1 of 27

The following text is from Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 novel Sister Carrie. Hurstwood, who tricked Carrie into leaving Chicago with him, has just asked her to marry him.

Carrie had never been ill-disposed toward him. Only a moment before she had been listening with some Underlined: complacency End underlined., remembering her old affection for him. He was so handsome, so daring!

Now, however, this feeling had changed to one of opposition, which rose feebly.

As used in the text, what does the word “complacency” most nearly mean?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 2 of 27

A 1993 study reported that college students scored slightly higher on a spatial-reasoning task after listening to ten minutes of a Mozart sonata than after sitting in silence, an improvement that lasted only about fifteen minutes. Within a few years, the finding had been recast in popular accounts as evidence that playing classical music to infants makes them smarter. Psychologists who reviewed the research judged this popular version ______: it offered an appealingly simple lesson only by ignoring how small, brief, and specific the original effect had been.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 3 of 27

The following text is from Charles Dickens’s 1857 novel Little Dorrit. The Circumlocution Office is a fictional government department.

This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Underlined: Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—HOW NOT TO DO IT. End underlined.

Through this delicate perception, through the tact with which it invariably seized it, and through the genius with which it always acted on it, the Circumlocution Office had risen to overtop all the public departments; and the public condition had risen to be—what it was.

Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 4 of 27

In the 1790s the naturalist Lazzaro Spallanzani found that bats whose eyes had been covered could still fly through a darkened room without striking threads strung across it. Soon afterward, Louis Jurine reported that bats whose ears had been tightly plugged collided with objects. Underlined: Spallanzani then fitted bats with small tubes inserted into their ears; when the tubes were left open, the bats flew normally, but when the tubes were closed, the bats blundered into obstacles. End underlined. Because neither man could hear any sound from the flying bats, the idea that bats find their way by hearing was widely doubted until the late 1930s, when researchers recorded the animals’ high-pitched calls, which lie beyond the range of human hearing.

Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 5 of 27

In 1991 psychologists Diane Halpern and Stanley Coren reported that among recently deceased people whose handedness their relatives could recall, left-handers had died about nine years younger, on average, than right-handers, and they suggested that left-handedness shortens life. Underlined: People born in the early twentieth century, however, were far less likely to be identified as left-handed than people born later, since many children of that era were made to write with their right hands. End underlined. A later study that followed a large group of older adults for several years found no difference in survival between left- and right-handers.

Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 6 of 27

Text 1

Astronomer Ivo Pell attributes a star’s periodic dimming to a planet passing in front of it. The star’s color remains nearly constant during each dimming event. Pell notes that a cool spot rotating across the star’s visible surface would make the observed light redder, so the color measurements favor his interpretation over the cool-spot explanation.

Text 2

Astronomer Mina Orr agrees that the color measurements weigh against a cool spot. She notes, however, that two stars of nearly the same color could eclipse one another without appreciably changing the combined light’s color. Measurements of the light sources’ motions would be needed to distinguish that possibility from Pell’s planet interpretation.

How would Orr (Text 2) most likely characterize the reasoning in Text 1?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 7 of 27

Text 1

Temple inscriptions from the reign of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses III describe invaders, whom historians call the Sea Peoples, overrunning lands from Anatolia to Cyprus before an attack on Egypt around 1177 BCE. Many historians concluded that these raiders alone had destroyed the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age.

Text 2

Excavations show that the region’s cities were destroyed over several decades rather than in a single wave, and some destruction layers show damage consistent with earthquakes rather than attack. Historian Eric Cline argues that earthquakes, drought and famine, and disrupted trade, together with the raids of the Sea Peoples, weakened the region’s interconnected kingdoms until they collapsed one after another.

Based on the texts, how would Cline (Text 2) most likely respond to the conclusion of the historians described in Text 1?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 8 of 27

Text 1

In a 1985 study, psychologists Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky had college basketball players each take 100 shots from spots where the player made about half of their attempts. For each player, the researchers compared the percentage of shots made immediately after three consecutive makes with the player’s overall percentage. Finding no meaningful difference, they concluded that the widespread belief in a “hot hand”—that players become more likely to score after a string of successes—is an illusion.

Text 2

Economists Joshua Miller and Adam Sanjurjo have identified a subtle bias in such comparisons. Consider a player whose chance of making each shot never changes and who takes 100 shots, as in the 1985 study. If one calculates the percentage of shots made immediately after three consecutive makes, that percentage will, on average, be noticeably lower than the player’s overall percentage.

Based on the texts, how would Miller and Sanjurjo (Text 2) most likely respond to the conclusion in Text 1?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 9 of 27

The following text is from Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 book Winesburg, Ohio. The narrator describes the central thought of an unpublished book written by an old man.

The thought was involved but a simple statement of it would be something like this:

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful. [...] And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.

It was the truths that made the people grotesques. [...] It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 10 of 27

In his 1877 essay “An Apology for Idlers,” Robert Louis Stevenson inverts a common judgment of character, treating relentless industry as a sign of inner poverty and a gift for leisure as the mark of a rich, many-sided nature.

Which quotation from “An Apology for Idlers” most effectively illustrates the claim?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 11 of 27

Before the 1860s, defenders of spontaneous generation—the idea that living things can arise from nonliving matter—argued that boiled broth stayed free of microbes in a sealed flask only because sealing kept out fresh air, which they believed life requires. Louis Pasteur therefore boiled broth in flasks whose necks he had drawn out into long, downward-bending curves, leaving the ends open. Air could reach the broth, but dust settled in the curves, and the broth remained free of microbes for months. Some critics then proposed that the boiling itself had altered the broth so that it could no longer support microbial life of any kind.

Which finding, if true, would most directly weaken the critics’ proposal?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 12 of 27

In a 1974 study, psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer showed 150 participants a short film of a car accident. Afterward, 50 participants were asked, “About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” Another 50 were asked the same question with “hit” in place of “smashed,” and the remaining 50 were not asked about speed. A week later, all participants were asked whether they had seen any broken glass in the film; there had been none. A student claims that the verb in the speed question changed what participants remembered about the accident itself, not merely the speeds they estimated.

Responses in Loftus and Palmer’s Second Experiment

Question asked after the film	Mean speed estimate (miles per hour)	Participants who reported seeing broken glass (of 50)
Speed question with “smashed”	10.46	16
Speed question with “hit”	8.00	7
No question about speed	—	6

Which choice most effectively uses data from the table to support the student’s claim?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 13 of 27

The number of farms in the United States reached its peak in the 1930s and then fell steeply as farms grew larger and more mechanized. A student claims that the number of farms per person in the country fell in the first half of the twentieth century—even during the years when the number of farms was still rising.

Number of Farms and Population of the United States

Year	Number of farms (millions)	Population (millions)
1900	5.7	76.2
1935	6.8	127.3
1950	5.4	151.3
2000	2.2	281.4

Which choice most effectively uses data from the table to support the student’s claim?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 14 of 27

In 1823 the astronomer Heinrich Olbers described a puzzle. Suppose the universe were infinitely large, had existed unchanged forever, and were filled throughout with stars much like the Sun. Then every line of sight from Earth would eventually end at the surface of a star, and the whole night sky would glow as brightly as the surface of the Sun. Dust between the stars cannot remove the difficulty: over endless time, dust absorbing starlight would heat up until it glowed as brightly as the stars themselves. Because the night sky is dark, ______

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 15 of 27

In sealed-bid auctions for leases to drill for oil in the Gulf of Mexico during the 1950s and 1960s, no company knew exactly how much oil a lease held. Each company estimated a lease’s value from its own surveys and bid accordingly, and the lease went to the highest bidder. In 1971 petroleum engineers Ed Capen, Robert Clapp, and William Campbell reported that winning companies had often earned disappointing returns on their leases, even though, the engineers argued, the companies’ estimates had not been too high on average. The engineers explained this apparent paradox by pointing out that ______

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 16 of 27

In 1774 Antoine Lavoisier heated a piece of tin in a sealed glass vessel until part of the tin had turned into a powdery substance called a calx. As others had found, the calx weighed more than the metal it came from, yet the sealed vessel and its contents weighed the same after heating as before. When Lavoisier broke the seal, air rushed into the vessel, which then weighed more than it had. Many chemists of the time held that a metal turns into a calx by giving off a substance called phlogiston. Lavoisier’s results suggest that ______

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 17 of 27

Genetics, the study of how traits are passed from parents to offspring, ______ its name from a term that the British biologist William Bateson proposed in 1905 in a letter to a fellow scientist.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 18 of 27

Benjamin Franklin filled the yearly editions of Poor Richard’s Almanack with short sayings that praised thrift, industry, and plain dealing. “Well done,” ______ “is better than well said.”

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 19 of 27

Alice Ball, a chemist ______ developed an injectable treatment for leprosy at the College of Hawaii, died in 1916 at age twenty-four; the college’s president later published her method without crediting her.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 20 of 27

A 2007 study of English verbs over the past twelve centuries found that frequency protects irregular forms such as “sang” and “went” from becoming regular. The more often an irregular verb is ______ less likely it is to have acquired a regular “-ed” past tense, with rarely used verbs regularizing fastest.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 21 of 27

When the Swedish warship Vasa was raised from Stockholm harbor in 1961, it ______ on the harbor floor for 333 years, preserved in part because the harbor’s brackish water was inhospitable to the shipworms that devour submerged wood elsewhere.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 22 of 27

Two days after Samuel Langley’s full-size Aerodrome plunged into the Potomac River in October 1903, an editorial in the New York Times ______ practical flying machine might take “from one million to ten million years” to develop. Ten weeks later, the Wright brothers made the first powered flights at Kitty Hawk.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 23 of 27

Sketches and notes that Leonardo da Vinci made around 1493 show a strikingly modern understanding of friction. ______ they state that the force needed to slide an object across a surface is proportional to the object’s weight and does not depend on how much of the object touches the surface—rules that the French physicist Guillaume Amontons would publish two centuries later.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 24 of 27

In 1869, while surveying the site of the planned Brooklyn Bridge, its designer, engineer John Roebling, suffered an injury that proved fatal. His son Washington took charge and began construction in 1870, but in 1872 he was disabled by decompression sickness from working in the bridge’s underwater foundations. ______ he directed the project from an apartment overlooking the river, relying on his wife, Emily Warren Roebling, to carry his instructions to the engineers until the bridge opened in 1883.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 25 of 27

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

In 1942 actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil received a U.S. patent for a “secret communication system.”
The system was designed to keep enemy forces from jamming the radio signals used to guide torpedoes.
It worked by rapidly switching the signal among 88 frequencies in a pattern known only to the sender and the receiver.
Antheil drew on his experience synchronizing player pianos, which have 88 keys.
The U.S. Navy did not adopt the system during World War II, reportedly considering it too cumbersome.
The technique it described, now called frequency hopping, later became a basis for some wireless technologies.

The student wants to explain how the invention was meant to protect a signal from jamming. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 26 of 27

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

Navigators in the Marshall Islands traditionally made stick charts from the ribs of coconut palm fronds, lashed together, with small shells tied on.
The curved and straight ribs represented patterns of ocean swells, including the way swells bend around islands; the shells marked islands.
A mattang chart illustrated general principles of how swells behave rather than depicting any real area.
A rebbelib chart depicted a large real region, such as an entire chain of atolls.
Navigators studied the charts on land and memorized them; the charts were not carried on voyages.

The student wants to explain what the charts represented and how navigators used them. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

Reading and Writing · Module 1 · Question 27 of 27

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

In 1956 physicists Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang suggested that a basic symmetry of nature called parity might not hold in certain radioactive decays.
Parity symmetry implies that a process and its mirror image should occur equally often.
Chien-Shiung Wu tested the suggestion by cooling radioactive cobalt-60 to near absolute zero and lining up its nuclei with a magnetic field.
She found that electrons from the decaying nuclei were emitted more often in one direction than in the opposite direction.
The result showed that parity symmetry is violated in such decays.
Lee and Yang received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for their suggestion.

The student wants to show readers who have never heard of parity how Wu’s result revealed that the symmetry does not always hold. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 1 of 27

The following text is from John Galsworthy’s 1906 novel The Man of Property. Soames Forsyte is suing an architect over the cost of a house. Chankery, a young lawyer on the architect’s side, discusses the case at a dinner; later, Soames’s own lawyer, Boulter, gives Soames his view.

He had, said Chankery, a case coming on with a “very Underlined: nice End underlined. point.” He then explained, preserving every professional discretion, the riddle in Soames’s case. Everyone, he said, to whom he had spoken, thought it a nice point. [...] Boulter, who had the matter in hand, Jobling having died some years before, told him that in his opinion it was rather a nice point; he would like counsel’s opinion on it.

As used in the text, what does the word “nice” most nearly mean?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 2 of 27

When Tim Berners-Lee circulated his 1989 proposal for what would become the World Wide Web, his supervisor wrote “Vague but exciting” on the cover. The proposal presented the web’s central idea—documents linked to one another that anyone on a computer network could reach—in ______ form: it stated the goal clearly, but the software, the rules for transmitting documents, and the format in which to write them were all worked out over the following two years.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 3 of 27

When fragments of a skull and a jaw were unearthed at Piltdown, England, in 1912, many British scientists accepted them as the remains of an early human ancestor. The find paired a large, humanlike braincase with an apelike jaw—the very combination these scientists expected, since they believed that an enlarged brain had led the way in human evolution. As fossils found in Africa and Asia over the following decades revealed ancestors with small brains but upright posture and humanlike teeth, Piltdown fit the record less and less. In 1953 chemical tests exposed it as a forgery that combined a relatively recent human skull with the jaw of an ape.

Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 4 of 27

The following text is Siegfried Sassoon’s poem “The General,” from his 1918 collection Counter-Attack and Other Poems. Sassoon served as a British officer in the First World War; Arras is a town in northern France where a major battle was fought in 1917.

“Good-morning; good-morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He’s a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

Underlined: But he did for them both by his plan of attack. End underlined.

Which choice best describes the function of the underlined portion in the text as a whole?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 5 of 27

Sickle-cell disease, which develops in people who inherit two copies of a particular gene variant, was usually fatal in childhood before modern treatment. Natural selection should make a variant that kills those who inherit two copies before they can reproduce increasingly rare. Underlined: Yet in parts of Africa, more than one person in five carries a single copy of the sickle-cell variant. End underlined. In the 1950s physician Anthony Allison found that people with one copy were less likely than others to suffer severe malaria and that the variant was most common in regions where malaria had long been widespread.

Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 6 of 27

Text 1

In his 1933 book The Triumph of Mediocrity in Business, the statistician Horace Secrist reported that stores with the highest profits in one year tended, on average, to earn lower profits in later years, while stores with the lowest profits tended to improve. Secrist concluded that competition steadily pushes businesses toward average performance, so that firms grow more alike over time.

Text 2

Reviewing Secrist’s book, the statistician Harold Hotelling observed that the same pattern appears when firms are grouped by their profits in a later year and traced backward: firms with the highest later profits had, on average, earned less in the earlier year, and firms with the lowest later profits had earned more.

Based on the texts, how would Hotelling (Text 2) most likely respond to Secrist’s conclusion in Text 1?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 7 of 27

Text 1

In the 1890s the physician Christiaan Eijkman noticed that chickens at his laboratory in Java developed a paralysis resembling the human disease beriberi when they were fed polished white rice, and that they recovered when fed rice with its outer layers intact. Eijkman concluded that polished rice contains a substance that damages nerves and that the outer layers of the grain contain something that counteracts it.

Text 2

Continuing Eijkman’s work, Gerrit Grijns fed chickens diets that contained no rice at all, such as meat that had been heated for a long time. These chickens also developed the paralysis, and adding the outer layers of rice grains—or certain beans—to their diets prevented it.

Based on the texts, how would Grijns (Text 2) most likely respond to Eijkman’s conclusion in Text 1?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 8 of 27

Text 1

During the 2009 flu season, researchers Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler monitored Harvard College students in two groups: students chosen at random and friends whom the randomly chosen students named. On average, the named friends came down with flu about two weeks earlier than the randomly chosen students did.

Text 2

In 1991 the sociologist Scott Feld showed that in networks of friendships, people’s friends have, on average, more friends than they themselves do. The reason is that a person with many friends appears on many people’s lists of friends, while a person with few friends appears on few lists.

Based on the texts, how would Feld (Text 2) most likely respond to the result reported in Text 1?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 9 of 27

The following text is from Samuel Butler’s 1903 novel The Way of All Flesh. Years earlier, Christina Allaby and her sisters had played a game of cards to decide which of them would try to marry Theobald Pontifex, a young clergyman; Christina won and later married him.

When the two Miss Allabys came, as they sometimes did, to stay with Christina, they said the life led by their sister and brother-in-law was an idyll. Happy indeed was Christina in her choice, for that she had had a choice was a fiction which soon took root among them—and happy Theobald in his Christina. Somehow or other Christina was always a little shy of cards when her sisters were staying with her, though at other times she enjoyed a game of cribbage or a rubber of whist heartily enough, but her sisters knew they would never be asked to Battersby again if they were to refer to that little matter, and on the whole it was worth their while to be asked to Battersby.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 10 of 27

In a 2009 experiment, Christopher Bird and Nathan Emery gave captive rooks a tall, narrow tube of water with a worm floating on the surface, too low for the birds to reach. The rooks dropped stones from a nearby pile into the tube until the water rose high enough for them to seize the worm. The researchers hypothesized that the birds understood that adding stones raises the water level, rather than simply dropping objects into the tube until food happened to come within reach.

Which finding, if true, would most directly support the researchers’ hypothesis?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 11 of 27

During a severe drought in 1977 on the Galápagos island of Daphne Major, most of the island’s medium ground finches died, and the small, soft seeds they usually eat became scarce, leaving mainly large, hard seeds. Researchers who had been capturing, measuring, and banding the island’s finches for years found that the average beak depth of the population was greater after the drought than before it. They concluded that the increase occurred because birds with deeper beaks, which can crack large, hard seeds, were more likely to survive the drought.

Which finding, if true, would most directly support the researchers’ conclusion?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 12 of 27

In a 1959 experiment, psychologists Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith had participants spend an hour on dull, repetitive tasks. Afterward, some participants were paid either $1 or $20 to tell the next participant, who was actually working with the researchers, that the tasks had been enjoyable; participants in a control group were not asked to say anything. Later, all participants rated the tasks on scales from -5 to 5. A student claims that the size of the payment, and not merely the act of describing the dull tasks as enjoyable, affected how participants came to view the tasks.

Participants’ Average Ratings in Festinger and Carlsmith’s Experiment

Which choice most effectively uses data from the graph to support the student’s claim?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 13 of 27

The mold Neurospora crassa makes the nutrient arginine through a chain of chemical steps that also produces two related substances, ornithine and citrulline. In 1944 geneticists Adrian Srb and Norman Horowitz studied mutant strains that could not grow without added arginine, each blocked at a single step in the chain. Arginine is made at the last step, and a strain grows when given a substance if, and only if, that substance is made at the strain’s blocked step or a later one. The researchers concluded that the mold makes ornithine before citrulline, citing the finding that ______

Growth of Mutant Neurospora Strains Given Different Substances

Strain group	Given ornithine	Given citrulline	Given arginine
Group 1	grew	grew	grew
Group 2	did not grow	grew	grew
Group 3	did not grow	did not grow	grew

Which choice most effectively uses data from the table to complete the text?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 14 of 27

In 1943 Salvador Luria and Max Delbrück asked whether bacteria that survive attack by a virus become resistant in response to the attack or already carry resistance-giving mutations that arose at random beforehand. They grew many separate cultures, each started from a few cells and grown to the same size under identical conditions, exposed each to the same dose of the virus, and compared the numbers of resistant bacteria in these cultures with the numbers in several samples drawn from one large culture. The samples varied little, but most separate cultures contained few or no resistant bacteria and a few contained hundreds. This result suggests that ______

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 15 of 27

In the 1780s Luigi Galvani found that the leg muscles of a dead frog twitched when a nerve and a muscle were connected by an arc made of two different metals, such as copper and iron. Galvani concluded that animal tissue produces its own electricity, which the metal arc merely released. Alessandro Volta noticed that the twitching was strongest when the two metals were most unlike and weak when they were alike. In 1800 he built a stack of alternating zinc and copper disks separated by brine-soaked cloth that produced a steady electric current with no animal tissue at all. Volta’s findings suggest that ______

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 16 of 27

Seedlings of canary grass bend toward light coming from one side, and the bending occurs in a region well below the tip. In experiments reported in 1880, Charles Darwin and his son Francis covered the tips of some seedlings with small opaque caps; these seedlings did not bend. Seedlings whose tips were covered instead with transparent glass tubes bent normally, as did seedlings whose tips were left exposed while the lower region, where the bending occurs, was shielded from light. Together, these results suggest that ______

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 17 of 27

Running water, wind, and the muscles of people and ______ were the chief sources of mechanical power in Europe until steam engines spread through mines and factories in the eighteenth century.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 18 of 27

In 1947 Thor Heyerdahl and five crewmates sailed the raft Kon-Tiki for 101 days across the Pacific Ocean before running aground on a reef in the Tuamotu ______ had built the raft in Peru from nine balsa logs lashed together with hemp rope.)

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 19 of 27

Twenty-six miles and 385 yards ______ the official length of the marathon since 1921, when international officials adopted the distance that had been run at the 1908 Olympic Games in London.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 20 of 27

______ most, of Shakespeare’s plays borrow their plots from earlier works, such as Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles and Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives, which Shakespeare reshaped freely.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 21 of 27

The Lindisfarne Gospels, a richly decorated manuscript of the four Gospels, is thought ______ written and illuminated around 715 by a single artist, Eadfrith, who was then bishop of the island monastery of Lindisfarne.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 22 of 27

In Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, the young scientist Victor Frankenstein assembles a creature from parts of corpses and brings it to life, but horrified by what he has made, he ______ it on the very night it first opens its eyes.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 23 of 27

Critics of the Crystal Palace, the iron-and-glass hall built in London for the Great Exhibition of 1851, complained that it could hardly be called architecture. ______ the building had been assembled in a few months from thousands of identical factory-made parts, and its designer, Joseph Paxton, was a gardener who had built greenhouses rather than a trained architect. But its methods would shape the architecture of railway stations and exhibition halls for decades.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 24 of 27

Earth’s magnetic field extends far into space, where it deflects most of the charged particles streaming outward from the Sun in the solar wind. ______ those particles would strike the upper atmosphere directly and, over hundreds of millions of years, could strip away much of it—as appears to have happened on Mars, which lost its global magnetic field billions of years ago.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 25 of 27

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

Jacob Lawrence completed The Migration Series, sixty small paintings, in 1941.
The panels depict the movement of African Americans from the rural South to northern cities in the early twentieth century.
Each panel is accompanied by a caption that Lawrence wrote.
In 1942 the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, agreed to buy the series together.
The Museum of Modern Art took the even-numbered panels, and the Phillips Collection took the odd-numbered panels.
The two museums have occasionally reunited the panels for joint exhibitions.

The student wants to explain how the series came to be divided and how the division was made. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 26 of 27

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

The Challenger Deep, in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, is the deepest known point in Earth’s oceans.
In 1960 Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh reached the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the bathyscaphe Trieste.
Piccard and Walsh spent about twenty minutes on the bottom and took no photographs, because silt stirred up by their landing clouded the water.
No one else reached the bottom of the Challenger Deep until 2012.
In 2012 filmmaker James Cameron made the descent alone in a vessel called Deepsea Challenger.
Cameron spent about three hours on the bottom, collecting samples and recording video.

The student wants to contrast what the two expeditions were able to record while on the bottom of the Challenger Deep. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

Reading and Writing · Module 2 · Question 27 of 27

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

In the 1970s astronomer Vera Rubin measured how fast stars and gas orbit the centers of spiral galaxies.
In the solar system, planets farther from the Sun orbit more slowly than planets closer to it, because most of the system’s mass is concentrated in the Sun.
Because most of a spiral galaxy’s visible mass is concentrated near its center, astronomers expected stars far from the center to orbit more slowly than stars closer in.
Rubin found instead that stars far from the center orbit about as fast as stars closer in.
Her results suggested that galaxies contain large amounts of unseen mass, now called dark matter, extending far beyond their visible edges.

The student wants to explain why Rubin’s finding was surprising. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

Math · Module 1 · Question 1 of 22

The table shows the predicted length $L$ of a coiled ribbon after $n$ identical turns are uncoiled. The relationship is linear. What is the predicted coiled length after 22 turns are uncoiled?

Uncoiled turns and remaining coiled length
Turns uncoiled n	Coiled length L (cm)
4	103
10	85

Math · Module 1 · Question 2 of 22

The figure shows a trapezoid whose parallel sides measure $10$ and $6$ and whose height is $4$ . What is the area of the trapezoid?

Math · Module 1 · Question 3 of 22

The graph shows the mass of grain, in kilograms, remaining in a hopper $t$ minutes after discharge begins. According to the graph, after how many minutes does the hopper contain $105$ kilograms of grain?

Math · Module 1 · Question 4 of 22

A stamp-foil service bills a fixed preparation charge plus a constant amount per centimeter of foil. An 80-centimeter order is billed at 94 dollars before any reimbursement. A 140-centimeter order is billed at 127 dollars after a 9-dollar reimbursement. What is the preparation charge, in dollars?

Math · Module 1 · Question 5 of 22

To estimate the mean daily water use of the $4{,}000$ metered households in an irrigation district, an analyst selected a random sample of $100$ households and recorded each household’s use for one day. The sample mean was $148$ gallons, with an associated margin of error of $12$ gallons at $95\%$ confidence. Which change to the study would most likely have produced a smaller margin of error?

Math · Module 1 · Question 6 of 22

Which value is closest to the positive zero of $r(x)=0.7x^2-6.3x-18.4$ ?

Math · Module 1 · Question 7 of 22

Positive numbers $m$ and $n$ satisfy $\dfrac{3}{m}+\dfrac{5}{n}=19$ and $\dfrac{6}{m}-\dfrac{2}{n}=14$ . What is the value of $mn$ ?

Math · Module 1 · Question 8 of 22

The dot plots show the number of tubers harvested from each plant in a trial plot of seed variety R and in a trial plot of seed variety S. Which statement about the two varieties do the dot plots support?

Math · Module 1 · Question 9 of 22

The function $f$ is defined by $f(x) = x^2 - 6x + 4$ . The graph of $y = f(x)$ in the $xy$ -plane is reflected across the $y$ -axis. Which equation defines the reflected graph?

Math · Module 1 · Question 10 of 22

The number $x$ satisfies $3<2x-5<11$ . How many different integer values can the expression $3x+1$ have?

Math · Module 1 · Question 11 of 22

A deck sealant covers $40$ square yards per gallon and is sold only in $3$ -gallon pails. A rectangular deck measures $60$ feet by $36$ feet, and it will receive two coats of sealant. What is the least number of pails needed? ( $1$ yard $=3$ feet)

Math · Module 1 · Question 12 of 22

In the given system of equations, $a$ and $b$ are constants.

$ax+by=7$

$bx+ay=5$

The solution to this system is $(2,1)$ . What is the solution to the following system?

$ax+by=5$

$bx+ay=7$

Math · Module 1 · Question 13 of 22

In the xy-plane, line $\ell$ passes through the point $(3, 5)$ and is perpendicular to the line $3x - 4y = 8$ . What is the y-coordinate of the y-intercept of line $\ell$ ?

Math · Module 1 · Question 14 of 22

The function $p$ is defined by $p(x)=x^3-ax^2-4x+4a$ , where $a$ is a constant greater than $2$ . The difference between the greatest zero of $p$ and the least zero of $p$ is $7$ . What is the value of $a$ ?

Your answer

Enter an integer, decimal, or fraction. Up to 5 characters, or 6 including a leading minus. No units or mixed numbers.

Math · Module 1 · Question 15 of 22

A linear function $f$ satisfies $f(2x+1)+f(3x-2)=20x+17$ for all values of $x$ . What is the value of $f(0)$ ?

Math · Module 1 · Question 16 of 22

In the $xy$ -plane, the graph of $y=kx-1$ , where $k$ is a constant, does not intersect the graph of $y=x^2+3$ . How many integer values of $k$ are possible?

Your answer

Enter an integer, decimal, or fraction. Up to 5 characters, or 6 including a leading minus. No units or mixed numbers.

Math · Module 1 · Question 17 of 22

For positive constants $a$ and $b$ , the function $f$ is defined by $f(x)=a\cdot b^x$ . If $f(2)\cdot f(8)=400$ , what is the value of $f(5)$ ?

Your answer

Enter an integer, decimal, or fraction. Up to 5 characters, or 6 including a leading minus. No units or mixed numbers.

Math · Module 1 · Question 18 of 22

At a car dealership, $40\%$ of the vehicles in stock are trucks, and the rest are cars. Of the trucks in stock, $30\%$ are electric, and half of the electric vehicles in stock are trucks. If a car in stock is selected at random, what is the probability that the selected car is electric?

Math · Module 1 · Question 19 of 22

In the figure, triangle $ABC$ has $AB=AC$ . Point $D$ lies on side $\overline{AC}$ so that $AD=BD=BC$ . What is the measure, in degrees, of $\angle BAC$ ?

Math · Module 1 · Question 20 of 22

For constants $c$ and $d$ with $c>0$ , the system of equations $y=\dfrac{15-cx}{6}$ and $2x+(c+1)y=d$ has infinitely many solutions. What is the value of $d$ ?

Math · Module 1 · Question 21 of 22

What is the sum of all real solutions to the equation $\sqrt{2x+7}-\sqrt{x+3}=1$ ?

Your answer

Enter an integer, decimal, or fraction. Up to 5 characters, or 6 including a leading minus. No units or mixed numbers.

Math · Module 1 · Question 22 of 22

In the $xy$ -plane, a rectangle has two of its vertices on the $x$ -axis and its other two vertices on the graph of $y=12-x^2$ . The rectangle lies above the $x$ -axis. What is the greatest possible perimeter of such a rectangle?

Your answer

Enter an integer, decimal, or fraction. Up to 5 characters, or 6 including a leading minus. No units or mixed numbers.

Math · Module 2 · Question 1 of 22

The equation $P=1{,}250-45w$ models the amount of money $P$ , in dollars, remaining on a transit card $w$ weeks after the card was loaded. Which of the following is the best interpretation of the value of $\dfrac{1{,}250}{45}$ in this context?

Math · Module 2 · Question 2 of 22

For $x\ne0$ and $x\ne3$ , which of the following is equivalent to $\dfrac{\frac{1}{x}-\frac{1}{3}}{x-3}$ ?

Math · Module 2 · Question 3 of 22

A chemist has $240$ milliliters of a solution that is $15\%$ salt by volume. How many milliliters of pure water must be added so that the resulting mixture is $9\%$ salt by volume?

Math · Module 2 · Question 4 of 22

A thermostat keeps the temperature $T$ of a room, in degrees Fahrenheit, within $4\%$ of its set temperature $S$ , so that $\lvert T-S\rvert\le0.04S$ . When the thermostat is set to temperature $S$ , the greatest temperature it allows is $72.8$ degrees Fahrenheit. What is the value of $S$ ?

Math · Module 2 · Question 5 of 22

For a positive constant $a$ , the equation $(x-a)^3=x^3+bx^2+27x+c$ is true for all values of $x$ , where $b$ and $c$ are constants. What is the value of $b+c$ ?

Your answer

Enter an integer, decimal, or fraction. Up to 5 characters, or 6 including a leading minus. No units or mixed numbers.

Math · Module 2 · Question 6 of 22

Which interval is the solution set of $-3\le\dfrac{5-2x}{4}<2$ ?

Math · Module 2 · Question 7 of 22

For how many values of the constant $k$ do the points $(1,3)$ , $(4,9)$ , and $(k+2,2k+1)$ lie on the same line in the $xy$ -plane?

Math · Module 2 · Question 8 of 22

A file contains 30 reflectance readings in group A and 50 in group B. The mean of all 80 original readings is 15. Each group A reading $x$ is replaced by $2x+3$ , while group B is unchanged. The mean of the 80 updated readings is 21. What was the original mean of group A?

Your answer

Enter an integer, decimal, or fraction. Up to 5 characters, or 6 including a leading minus. No units or mixed numbers.

Math · Module 2 · Question 9 of 22

Triangle $ABC$ has $AB=AC=10$ and $BC=12$ . A circle passes through all three vertices of the triangle. What is the radius of the circle?

Math · Module 2 · Question 10 of 22

The graph of the quadratic function $f$ is shown. The function $g$ is defined by $g(x)=f\left((x-2)^2\right)$ . What is the sum of all real zeros of $g$ ?

Math · Module 2 · Question 11 of 22

The shaded region in the graph, including its solid boundary line but not its dashed boundary line, represents all solutions $(x,y)$ of a system of two linear inequalities. The point $(a,2a-1)$ lies in the shaded region. Which of the following describes all possible values of $a$ ?

Math · Module 2 · Question 12 of 22

The intensity of light from a small lamp is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the lamp. When a light sensor is moved $2$ meters farther from the lamp, the intensity it measures decreases by $36\%$ . From the sensor’s original position, how many meters toward the lamp must it be moved so that the intensity it measures is $56.25\%$ greater than the intensity at its original position?

Math · Module 2 · Question 13 of 22

In the figure, two circles each have a radius of $4$ , and each circle passes through the center of the other. The shaded region lies inside both circles. What is its area?

Math · Module 2 · Question 14 of 22

For each value of the constant $k$ , the graph of $(k+2)x+(k-1)y=3k+3$ in the $xy$ -plane is a line. All of these lines pass through the same point $P$ . What is the $y$ -coordinate of $P$ ?

Math · Module 2 · Question 15 of 22

A data set consists of $26$ different numbers, and its mean is $40$ . When the numbers are listed in increasing order, the $13$ th number is $36$ and the $14$ th number is $40$ . Each number in the data set that is greater than the median is increased by $5$ , and the other numbers are not changed. What is the mean of the new data set minus the median of the new data set?

Your answer

Enter an integer, decimal, or fraction. Up to 5 characters, or 6 including a leading minus. No units or mixed numbers.

Math · Module 2 · Question 16 of 22

In the $xy$ -plane, the graph of $x^2+y^2-6y=160$ is a circle, and the graph of $y=x^2+k$ , where $k$ is a constant, is a parabola. The circle and the parabola intersect at exactly three points. What is the area of the triangle whose vertices are these three points?

Your answer

Enter an integer, decimal, or fraction. Up to 5 characters, or 6 including a leading minus. No units or mixed numbers.

Math · Module 2 · Question 17 of 22

In the figure, triangle $ABC$ has a right angle at $C$ , and $\overline{CD}$ is perpendicular to $\overline{AB}$ . If $AB=13$ and $\tan(\angle BCD)=\dfrac{3}{2}$ , what is the length of $\overline{AD}$ ?

Math · Module 2 · Question 18 of 22

The function $f$ is defined by $f(x)=ax^2+bx+c$ , where $a$ , $b$ , and $c$ are constants. In the $xy$ -plane, the parabola $y=f(x)$ has its vertex in quadrant II and crosses the $y$ -axis below the $x$ -axis. Which of the following must be true?

Math · Module 2 · Question 19 of 22

In the figure, right triangle $ABC$ has hypotenuse $\overline{AB}$ , $AC=12$ , and $BC=16$ . Square $DEFG$ has vertices $D$ and $E$ on $\overline{AB}$ , vertex $F$ on $\overline{BC}$ , and vertex $G$ on $\overline{AC}$ . What is the side length of the square?

Math · Module 2 · Question 20 of 22

The polynomial function $p$ is defined by $p(x)=x^3-5x^2+kx+12$ , where $k$ is a constant. When $p(x)$ is divided by $x-2$ , the remainder is equal to $p(0)$ . What is the sum of the real zeros of $p$ ?

Your answer

Enter an integer, decimal, or fraction. Up to 5 characters, or 6 including a leading minus. No units or mixed numbers.

Math · Module 2 · Question 21 of 22

A right circular cone has a base radius of $6$ centimeters and a height of $12$ centimeters. A right circular cylinder is inside the cone: the bottom base of the cylinder lies on the base of the cone, and the circle at the top of the cylinder lies on the lateral surface of the cone. The lateral surface area of the cylinder is $32\pi$ square centimeters, and the height of the cylinder is greater than its diameter. What is the total surface area of the cylinder, including both bases, in square centimeters?

Math · Module 2 · Question 22 of 22

The quadratic function $f$ has a minimum value of $-2$ , which occurs at $x=k$ . In the $xy$ -plane, the points $(0,6)$ and $(2,0)$ lie on the graph of $y=f(x)$ . What is the greatest possible value of $k$ ?

Your answer

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