Easy level questions
1. Genetic studies have led researchers to suggest that turtles are most closely related to the group that includes
modern crocodiles. But studies of fossils have suggested instead that turtles are most closely related to other groups,
such as the one that contains modern snakes. However, many of the fossil studies have relied on incomplete data sets.
For a 2022 investigation, biologist Tiago R. Simões and colleagues examined more than 1,000 reptile fossils collected
worldwide. From this large data set, they found clear agreement with the results of the genetic studies.
Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence?
A. It offers an overview of the tools scientists use to examine fossils.
B. It describes a limitation of some studies about the origin of turtles.
C. It summarizes previous research on the evolution of crocodiles.
D. It criticizes a widely held belief about genetic studies of reptiles.
2. The following text is adapted from Jean Webster’s 1912 novel Daddy-Long-Legs. The narrator is a young college
student writing letters detailing her weekly experiences.
[The college is] organizing the Freshman basket-ball team and there’s just a chance that I shall make it. I’m little of
course, but terribly quick and wiry and tough. While the others are hopping about in the air, I can dodge under their
feet and grab the ball.
Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?
A. To compare basketball with other sports
B. To provide details of how to play basketball
C. To state how players will be chosen for the basketball team
D. To explain why the narrator thinks she might make the basketball team
3. Hiroshi Senju is known worldwide for his paintings of waterfalls. These paintings are large and tend not to show the
entire waterfall. Instead, Senju focuses on just the point where the falling water reaches the pool below, keeping the
top of the waterfall out of view. While Senju’s paintings are rooted in art movements originating in the United States,
the artist uses traditional Japanese techniques and materials that make his work instantly recognizable.
Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?
A. It introduces an artist and then explains some common characteristics of well-known paintings by that artist.
B. It explains a specific painting technique and then provides examples of artists who use the technique.
C. It describes a famous painting and then compares it to a lesser-known painting from the same time period. D. It
gives an opinion on an artist and then suggests multiple reasons why the artist’s work has been largely overlooked.
4. In 1801, a Blackfoot chief named Ac Ko Mok Ki drew a finely detailed map of the Upper Missouri region. This
work demonstrates a vast amount of topographic knowledge, as the map features specific names of mountains and
rivers, as well as the first-known sketch of the drainage network of the Missouri River. The map is especially notable
because Ac Ko Mok Ki also included details about the numerous tribes that lived in the area.
Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?
A. It emphasizes Ac Ko Mok Ki’s desire to represent other tribes on the map.
B. It explains how Ac Ko Mok Ki developed an interest in mapmaking.
C. It identifies some reasons why the map is impressive.
D. It details how the map was used for hunting and trading purposes.
5. In many agricultural environments, the banks of streams are kept forested to protect water quality, but it’s been
unclear what effects these forests may have on stream biodiversity. To investigate the issue, biologist Xingli Giam and
colleagues studied an Indonesian oil palm plantation, comparing the species richness of forested streams with that of
nonforested streams. Giam and colleagues found that species richness was significantly higher in forested streams, a
finding the researchers attribute to the role leaf litter plays in sheltering fish from predators and providing food
resources.
Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?
A. It discusses research intended to settle a debate about how agricultural yields can be increased without
negative effects on water quality.
B. It explains the differences between stream-protection strategies used in oil palm plantations and stream-
protection strategies used in other kinds of agricultural environments.
C. It describes findings that challenge a previously held view about how fish that inhabit streams in agricultural
environments attempt to avoid predators.
D. It presents a study that addresses an unresolved question about the presence of forests along streams in
agricultural environments.
Medium level questions
1. The following text is adapted from Louise Erdrich’s 2020 novel The Night Watchman. Louis Pipestone is collecting
signatures for a petition from fellow members of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa on the tribe’s reservation in
North Dakota.
Louis Pipestone tended the petition like a garden. He kept it with him at all times. In town, his eyes sharpened when
he noticed a tribal member who hadn’t yet signed. Wherever they were—at the gas pump, mercantile [general store],
at Henry’s [Café], on the road, or outside the clinic and hospital—Louis cornered them. If they were waiting for a
baby to be born, he’d have them sign. If they were laughing, if they were arguing. If they were taking a child home
from school, they signed. ©2020 by Louise Erdrich
Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?
A. To suggest that some tribal members refuse to sign the petition because they dislike Louis Pipestone
B. To show that attitudes toward the petition within the tribal community change over time
C. To demonstrate that most tribal members are enthusiastic about signing the petition
D. To portray Louis Pipestone’s strong commitment to collecting signatures for the petition
2. The following text is from Walt Whitman’s 1860 poem “Calamus 24.”
I HEAR it is charged against me that I seek to destroy institutions; But really I am neither for nor against institutions
(What indeed have I in common with them?—Or what with the destruction of them?),Only I will establish in the
Manna Hatta [Manhattan] and in every city of These States, inland and sea board, And in the fields and woods, and
above every keel [ship] little or large, that dents the water, Without edifices, or rules, or trustees, or any argument, The
institution of the dear love of comrades.
Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?
A. The speaker questions an increasingly prevalent attitude, then summarizes his worldview.
B. The speaker regrets his isolation from others, then predicts a profound change in society.
C. The speaker concedes his personal shortcomings, then boasts of his many achievements.
D. The speaker addresses a criticism leveled against him, then announces a grand ambition of his.
3. The following text is adapted from Susan Glaspell’s 1912 short story “‘Out There.’” An elderly shop owner is
looking at a picture that he recently acquired and hopes to sell.
It did seem that the picture failed to fit in with the rest of the shop. A persuasive young fellow who claimed he was
closing out his stock let the old man have it for what he called a song. It was only a little out-of-the-way store which
subsisted chiefly on the framing of pictures. The old man looked around at his views of the city, his pictures of cats
and dogs, his flaming bits of landscape. “Don’t belong in here,” he fumed. And yet the old man was secretly proud of
his acquisition. There was a hidden dignity in his scowling as he shuffled about pondering the least ridiculous place
for the picture.
Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?
A. To reveal the shop owner’s conflicted feelings about the new picture
B. To convey the shop owner’s resentment of the person he got the new picture from
C. To describe the items that the shop owner most highly prizes
D. To explain differences between the new picture and other pictures in the shop
4. The following text is from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables. Anne, an eleven-year-old
girl, has come to live on a farm with a woman named Marilla in Nova Scotia, Canada. Anne revealed in the world of
color about her.
“Oh, Marilla,” she exclaimed one Saturday morning, coming dancing in with her arms full of gorgeous boughs, “I’m
so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to
November, wouldn’t it? Look at these maple branches. Don’t they give you a thrill—several thrills? I’m going to
decorate my room with them.”
“Messy things,” said Marilla, whose aesthetic sense was not noticeably developed. “You clutter up your room entirely
too much with out-of-doors stuff, Anne. Bedrooms were made to sleep in.”
Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?
A. To demonstrate that Anne has a newly developed appreciation of nature
B. To describe an argument that Anne and Marilla often have
C. To emphasize Marilla’s disapproval of how Anne has decorated her room D. To show that Anne and Marilla have
very different personalities
5. Horizontal gene transfer occurs when an organism of one species acquires genetic material from an organism of
another species through nonreproductive means. The genetic material can then be transferred “vertically” in the
second species— that is, through reproductive inheritance. Scientist Atma Ivancevic and her team have hypothesized
infection by invertebrate parasites as a mechanism of horizontal gene transfer between vertebrate species: while
feeding, a parasite could acquire a gene from one host, then relocate to a host from a different vertebrate species and
transfer the gene to it in turn.
Which choice best describes the function of the underlined portion in the text as a whole?
A. It explains why parasites are less susceptible to horizontal gene transfer than their hosts are.
B. It clarifies why some genes are more likely to be transferred horizontally than others are.
C. It contrasts how horizontal gene transfer occurs among vertebrates with how it occurs among invertebrates.
D. It describes a means by which horizontal gene transfer might occur among vertebrates.
Hard level questions
1. The mimosa tree evolved in East Asia, where the beetle Bruchidius terrenus preys on its seeds. In 1785, mimosa
trees were introduced to North America, far from any B. terrenus. But evolutionary links between predators and their
prey can persist across centuries and continents. Around 2001, B. terrenus was introduced in southeastern North
America near where botanist Shu-Mei Chang and colleagues had been monitoring mimosa trees. Within a year, 93
percent of the trees had been attacked by the beetles.
Which choice best describes the function of the third sentence in the overall structure of the text?
A. It states the hypothesis that Chang and colleagues had set out to investigate using mimosa trees and B. terrenus.
B. It presents a generalization that is exemplified by the discussion of the mimosa trees and B. terrenus.
C. It provides context that clarifies why the species mentioned spread to new locations.
D. It offers an alternative explanation for the findings of Chang and colleagues.
2. The 1967 release of Harold Cruse’s book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual isolated him from almost all other
scholars and activists of the American Civil Rights Movement—though many of those thinkers disagreed with each
other, he nonetheless found ways to disagree with them all. He thought that activists who believed that Black people
such as
himself should culturally assimilate were naïve. But he also sharply criticized Black nationalists such as Marcus
Garvey who wanted to establish independent, self-contained Black economies and societies, even though Cruse
himself identified as a Black nationalist.
Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole? A.
It describes a direction that Cruse felt the Civil Rights Movement ought to take.
B. It indicates that Cruse’s reputation as a persistent antagonist of other scholars is undeserved.
C. It describes a controversy that Cruse’s work caused within the Black nationalist movement.
D. It helps explain Cruse’s position with respect to the community of civil rights thinkers.
3. Raymond Antrobus, an accomplished poet and writer of prose, recently released his debut spoken word poetry
album, The First Time I Wore Hearing Aids, in collaboration with producer Ian Brennan. The album contains both
autobiographical and reflective pieces combining Antrobus’s spoken words with Brennan’s fragmented audio
elements and pieces of music to convey how people who are deaf may experience sound, both its presence and
absence. Some critics suggest that the album questions the function of sound in the world, highlighting that the
experience of sound is multifaceted.
Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?
A. It introduces a collaborative spoken word poetry project, details the approach taken to produce the work, and
then provides an example of critique the album received upon release.
B. It mentions a collection of spoken word poems, distinguishes one poem as being an exemplar on the album,
and then offers a summary of the subject matter of the whole collection.
C. It summarizes the efforts to produce a collection of spoken word poems, presents biographies of two people
who worked on the album, and speculates about the meaning behind the poetry.
D. It connects two artists to the same spoken word poetry project, explains the extent of their collaboration on
each poem, and then provides an overview of the technique used to produce the work.
4. Scholarly accounts of the Chicano movement—a movement that advocated for the social, political, and cultural
empowerment of Mexican Americans and reached its zenith in the 1960s and 1970s—tend to focus on the most
militant, outspoken figures in the movement, making it seem uniformly radical. Geographer Juan Herrera has shown,
however,
that if we shift our focus toward the way the movement manifested in comparatively low-profile neighbourhood
institutions and projects, we see participants espousing an array of political orientations and approaches to community
activism.
Which choice best describes the function of the underlined portion in the text as a whole?
A. It presents a trend in scholarship on the Chicano movement that the text claims has been reevaluated by
researchers in light of Herrera’s work on the movement’s participants.
B. It identifies an aspect of the Chicano movement that the text implies was overemphasized by scholars due to
their own political orientations.
C. It describes a common approach to studying the Chicano movement that, according to the text, obscures the
ideological diversity of the movement’s participants.
D. It summarizes the conventional method for analysing the Chicano movement, which the text suggests creates
a misleading impression of the effectiveness of neighbourhood institutions and projects.
5. Space scientists Anna-Lisa Paul, Stephen M. Elardo, and Robert Ferl planted seeds of Arabidopsis thaliana in
samples of lunar regolith—the surface material of the Moon—and, serving as a control group, in terrestrial soil. They
found that while all the seeds germinated, the roots of the regolith-grown plants were stunted compared with those in
the control group. Moreover, unlike the plants in the control group, the regolith-grown plants exhibited red
pigmentation, reduced leaf size, and inhibited growth rates—indicators of stress that were corroborated by
postharvest molecular analysis.
Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?
A. It describes an experiment that addressed an unresolved question about the extent to which lunar regolith resembles
terrestrial soils.
B. It compares two distinct methods of assessing indicators of stress in plants grown in a simulated lunar environment.
C. It presents evidence in support of the hypothesis that seed germination in lunar habitats is an unattainable goal.
D. It discusses the findings of a study that evaluated the effects of exposing a plant species to lunar soil conditions.
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