All questions of Practice Questions for Class 10 Exam

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from George Eliot, Silas Marner. Originally published in 1861. Silas was a weaver and a
notorious miser, but then the gold he had hoarded was stolen. Shortly after, Silas adopted a young child, Eppie, the
daughter of an impoverished woman who had died suddenly.
Unlike the gold which needed nothing, and must
be worshipped in close-locked solitude—which was
hidden away from the daylight, was deaf to the song
of birds, and started to no human tones—Eppie was a
5 creature of endless claims and ever-growing desires,
seeking and loving sunshine, and living sounds, and
living movements; making trial of everything, with
trust in new joy, and stirring the human kindness in
all eyes that looked on her. The gold had kept his
10 thoughts in an ever-repeated circle, leading to
nothing beyond itself; but Eppie was an object
compacted of changes and hopes that forced his
thoughts onward, and carried them far away from
their old eager pacing towards the same blank
15 limit—carried them away to the new things that
would come with the coming years, when Eppie
would have learned to understand how her father
Silas cared for her; and made him look for images of
that time in the ties and charities that bound together
20 the families of his neighbors. The gold had asked that
he should sit weaving longer and longer, deafened
and blinded more and more to all things except the
monotony of his loom and the repetition of his web;
but Eppie called him away from his weaving, and
25 made him think all its pauses a holiday, reawakening
his senses with her fresh life, even to the old
winter-flies that came crawling forth in the early
spring sunshine, and warming him into joy because
she had joy.
30 And when the sunshine grew strong and lasting,
so that the buttercups were thick in the meadows,
Silas might be seen in the sunny mid-day, or in the
late afternoon when the shadows were lengthening
under the hedgerows, strolling out with uncovered
35 head to carry Eppie beyond the Stone-pits to where
the flowers grew, till they reached some favorite bank
where he could sit down, while Eppie toddled to
pluck the flowers, and make remarks to the winged
things that murmured happily above the bright
40 petals, calling “Dad-dad’s” attention continually by
bringing him the flowers. Then she would turn her
ear to some sudden bird-note, and Silas learned to
please her by making signs of hushed stillness, that
they might listen for the note to come again: so that
45 when it came, she set up her small back and laughed
with gurgling triumph. Sitting on the banks in this
way, Silas began to look for the once familiar herbs
again; and as the leaves, with their unchanged outline
and markings, lay on his palm, there was a sense of
50 crowding remembrances from which he turned away
timidly, taking refuge in Eppie’s little world, that lay
lightly on his enfeebled spirit.
As the child’s mind was growing into knowledge,
his mind was growing into memory: as her life
55 unfolded, his soul, long stupefied in a cold narrow
prison, was unfolding too, and trembling gradually
into full consciousness.
It was an influence which must gather force with
every new year: the tones that stirred Silas’ heart
60 grew articulate, and called for more distinct answers;
shapes and sounds grew clearer for Eppie’s eyes and
ears, and there was more that “Dad-dad” was
imperatively required to notice and account for.
Also, by the time Eppie was three years old, she
65 developed a fine capacity for mischief, and for
devising ingenious ways of being troublesome, which
found much exercise, not only for Silas’ patience, but
for his watchfulness and penetration. Sorely was poor
Silas puzzled on such occasions by the incompatible
70 demands of love.

Q. Which statement best describes a technique the narrator uses to represent Silas’s character before he adopted Eppie?

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Mary Helen Stefaniak, The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia: A Novel. ©2010 by Mary Helen Stefaniak.
Miss Grace Spivey arrived in Threestep, Georgia,
in August 1938. She stepped off the train wearing a
pair of thick-soled boots suitable for hiking, a navy
Line blue dress, and a little white tam that rode the waves
5 of her red hair at a gravity-defying angle. August was
a hellish month to step off the train in Georgia,
although it was nothing, she said, compared to the
119 degrees that greeted her when she arrived one
time in Timbuktu, which, she assured us, was a real
10 place in Africa. I believe her remark irritated some of
the people gathered to welcome her on the burned
grass alongside the tracks. When folks are sweating
through their shorts, they don’t like to hear that this
is nothing compared to someplace else. Irritated or
15 not, the majority of those present were inclined to see
the arrival of the new schoolteacher in a positive
light. Hard times were still upon us in 1938, but, like
my momma said, “We weren’t no poorer than we’d
ever been,” and the citizens of Threestep were in the
20 mood for a little excitement.
Miss Spivey looked like just the right person to
give it to them. She was, by almost anyone’s
standards, a woman of the world. She’d gone to
boarding schools since she was six years old; she’d
25 studied French in Paris and drama in London; and
during what she called a “fruitful intermission” in her
formal education, she had traveled extensively in the
Near East and Africa with a friend of her
grandmother’s, one Janet Miller, who was a medical
30 doctor from Nashville, Tennessee. After her travels
with Dr. Miller, Miss Spivey continued her education
by attending Barnard College in New York City. She
told us all that at school the first day. When my little
brother Ralphord asked what did she study at
35 Barnyard College, Miss Spivey explained that
Barnard, which she wrote on the blackboard, was the
sister school of Columbia University, of which, she
expected, we all had heard.
It was there, she told us, in the midst of trying to
40 find her true mission in life, that she wandered one
afternoon into a lecture by the famous John Dewey,
who was talking about his famous book, Democracy
and Education. Professor Dewey was in his seventies
by then, Miss Spivey said, but he still liked to chat
45 with students after a lecture—especially female
students, she added—sometimes over coffee, and see
in their eyes the fire his words could kindle. It was
after this lecture and subsequent coffee that Miss
Spivey had marched to the Teacher’s College and
50 signed up, all aflame. Two years later, she told a
cheery blue-suited woman from the WPA1 that she
wanted to bring democracy and education to the
poorest, darkest, most remote and forgotten corner
of America.
55 They sent her to Threestep, Georgia.
Miss Spivey paused there for questions, avoiding
my brother Ralphord’s eye.
What we really wanted to know about—all
twenty-six of us across seven grade levels in the one
60 room—was the pearly white button hanging on a
string in front of the blackboard behind the teacher’s
desk up front. That button on a string was something
new. When Mavis Davis (the only bona fide seventh
grader, at age thirteen) asked what it was for, Miss
65 Spivey gave the string a tug, and to our astonishment,
the whole world—or at least a wrinkled map of
it—unfolded before our eyes. Her predecessor, Miss
Chandler, had never once made use of that map,
which was older than our fathers, and until that
70 moment, not a one of us knew it was there.
Miss Spivey showed us on the map how she and
Dr. Janet Miller had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean
and past the Rock of Gibraltar into the
Mediterranean Sea. Using the end of a ruler, she
75 gently tapped such places as Morocco and Tunis and
Algiers to mark their route along the top of Africa.
They spent twenty hours on the train to Baghdad, she
said, swathed in veils against the sand that crept in
every crack and crevice.
80 “And can you guess what we saw from the train?”
Miss Spivey asked. We could not. “Camels!” she said.
“We saw a whole caravan of camels.” She looked
around the room, waiting for us to be amazed and
delighted at the thought.
85 We all hung there for a minute, thinking hard,
until Mavis Davis spoke up.
“She means like the three kings rode to
Bethlehem,” Mavis said, and she folded her hands
smugly on her seventh-grade desk in the back of the
90 room.
Miss Spivey made a mistake right then. Instead of
beaming upon Mavis the kind of congratulatory
smile that old Miss Chandler would have bestowed
on her for having enlightened the rest of us, Miss
95 Spivey simply said, “That’s right.”
¹The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a government
agency that hired people for public and cultural development
projects and services.

Q. It can reasonably be inferred from the passage that some of the people at the train station regard Miss Spivey’s comment about the Georgia heat with

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from MacDonald Harris, The Balloonist. ©2011 by The Estate of Donald Heiney. During the summer of 1897, the narrator of this story, afictional Swedish scientist, has set out for the North Pole in a hydrogen powered balloon.

My emotions are complicated and not
readily verifiable. I feel a vast yearning that is
simultaneously a pleasure and a pain. I am certain
of the consummation of this yearning, but I don’t
5 know yet what form it will take, since I do not
understand quite what it is that the yearning desires.
For the first time there is borne in upon me the full
truth of what I myself said to the doctor only an hour
ago: that my motives in this undertaking are not
10 entirely clear. For years, for a lifetime, the machinery
of my destiny has worked in secret to prepare for this
moment; its clockwork has moved exactly toward
this time and place and no other. Rising slowly from
the earth that bore me and gave me sustenance, I am
15 carried helplessly toward an uninhabited and hostile,
or at best indifferent, part of the earth, littered with
the bones of explorers and the wrecks of ships, frozen
supply caches, messages scrawled with chilled fingers
and hidden in cairns that no eye will ever see.
20 Nobody has succeeded in this thing, and many have
died. Yet in freely willing this enterprise, in choosing
this moment and no other when the south wind
will carry me exactly northward at a velocity of
eight knots, I have converted the machinery of my
25 fate into the servant of my will. All this I understand,
as I understand each detail of the technique by which
this is carried out. What I don’t understand is why I
am so intent on going to this particular place. Who
wants the North Pole! What good is it! Can you eat
30 it? Will it carry you from Gothenburg to Malmö like
a railway? The Danish ministers have declared from
their pulpits that participation in polar expeditions is
beneficial to the soul’s eternal well-being, or so I read
in a newspaper. It isn’t clear how this doctrine is to
35 be interpreted, except that the Pole is something
difficult or impossible to attain which must
nevertheless be sought for, because man is
condemned to seek out and know everything
whether or not the knowledge gives him pleasure. In
40 short, it is the same unthinking lust for knowledge
that drove our First Parents out of the garden.
And suppose you were to find it in spite of all, this
wonderful place that everybody is so anxious to stand
on! What would you find? Exactly nothing.
45 A point precisely identical to all the others in a
completely featureless wasteland stretching around it
for hundreds of miles. It is an abstraction, a
mathematical fiction. No one but a Swedish madman
could take the slightest interest in it. Here I am. The
50 wind is still from the south, bearing us steadily
northward at the speed of a trotting dog. Behind us,
perhaps forever, lie the Cities of Men with their
teacups and their brass bedsteads. I am going forth of
my own volition to join the ghosts of Bering and
55 poor Franklin, of frozen De Long and his men.
What I am on the brink of knowing, I now see, is not
an ephemeral mathematical spot but myself. The
doctor was right, even though I dislike him.
Fundamentally I am a dangerous madman, and what
60 I do is both a challenge to my egotism and a
surrender to it.

Q. As used in lines 1-2, “not readily verifiable” most nearly means

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Amy Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter. ©2001 by Amy Tan.
At last, Old Widow Lau was done haggling with
the driver and we stepped inside Father’s shop. It was
north-facing, quite dim inside, and perhaps this was
Line why Father did not see us at first. He was busy with a
5 customer, a man who was distinguished-looking, like
the scholars of two decades before. The two men
were bent over a glass case, discussing the different
qualities of inksticks. Big Uncle welcomed us and
invited us to be seated. From his formal tone, I knew
10 he did not recognize who we were. So I called his
name in a shy voice. And he squinted at me, then
laughed and announced our arrival to Little Uncle,
who apologized many times for not rushing over
sooner to greet us. They rushed us to be seated at one
15 of two tea tables for customers. Old Widow Lau
refused their invitation three times, exclaiming that
my father and uncles must be too busy for visitors.
She made weak efforts to leave. On the fourth
insistence, we finally sat. Then Little Uncle brought
20 us hot tea and sweet oranges, as well as bamboo
latticework fans with which to cool ourselves.
I tried to notice everything so I could later tell
GaoLing what I had seen, and tease out her envy. The
floors of the shop were of dark wood, polished and
25 clean, no dirty footprints, even though this was
during the dustiest part of the summer. And along
the walls were display cases made of wood and glass.
The glass was very shiny and not one pane was
broken. Within those glass cases were our silk-
30 wrapped boxes, all our hard work. They looked so
much nicer than they had in the ink-making studio
at Immortal Heart village.
I saw that Father had opened several of the boxes.
He set sticks and cakes and other shapes on a silk
35 cloth covering a glass case that served as a table on
which he and the customer leaned. First he pointed
to a stick with a top shaped like a fairy boat and said
with graceful importance, “Your writing will flow as
smoothly as a keel cutting through a glassy lake.”
40 He picked up a bird shape: “Your mind will soar into
the clouds of higher thought.” He waved toward a
row of ink cakes embellished with designs of peonies
and bamboo: “Your ledgers will blossom into
abundance while bamboo surrounds your quiet
45 mind.”
As he said this, Precious Auntie came back into
mind. I was remembering how she taught me that
everything, even ink, had a purpose and a meaning:
Good ink cannot be the quick kind, ready to pour out
50 of a bottle. You can never be an artist if your work
comes without effort. That is the problem of modern
ink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You
simply write what is swimming on the top of your
brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead
55 leaves, and mosquito spawn. But when you push an
inkstick along an inkstone, you take the first step to
cleansing your mind and your heart. You push and
you ask yourself, What are my intentions? What is in
my heart that matches my mind?
60 I remembered this, and yet that day in the ink
shop, I listened to what Father was saying, and his
words became far more important than anything
Precious Auntie had thought. “Look here,” Father
said to his customer, and I looked. He held up an
65 inkstick and rotated it in the light. “See? It’s the right
hue, purple-black, not brown or gray like the cheap
brands you might find down the street. And listen to
this.” And I heard a sound as clean and pure as a
small silver bell. “The high-pitched tone tells you that
70 the soot is very fine, as smooth as the sliding banks of
old rivers. And the scent—can you smell the balance
of strength and delicacy, the musical notes of the
ink’s perfume? Expensive, and everyone who sees
you using it will know that it was well worth the high
75 price.”
I was very proud to hear Father speak of our
family’s ink this way.

Q. As used in line 68, “clean” most nearly means

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Emily Anthes, Frankenstein's Cat. ©2013 by Emily Anthes.
When scientists first learned how to edit the
genomes of animals, they began to imagine all the
ways they could use this new power. Creating
brightly colored novelty pets was not a high priority.
5 Instead, most researchers envisioned far more
consequential applications, hoping to create
genetically engineered animals that saved human
lives. One enterprise is now delivering on this dream.
Welcome to the world of “pharming,” in which
10 simple genetic tweaks turn animals into living
pharmaceutical factories.
Many of the proteins that our cells crank out
naturally make for good medicine. Our bodies’ own
enzymes, hormones, clotting factors, and antibodies
15 are commonly used to treat cancer, diabetes,
autoimmune diseases, and more. The trouble is that
it’s difficult and expensive to make these compounds
on an industrial scale, and as a result, patients can
face shortages of the medicines they need. Dairy
20 animals, on the other hand, are expert protein
producers, their udders swollen with milk. So the
creation of the first transgenic animals—first mice,
then other species—in the 1980s gave scientists an
idea: What if they put the gene for a human antibody
25 or enzyme into a cow, goat, or sheep? If they put the
gene in just the right place, under the control of the
right molecular switch, maybe they could engineer
animals that produced healing human proteins in
their milk. Then doctors could collect medicine by
30 the bucketful.
Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, studies provided
proof of principle, as scientists created transgenic
mice, sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, and rabbits that did in
fact make therapeutic compounds in their milk.
35 At first, this work was merely gee-whiz, scientific
geekery, lab-bound thought experiments come true.
That all changed with ATryn, a drug produced by the
Massachusetts firm GTC Biotherapeutics. ATryn is
antithrombin, an anticoagulant that can be used to
40 prevent life-threatening blood clots. The compound,
made by our liver cells, plays a key role in keeping
our bodies clot-free. It acts as a molecular bouncer,
sidling up to clot-forming compounds and escorting
them out of the bloodstream. But as many as 1 in
45 2,000 Americans are born with a genetic mutation
that prevents them from making antithrombin.
These patients are prone to clots, especially in their
legs and lungs, and they are at elevated risk of
suffering from fatal complications during surgery
50 and childbirth. Supplemental antithrombin can
reduce this risk, and GTC decided to try to
manufacture the compound using genetically
engineered goats.
To create its special herd of goats, GTC used
55 microinjection, the same technique that produced
GloFish and AquAdvantage salmon. The company’s
scientists took the gene for human antithrombin and
injected it directly into fertilized goat eggs. Then they
implanted the eggs in the wombs of female goats.
60 When the kids were born, some of them proved to be
transgenic, the human gene nestled safely in their
cells. The researchers paired the antithrombin gene
with a promoter (which is a sequence of DNA that
controls gene activity) that is normally active in the
65 goat’s mammary glands during milk production.
When the transgenic females lactated, the promoter
turned the transgene on and the goats’ udders filled
with milk containing antithrombin. All that was left
to do was to collect the milk, and extract and purify
70 the protein. Et voilà—human medicine! And, for
GTC, liquid gold. ATryn hit the market in 2006,
becoming the world’s first transgenic animal drug.
Over the course of a year, the “milking parlors” on
GTC’s 300-acre farm in Massachusetts can collect
75 more than a kilogram of medicine from a single
animal.

Q. The most likely purpose of the parenthetical information in lines 63-64 is to

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Amy Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter. ©2001 by Amy Tan.
At last, Old Widow Lau was done haggling with
the driver and we stepped inside Father’s shop. It was
north-facing, quite dim inside, and perhaps this was
Line why Father did not see us at first. He was busy with a
5 customer, a man who was distinguished-looking, like
the scholars of two decades before. The two men
were bent over a glass case, discussing the different
qualities of inksticks. Big Uncle welcomed us and
invited us to be seated. From his formal tone, I knew
10 he did not recognize who we were. So I called his
name in a shy voice. And he squinted at me, then
laughed and announced our arrival to Little Uncle,
who apologized many times for not rushing over
sooner to greet us. They rushed us to be seated at one
15 of two tea tables for customers. Old Widow Lau
refused their invitation three times, exclaiming that
my father and uncles must be too busy for visitors.
She made weak efforts to leave. On the fourth
insistence, we finally sat. Then Little Uncle brought
20 us hot tea and sweet oranges, as well as bamboo
latticework fans with which to cool ourselves.
I tried to notice everything so I could later tell
GaoLing what I had seen, and tease out her envy. The
floors of the shop were of dark wood, polished and
25 clean, no dirty footprints, even though this was
during the dustiest part of the summer. And along
the walls were display cases made of wood and glass.
The glass was very shiny and not one pane was
broken. Within those glass cases were our silk-
30 wrapped boxes, all our hard work. They looked so
much nicer than they had in the ink-making studio
at Immortal Heart village.
I saw that Father had opened several of the boxes.
He set sticks and cakes and other shapes on a silk
35 cloth covering a glass case that served as a table on
which he and the customer leaned. First he pointed
to a stick with a top shaped like a fairy boat and said
with graceful importance, “Your writing will flow as
smoothly as a keel cutting through a glassy lake.”
40 He picked up a bird shape: “Your mind will soar into
the clouds of higher thought.” He waved toward a
row of ink cakes embellished with designs of peonies
and bamboo: “Your ledgers will blossom into
abundance while bamboo surrounds your quiet
45 mind.”
As he said this, Precious Auntie came back into
mind. I was remembering how she taught me that
everything, even ink, had a purpose and a meaning:
Good ink cannot be the quick kind, ready to pour out
50 of a bottle. You can never be an artist if your work
comes without effort. That is the problem of modern
ink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You
simply write what is swimming on the top of your
brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead
55 leaves, and mosquito spawn. But when you push an
inkstick along an inkstone, you take the first step to
cleansing your mind and your heart. You push and
you ask yourself, What are my intentions? What is in
my heart that matches my mind?
60 I remembered this, and yet that day in the ink
shop, I listened to what Father was saying, and his
words became far more important than anything
Precious Auntie had thought. “Look here,” Father
said to his customer, and I looked. He held up an
65 inkstick and rotated it in the light. “See? It’s the right
hue, purple-black, not brown or gray like the cheap
brands you might find down the street. And listen to
this.” And I heard a sound as clean and pure as a
small silver bell. “The high-pitched tone tells you that
70 the soot is very fine, as smooth as the sliding banks of
old rivers. And the scent—can you smell the balance
of strength and delicacy, the musical notes of the
ink’s perfume? Expensive, and everyone who sees
you using it will know that it was well worth the high
75 price.”
I was very proud to hear Father speak of our
family’s ink this way.

Q. It can be most reasonably inferred from the passage that Old Widow Lau’s reluctance to stay for tea is

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Saki, “The Schartz-Metterklume Method.” Originally published in 1911.
Lady Carlotta stepped out on to the platform of
the small wayside station and took a turn or two up
and down its uninteresting length, to kill time till the
train should be pleased to proceed on its way. Then,
5 in the roadway beyond, she saw a horse struggling
with a more than ample load, and a carter of the sort
that seems to bear a sullen hatred against the animal
that helps him to earn a living. Lady Carlotta
promptly betook her to the roadway, and put rather a
10 different complexion on the struggle. Certain of her
acquaintances were wont to give her plentiful
admonition as to the undesirability of interfering on
behalf of a distressed animal, such interference being
“none of her business.” Only once had she put the
15 doctrine of non-interference into practice, when one
of its most eloquent exponents had been besieged for
nearly three hours in a small and extremely
uncomfortable may-tree by an angry boar-pig, while
Lady Carlotta, on the other side of the fence, had
20 proceeded with the water-colour sketch she was
engaged on, and refused to interfere between the
boar and his prisoner. It is to be feared that she lost
the friendship of the ultimately rescued lady. On this
occasion she merely lost the train, which gave way to
25 the first sign of impatience it had shown throughout
the journey, and steamed off without her. She bore
the desertion with philosophical indifference; her
friends and relations were thoroughly well used to
the fact of her luggage arriving without her.
30 She wired a vague non-committal message to her
destination to say that she was coming on “by
another train.” Before she had time to think what her
next move might be she was confronted by an
imposingly attired lady, who seemed to be taking a
35 prolonged mental inventory of her clothes and looks.
“You must be Miss Hope, the governess I’ve come
to meet,” said the apparition, in a tone that admitted
of very little argument.
“Very well, if I must I must,” said Lady Carlotta to
40 herself with dangerous meekness.
“I am Mrs. Quabarl,” continued the lady; “and
where, pray, is your luggage?”
“It’s gone astray,” said the alleged governess,
falling in with the excellent rule of life that the absent
45 are always to blame; the luggage had, in point of fact,
behaved with perfect correctitude. “I’ve just
telegraphed about it,” she added, with a nearer
approach to truth.
“How provoking,” said Mrs. Quabarl; “these
50 railway companies are so careless. However, my
maid can lend you things for the night,” and she led
the way to her car.
During the drive to the Quabarl mansion
Lady Carlotta was impressively introduced to the
55 nature of the charge that had been thrust upon her;
she learned that Claude and Wilfrid were delicate,
sensitive young people, that Irene had the artistic
temperament highly developed, and that Viola was
something or other else of a mould equally
60 commonplace among children of that class and type
in the twentieth century.
“I wish them not only to be TAUGHT,” said Mrs.
Quabarl, “but INTERESTED in what they learn. In
their history lessons, for instance, you must try to
65 make them feel that they are being introduced to the
life-stories of men and women who really lived, not
merely committing a mass of names and dates to
memory. French, of course, I shall expect you to talk
at meal-times several days in the week.”
70 “I shall talk French four days of the week and
Russian in the remaining three.”
“Russian? My dear Miss Hope, no one in the
house speaks or understands Russian.”
“That will not embarrass me in the least,” said
75 Lady Carlotta coldly.
Mrs. Quabarl, to use a colloquial expression, was
knocked off her perch. She was one of those
imperfectly self-assured individuals who are
magnificent and autocratic as long as they are not
80 seriously opposed. The least show of unexpected
resistance goes a long way towards rendering them
cowed and apologetic. When the new governess
failed to express wondering admiration of the large
newly-purchased and expensive car, and lightly
85 alluded to the superior advantages of one or two
makes which had just been put on the market, the
discomfiture of her patroness became almost abject.
Her feelings were those which might have animated a
general of ancient warfaring days, on beholding his
90 heaviest battle-elephant ignominiously driven off the
field by slingers and javelin throwers.

Q. As presented in the passage, Mrs. Quabarl is best described as

This passage is from Lydia Minatoya, The Strangeness of Beauty. ©1999 by Lydia Minatoya. The setting is Japan in 1920.
Chie and her daughter Naomi are members of the House of Fuji, a noble family.

Akira came directly, breaking all tradition. Was
that it? Had he followed form—had he asked his
mother to speak to his father to approach a
go-between—would Chie have been more receptive?

5 He came on a winter’s eve. He pounded on the
door while a cold rain beat on the shuttered veranda,
so at first Chie thought him only the wind. The maid
knew better. Chie heard her soft scuttling footsteps,
the creak of the door. Then the maid brought a
10 calling card to the drawing room, for Chie.
Chie was reluctant to go to her guest; perhaps she
was feeling too cozy. She and Naomi were reading at
a low table set atop a charcoal brazier. A thick quilt
spread over the sides of the table so their legs were
15 tucked inside with the heat.
“Who is it at this hour, in this weather?” Chie
questioned as she picked the name card off the
maid’s lacquer tray.
“Shinoda, Akira. Kobe Dental College,” she read.
20 Naomi recognized the name. Chie heard a soft
intake of air.
“I think you should go,” said Naomi.
Akira was waiting in the entry. He was in his early
twenties, slim and serious, wearing the black
25 military-style uniform of a student. As he
bowed—his hands hanging straight down, a
black cap in one, a yellow oil-paper umbrella in the
other—Chie glanced beyond him. In the glistening
surface of the courtyard’s rain-drenched paving
30 stones, she saw his reflection like a dark double.
“Madame,” said Akira, “forgive my disruption,
but I come with a matter of urgency.”
His voice was soft, refined. He straightened and
stole a deferential peek at her face.
35 In the dim light his eyes shone with sincerity.
Chie felt herself starting to like him.
“Come inside, get out of this nasty night. Surely
your business can wait for a moment or two.”
“I don’t want to trouble you. Normally I would
40 approach you more properly but I’ve received word
of a position. I’ve an opportunity to go to America, as
dentist for Seattle’s Japanese community.”
“Congratulations,” Chie said with amusement.
“That is an opportunity, I’m sure. But how am I
45 involved?”
Even noting Naomi’s breathless reaction to the
name card, Chie had no idea. Akira’s message,
delivered like a formal speech, filled her with
maternal amusement. You know how children speak
50 so earnestly, so hurriedly, so endearingly about
things that have no importance in an adult’s mind?
That’s how she viewed him, as a child.
It was how she viewed Naomi. Even though
Naomi was eighteen and training endlessly in the arts
55 needed to make a good marriage, Chie had made no
effort to find her a husband.
Akira blushed.
“Depending on your response, I may stay in
Japan. I’ve come to ask for Naomi’s hand.”
60 Suddenly Chie felt the dampness of the night.
“Does Naomi know anything of your...
ambitions?”
“We have an understanding. Please don’t judge
my candidacy by the unseemliness of this proposal. I
65  ask directly because the use of a go-between takes
much time. Either method comes down to the same
thing: a matter of parental approval. If you give your
consent, I become Naomi’s yoshi.* We’ll live in the
House of Fuji. Without your consent, I must go to
70 America, to secure a new home for my bride.”
Eager to make his point, he’d been looking her full
in the face. Abruptly, his voice turned gentle. “I see
I’ve startled you. My humble apologies. I’ll take no
more of your evening. My address is on my card. If
75 you don’t wish to contact me, I’ll reapproach you
in two weeks’ time. Until then, good night.”
He bowed and left. Taking her ease, with effortless
grace, like a cat making off with a fish.
“Mother?” Chie heard Naomi’s low voice and
80 turned from the door. “He has asked you?”
The sight of Naomi’s clear eyes, her dark brows
gave Chie strength. Maybe his hopes were
preposterous.
“Where did you meet such a fellow? Imagine! He
85 thinks he can marry the Fuji heir and take her to
America all in the snap of his fingers!”
Chie waited for Naomi’s ripe laughter.
Naomi was silent. She stood a full half minute
looking straight into Chie’s eyes. Finally, she spoke.
90 “I met him at my literary meeting.”
Naomi turned to go back into the house, then
stopped.
“Mother.”
“Yes?”
95 “I mean to have him.”
* a man who marries a woman of higher status and takes her
family’s name

Q. Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?

Question is based on the following passage.
This passage is from Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, originally published in 1857.

No man likes to acknowledge that he has made a
mistake in the choice of his profession, and every
man, worthy of the name, will row long against wind
and tide before he allows himself to cry out, “I am
5 baffled!” and submits to be floated passively back to
land. From the first week of my residence in X—
felt my occupation irksome. The thing itself—the
work of copying and translating business-letters—
was a dry and tedious task enough, but had that been
10 all, I should long have borne with the nuisance; I am
not of an impatient nature, and influenced by the
double desire of getting my living and justifying to
myself and others the resolution I had taken to
become a tradesman, I should have endured in
15 silence the rust and cramp of my best faculties; I
should not have whispered, even inwardly, that I
longed for liberty; I should have pent in every sigh by
which my heart might have ventured to intimate its
distress under the closeness, smoke, monotony, and
20 joyless tumult of Bigben Close, and its panting desire
for freer and fresher scenes; I should have set up the
image of Duty, the fetish of Perseverance, in my
small bedroom at Mrs. King’s lodgings, and they two
should have been my household gods, from which
25 my darling, my cherished-in-secret, Imagination, the
tender and the mighty, should never, either by
softness or strength, have severed me. But this was
not all; the antipathy which had sprung up between
myself and my employer striking deeper root and
30 spreading denser shade daily, excluded me from
every glimpse of the sunshine of life; and I began to
feel like a plant growing in humid darkness out of the
slimy walls of a well.
Antipathy is the only word which can express the
35 feeling Edward Crimsworth had for me—a feeling, in
a great measure, involuntary, and which was liable to
be excited by every, the most trifling movement,
look, or word of mine. My southern accent annoyed
him; the degree of education evinced in my language
40 irritated him; my punctuality, industry, and
accuracy, fixed his dislike, and gave it the high
flavour and poignant relish of envy; he feared that I
too should one day make a successful tradesman.
Had I been in anything inferior to him, he would not
45 have hated me so thoroughly, but I knew all that he
knew, and, what was worse, he suspected that I kept
the padlock of silence on mental wealth in which he
was no sharer. If he could have once placed me in a
ridiculous or mortifying position, he would have
50 forgiven me much, but I was guarded by three
faculties—Caution, Tact, Observation; and prowling
and prying as was Edward’s malignity, it could never
baffle the lynx-eyes of these, my natural sentinels.
Day by day did his malice watch my tact, hoping it
55 would sleep, and prepared to steal snake-like on its
slumber; but tact, if it be genuine, never sleeps.
I had received my first quarter’s wages, and was
returning to my lodgings, possessed heart and soul
with the pleasant feeling that the master who had
60 paid me grudged every penny of that hard‑earned
pittance—(I had long ceased to regard
Mr. Crimsworth as my brother—he was a hard,
grinding master; he wished to be an inexorable
tyrant: that was all). Thoughts, not varied but strong,
65 occupied my mind; two voices spoke within me;
again and again they uttered the same monotonous
phrases. One said: “William, your life is intolerable.”
The other: “What can you do to alter it?” I walked
fast, for it was a cold, frosty night in January; as I
70 approached my lodgings, I turned from a general
view of my affairs to the particular speculation as to
whether my fire would be out; looking towards the
window of my sitting-room, I saw no cheering red
gleam.

Q. Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?

This passage is from Lydia Minatoya, The Strangeness of Beauty. ©1999 by Lydia Minatoya. The setting is Japan in 1920.
Chie and her daughter Naomi are members of the House of Fuji, a noble family.

Akira came directly, breaking all tradition. Was
that it? Had he followed form—had he asked his
mother to speak to his father to approach a
go-between—would Chie have been more receptive?

5 He came on a winter’s eve. He pounded on the
door while a cold rain beat on the shuttered veranda,
so at first Chie thought him only the wind. The maid
knew better. Chie heard her soft scuttling footsteps,
the creak of the door. Then the maid brought a
10 calling card to the drawing room, for Chie.
Chie was reluctant to go to her guest; perhaps she
was feeling too cozy. She and Naomi were reading at
a low table set atop a charcoal brazier. A thick quilt
spread over the sides of the table so their legs were
15 tucked inside with the heat.
“Who is it at this hour, in this weather?” Chie
questioned as she picked the name card off the
maid’s lacquer tray.
“Shinoda, Akira. Kobe Dental College,” she read.
20 Naomi recognized the name. Chie heard a soft
intake of air.
“I think you should go,” said Naomi.
Akira was waiting in the entry. He was in his early
twenties, slim and serious, wearing the black
25 military-style uniform of a student. As he
bowed—his hands hanging straight down, a
black cap in one, a yellow oil-paper umbrella in the
other—Chie glanced beyond him. In the glistening
surface of the courtyard’s rain-drenched paving
30 stones, she saw his reflection like a dark double.
“Madame,” said Akira, “forgive my disruption,
but I come with a matter of urgency.”
His voice was soft, refined. He straightened and
stole a deferential peek at her face.
35 In the dim light his eyes shone with sincerity.
Chie felt herself starting to like him.
“Come inside, get out of this nasty night. Surely
your business can wait for a moment or two.”
“I don’t want to trouble you. Normally I would
40 approach you more properly but I’ve received word
of a position. I’ve an opportunity to go to America, as
dentist for Seattle’s Japanese community.”
“Congratulations,” Chie said with amusement.
“That is an opportunity, I’m sure. But how am I
45 involved?”
Even noting Naomi’s breathless reaction to the
name card, Chie had no idea. Akira’s message,
delivered like a formal speech, filled her with
maternal amusement. You know how children speak
50 so earnestly, so hurriedly, so endearingly about
things that have no importance in an adult’s mind?
That’s how she viewed him, as a child.
It was how she viewed Naomi. Even though
Naomi was eighteen and training endlessly in the arts
55 needed to make a good marriage, Chie had made no
effort to find her a husband.
Akira blushed.
“Depending on your response, I may stay in
Japan. I’ve come to ask for Naomi’s hand.”
60 Suddenly Chie felt the dampness of the night.
“Does Naomi know anything of your...
ambitions?”
“We have an understanding. Please don’t judge
my candidacy by the unseemliness of this proposal. I
65  ask directly because the use of a go-between takes
much time. Either method comes down to the same
thing: a matter of parental approval. If you give your
consent, I become Naomi’s yoshi.* We’ll live in the
House of Fuji. Without your consent, I must go to
70 America, to secure a new home for my bride.”
Eager to make his point, he’d been looking her full
in the face. Abruptly, his voice turned gentle. “I see
I’ve startled you. My humble apologies. I’ll take no
more of your evening. My address is on my card. If
75 you don’t wish to contact me, I’ll reapproach you
in two weeks’ time. Until then, good night.”
He bowed and left. Taking her ease, with effortless
grace, like a cat making off with a fish.
“Mother?” Chie heard Naomi’s low voice and
80 turned from the door. “He has asked you?”
The sight of Naomi’s clear eyes, her dark brows
gave Chie strength. Maybe his hopes were
preposterous.
“Where did you meet such a fellow? Imagine! He
85 thinks he can marry the Fuji heir and take her to
America all in the snap of his fingers!”
Chie waited for Naomi’s ripe laughter.
Naomi was silent. She stood a full half minute
looking straight into Chie’s eyes. Finally, she spoke.
90 “I met him at my literary meeting.”
Naomi turned to go back into the house, then
stopped.
“Mother.”
“Yes?”
95 “I mean to have him.”
* a man who marries a woman of higher status and takes her
family’s name

Q. In the passage, Akira addresses Chie with

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from a speech delivered in 1838 by Sara T. Smith at the Second Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women.
We are told that it is not within the “province of
woman,” to discuss the subject of slavery; that it is a
“political question,” and we are “stepping out of our
Line sphere,” when we take part in its discussion. It is not
5 true that it is merely a political question, it is likewise
a question of justice, of humanity, of morality, of
religion; a question which, while it involves
considerations of immense importance to the welfare
and prosperity of our country, enters deeply into the
10 home-concerns, the every-day feelings of millions of
our fellow beings. Whether the laborer shall receive
the reward of his labor, or be driven daily to
unrequited toil—whether he shall walk erect in the
dignity of conscious manhood, or be reckoned
15 among the beasts which perish—whether his bones
and sinews shall be his own, or another’s—whether
his child shall receive the protection of its natural
guardian, or be ranked among the live-stock of the
estate, to be disposed of as the caprice or interest of
20 the master may dictate—. . . these considerations are
all involved in the question of liberty or slavery.
And is a subject comprehending interests of such
magnitude, merely a “political question,” and one in
which woman “can take no part without losing
25 something of the modesty and gentleness which are
her most appropriate ornaments”? May not the
“ornament of a meek and quiet spirit” exist with an
upright mind and enlightened intellect, and must
woman necessarily be less gentle because her heart is
30 open to the claims of humanity, or less modest
because she feels for the degradation of her enslaved
sisters, and would stretch forth her hand for their
rescue?
By the Constitution of the United States, the
35 whole physical power of the North is pledged for the
suppression of domestic insurrections, and should
the slaves, maddened by oppression, endeavor to
shake off the yoke of the taskmaster, the men of the
North are bound to make common cause with the
40 tyrant, and put down, at the point of the bayonet,
every effort on the part of the slave, for the
attainment of his freedom. And when the father,
husband, son, and brother shall have left their homes
to mingle in the unholy warfare, “to become the
45 executioners of their brethren, or to fall themselves
by their hands,”1 will the mother, wife, daughter, and
sister feel that they have no interest in this subject?
Will it be easy to convince them that it is no concern
of theirs, that their homes are rendered desolate, and
50 their habitations the abodes of wretchedness?
Surely this consideration is of itself sufficient to
arouse the slumbering energies of woman, for the
overthrow of a system which thus threatens to lay in
ruins the fabric of her domestic happiness; and she
55 will not be deterred from the performance of her
duty to herself, her family, and her country, by the
cry of political question.
But admitting it to be a political question, have we
no interest in the welfare of our country? May we not
60 permit a thought to stray beyond the narrow limits of
our own family circle, and of the present hour? May
we not breathe a sigh over the miseries of our
countrymen, nor utter a word of remonstrance
against the unjust laws that are crushing them to the
65 earth? Must we witness “the headlong rage or
heedless folly,” with which our nation is rushing
onward to destruction, and not seek to arrest its
downward course? Shall we silently behold the land
which we love with all the heart-warm affection of
70 children, rendered a hissing and a reproach
throughout the world, by this system which is already
tolling the death-bell of her decease among the
nations? No: the events of the last two years have cast
their dark shadows before, overclouding the bright
75 prospects of the future, and shrouding the destinies
of our country in more than midnight gloom, and we
cannot remain inactive. Our country is as dear to us
as to the proudest statesman, and the more closely
our hearts cling to “our altars and our homes,” the
80 more fervent are our aspirations that every
inhabitant of our land may be protected in his
fireside enjoyments by just and equal laws; that the
foot of the tyrant may no longer invade the domestic
sanctuary, nor his hand tear asunder those whom
85 God himself has united by the most holy ties. Let our
course, then, still be onward!
1 A quotation from the Declaration of Independence

Q. According to Smith, the US Constitution requires which action on the part of the Northern free states if slaves were to revolt?

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Mary Helen Stefaniak, The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia: A Novel. ©2010 by Mary Helen Stefaniak.
Miss Grace Spivey arrived in Threestep, Georgia,
in August 1938. She stepped off the train wearing a
pair of thick-soled boots suitable for hiking, a navy
Line blue dress, and a little white tam that rode the waves
5 of her red hair at a gravity-defying angle. August was
a hellish month to step off the train in Georgia,
although it was nothing, she said, compared to the
119 degrees that greeted her when she arrived one
time in Timbuktu, which, she assured us, was a real
10 place in Africa. I believe her remark irritated some of
the people gathered to welcome her on the burned
grass alongside the tracks. When folks are sweating
through their shorts, they don’t like to hear that this
is nothing compared to someplace else. Irritated or
15 not, the majority of those present were inclined to see
the arrival of the new schoolteacher in a positive
light. Hard times were still upon us in 1938, but, like
my momma said, “We weren’t no poorer than we’d
ever been,” and the citizens of Threestep were in the
20 mood for a little excitement.
Miss Spivey looked like just the right person to
give it to them. She was, by almost anyone’s
standards, a woman of the world. She’d gone to
boarding schools since she was six years old; she’d
25 studied French in Paris and drama in London; and
during what she called a “fruitful intermission” in her
formal education, she had traveled extensively in the
Near East and Africa with a friend of her
grandmother’s, one Janet Miller, who was a medical
30 doctor from Nashville, Tennessee. After her travels
with Dr. Miller, Miss Spivey continued her education
by attending Barnard College in New York City. She
told us all that at school the first day. When my little
brother Ralphord asked what did she study at
35 Barnyard College, Miss Spivey explained that
Barnard, which she wrote on the blackboard, was the
sister school of Columbia University, of which, she
expected, we all had heard.
It was there, she told us, in the midst of trying to
40 find her true mission in life, that she wandered one
afternoon into a lecture by the famous John Dewey,
who was talking about his famous book, Democracy
and Education. Professor Dewey was in his seventies
by then, Miss Spivey said, but he still liked to chat
45 with students after a lecture—especially female
students, she added—sometimes over coffee, and see
in their eyes the fire his words could kindle. It was
after this lecture and subsequent coffee that Miss
Spivey had marched to the Teacher’s College and
50 signed up, all aflame. Two years later, she told a
cheery blue-suited woman from the WPA1 that she
wanted to bring democracy and education to the
poorest, darkest, most remote and forgotten corner
of America.
55 They sent her to Threestep, Georgia.
Miss Spivey paused there for questions, avoiding
my brother Ralphord’s eye.
What we really wanted to know about—all
twenty-six of us across seven grade levels in the one
60 room—was the pearly white button hanging on a
string in front of the blackboard behind the teacher’s
desk up front. That button on a string was something
new. When Mavis Davis (the only bona fide seventh
grader, at age thirteen) asked what it was for, Miss
65 Spivey gave the string a tug, and to our astonishment,
the whole world—or at least a wrinkled map of
it—unfolded before our eyes. Her predecessor, Miss
Chandler, had never once made use of that map,
which was older than our fathers, and until that
70 moment, not a one of us knew it was there.
Miss Spivey showed us on the map how she and
Dr. Janet Miller had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean
and past the Rock of Gibraltar into the
Mediterranean Sea. Using the end of a ruler, she
75 gently tapped such places as Morocco and Tunis and
Algiers to mark their route along the top of Africa.
They spent twenty hours on the train to Baghdad, she
said, swathed in veils against the sand that crept in
every crack and crevice.
80 “And can you guess what we saw from the train?”
Miss Spivey asked. We could not. “Camels!” she said.
“We saw a whole caravan of camels.” She looked
around the room, waiting for us to be amazed and
delighted at the thought.
85 We all hung there for a minute, thinking hard,
until Mavis Davis spoke up.
“She means like the three kings rode to
Bethlehem,” Mavis said, and she folded her hands
smugly on her seventh-grade desk in the back of the
90 room.
Miss Spivey made a mistake right then. Instead of
beaming upon Mavis the kind of congratulatory
smile that old Miss Chandler would have bestowed
on her for having enlightened the rest of us, Miss
95 Spivey simply said, “That’s right.”
¹The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a government
agency that hired people for public and cultural development
projects and services.

Q. In the passage, Threestep is mainly presented as a

Question is based on the following passage.
This passage is from Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, originally published in 1857.

No man likes to acknowledge that he has made a
mistake in the choice of his profession, and every
man, worthy of the name, will row long against wind
and tide before he allows himself to cry out, “I am
5 baffled!” and submits to be floated passively back to
land. From the first week of my residence in X—
felt my occupation irksome. The thing itself—the
work of copying and translating business-letters—
was a dry and tedious task enough, but had that been
10 all, I should long have borne with the nuisance; I am
not of an impatient nature, and influenced by the
double desire of getting my living and justifying to
myself and others the resolution I had taken to
become a tradesman, I should have endured in
15 silence the rust and cramp of my best faculties; I
should not have whispered, even inwardly, that I
longed for liberty; I should have pent in every sigh by
which my heart might have ventured to intimate its
distress under the closeness, smoke, monotony, and
20 joyless tumult of Bigben Close, and its panting desire
for freer and fresher scenes; I should have set up the
image of Duty, the fetish of Perseverance, in my
small bedroom at Mrs. King’s lodgings, and they two
should have been my household gods, from which
25 my darling, my cherished-in-secret, Imagination, the
tender and the mighty, should never, either by
softness or strength, have severed me. But this was
not all; the antipathy which had sprung up between
myself and my employer striking deeper root and
30 spreading denser shade daily, excluded me from
every glimpse of the sunshine of life; and I began to
feel like a plant growing in humid darkness out of the
slimy walls of a well.
Antipathy is the only word which can express the
35 feeling Edward Crimsworth had for me—a feeling, in
a great measure, involuntary, and which was liable to
be excited by every, the most trifling movement,
look, or word of mine. My southern accent annoyed
him; the degree of education evinced in my language
40 irritated him; my punctuality, industry, and
accuracy, fixed his dislike, and gave it the high
flavour and poignant relish of envy; he feared that I
too should one day make a successful tradesman.
Had I been in anything inferior to him, he would not
45 have hated me so thoroughly, but I knew all that he
knew, and, what was worse, he suspected that I kept
the padlock of silence on mental wealth in which he
was no sharer. If he could have once placed me in a
ridiculous or mortifying position, he would have
50 forgiven me much, but I was guarded by three
faculties—Caution, Tact, Observation; and prowling
and prying as was Edward’s malignity, it could never
baffle the lynx-eyes of these, my natural sentinels.
Day by day did his malice watch my tact, hoping it
55 would sleep, and prepared to steal snake-like on its
slumber; but tact, if it be genuine, never sleeps.
I had received my first quarter’s wages, and was
returning to my lodgings, possessed heart and soul
with the pleasant feeling that the master who had
60 paid me grudged every penny of that hard‑earned
pittance—(I had long ceased to regard
Mr. Crimsworth as my brother—he was a hard,
grinding master; he wished to be an inexorable
tyrant: that was all). Thoughts, not varied but strong,
65 occupied my mind; two voices spoke within me;
again and again they uttered the same monotonous
phrases. One said: “William, your life is intolerable.”
The other: “What can you do to alter it?” I walked
fast, for it was a cold, frosty night in January; as I
70 approached my lodgings, I turned from a general
view of my affairs to the particular speculation as to
whether my fire would be out; looking towards the
window of my sitting-room, I saw no cheering red
gleam.

Q. The main purpose of the opening sentence of the passage is to

This passage is from Lydia Minatoya, The Strangeness of Beauty. ©1999 by Lydia Minatoya. The setting is Japan in 1920.
Chie and her daughter Naomi are members of the House of Fuji, a noble family.

Akira came directly, breaking all tradition. Was
that it? Had he followed form—had he asked his
mother to speak to his father to approach a
go-between—would Chie have been more receptive?

5 He came on a winter’s eve. He pounded on the
door while a cold rain beat on the shuttered veranda,
so at first Chie thought him only the wind. The maid
knew better. Chie heard her soft scuttling footsteps,
the creak of the door. Then the maid brought a
10 calling card to the drawing room, for Chie.
Chie was reluctant to go to her guest; perhaps she
was feeling too cozy. She and Naomi were reading at
a low table set atop a charcoal brazier. A thick quilt
spread over the sides of the table so their legs were
15 tucked inside with the heat.
“Who is it at this hour, in this weather?” Chie
questioned as she picked the name card off the
maid’s lacquer tray.
“Shinoda, Akira. Kobe Dental College,” she read.
20 Naomi recognized the name. Chie heard a soft
intake of air.
“I think you should go,” said Naomi.
Akira was waiting in the entry. He was in his early
twenties, slim and serious, wearing the black
25 military-style uniform of a student. As he
bowed—his hands hanging straight down, a
black cap in one, a yellow oil-paper umbrella in the
other—Chie glanced beyond him. In the glistening
surface of the courtyard’s rain-drenched paving
30 stones, she saw his reflection like a dark double.
“Madame,” said Akira, “forgive my disruption,
but I come with a matter of urgency.”
His voice was soft, refined. He straightened and
stole a deferential peek at her face.
35 In the dim light his eyes shone with sincerity.
Chie felt herself starting to like him.
“Come inside, get out of this nasty night. Surely
your business can wait for a moment or two.”
“I don’t want to trouble you. Normally I would
40 approach you more properly but I’ve received word
of a position. I’ve an opportunity to go to America, as
dentist for Seattle’s Japanese community.”
“Congratulations,” Chie said with amusement.
“That is an opportunity, I’m sure. But how am I
45 involved?”
Even noting Naomi’s breathless reaction to the
name card, Chie had no idea. Akira’s message,
delivered like a formal speech, filled her with
maternal amusement. You know how children speak
50 so earnestly, so hurriedly, so endearingly about
things that have no importance in an adult’s mind?
That’s how she viewed him, as a child.
It was how she viewed Naomi. Even though
Naomi was eighteen and training endlessly in the arts
55 needed to make a good marriage, Chie had made no
effort to find her a husband.
Akira blushed.
“Depending on your response, I may stay in
Japan. I’ve come to ask for Naomi’s hand.”
60 Suddenly Chie felt the dampness of the night.
“Does Naomi know anything of your...
ambitions?”
“We have an understanding. Please don’t judge
my candidacy by the unseemliness of this proposal. I
65  ask directly because the use of a go-between takes
much time. Either method comes down to the same
thing: a matter of parental approval. If you give your
consent, I become Naomi’s yoshi.* We’ll live in the
House of Fuji. Without your consent, I must go to
70 America, to secure a new home for my bride.”
Eager to make his point, he’d been looking her full
in the face. Abruptly, his voice turned gentle. “I see
I’ve startled you. My humble apologies. I’ll take no
more of your evening. My address is on my card. If
75 you don’t wish to contact me, I’ll reapproach you
in two weeks’ time. Until then, good night.”
He bowed and left. Taking her ease, with effortless
grace, like a cat making off with a fish.
“Mother?” Chie heard Naomi’s low voice and
80 turned from the door. “He has asked you?”
The sight of Naomi’s clear eyes, her dark brows
gave Chie strength. Maybe his hopes were
preposterous.
“Where did you meet such a fellow? Imagine! He
85 thinks he can marry the Fuji heir and take her to
America all in the snap of his fingers!”
Chie waited for Naomi’s ripe laughter.
Naomi was silent. She stood a full half minute
looking straight into Chie’s eyes. Finally, she spoke.
90 “I met him at my literary meeting.”
Naomi turned to go back into the house, then
stopped.
“Mother.”
“Yes?”
95 “I mean to have him.”
* a man who marries a woman of higher status and takes her
family’s name

Q. The main purpose of the first paragraph is to

Question is based on the followingpassage.

This passage is adapted from William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf. ©1959 by William Maxwell. Originally published in 1945.
The Alcazar Restaurant was on Sheridan Road
near Devon Avenue. It was long and narrow, with
tables for two along the walls and tables for four
down the middle. The decoration was art moderne,
5 except for the series of murals depicting the four
seasons, and the sick ferns in the front window.
Lymie sat down at the second table from the cash
register, and ordered his dinner. The history book,
which he propped against the catsup and the glass
10 sugar bowl, had been used by others before him.
Blank pages front and back were filled in with maps,
drawings, dates, comic cartoons, and organs of the
body; also with names and messages no longer clear
and never absolutely legible. On nearly every other
15 page there was some marginal notation, either in ink
or in very hard pencil. And unless someone had
upset a glass of water, the marks on page 177 were
from tears.
While Lymie read about the Peace of Paris, signed
20 on the thirtieth of May, 1814, between France and
the Allied powers, his right hand managed again and
again to bring food up to his mouth. Sometimes he
chewed, sometimes he swallowed whole the food that
he had no idea he was eating. The Congress of
25 Vienna met, with some allowance for delays, early in
November of the same year, and all the powers
engaged in the war on either side sent
plenipotentiaries. It was by far the most splendid and
important assembly ever convoked to discuss and
30 determine the affairs of Europe. The Emperor of
Russia, the King of Prussia, the Kings of Bavaria,
Denmark, and Wurttemberg, all were present in
person at the court of the Emperor Francis I in the
Austrian capital. When Lymie put down his fork and
35 began to count them off, one by one, on the fingers
of his left hand, the waitress, whose name was Irma,
thought he was through eating and tried to take his
plate away. He stopped her. Prince Metternich (his
right thumb) presided over the Congress, and
40 Prince Talleyrand (the index finger) represented
France.
A party of four, two men and two women, came
into the restaurant, all talking at once, and took
possession of the center table nearest Lymie.
45 The women had shingled hair and short tight skirts
which exposed the underside of their knees when
they sat down. One of the women had the face of a
young boy but disguised by one trick or another
(rouge, lipstick, powder, wet bangs plastered against
50 the high forehead, and a pair of long pendent
earrings) to look like a woman of thirty-five, which
as a matter of fact she was. The men were older. They
laughed more than there seemed any occasion for,
while they were deciding between soup and shrimp
55 cocktail, and their laughter was too loud. But it was
the women’s voices, the terrible not quite sober pitch
of the women’s voices which caused Lymie to skim
over two whole pages without knowing what was on
them. Fortunately he realized this and went back.
60 Otherwise he might never have known about the
secret treaty concluded between England, France,
and Austria, when the pretensions of Prussia and
Russia, acting in concert, seemed to threaten a
renewal of the attack. The results of the Congress
65 were stated clearly at the bottom of page 67 and at
the top of page 68, but before Lymie got halfway
through them, a coat that he recognized as his
father’s was hung on the hook next to his chair.
Lymie closed the book and said, “I didn’t think you
70 were coming.”
Time is probably no more unkind to sporting
characters than it is to other people, but physical
decay unsustained by respectability is somehow more
noticeable. Mr. Peters’ hair was turning gray and his
75 scalp showed through on top. He had lost weight
also; he no longer filled out his clothes the way he
used to. His color was poor, and the flower had
disappeared from his buttonhole. In its place was an
American Legion button.
80 Apparently he himself was not aware that there
had been any change. He straightened his tie
self-consciously and when Irma handed him a menu,
he gestured with it so that the two women at the next
table would notice the diamond ring on the fourth
85 finger of his right hand. Both of these things, and
also the fact that his hands showed signs of the
manicurist, one can blame on the young man who
had his picture taken with a derby hat on the back of
his head, and also sitting with a girl in the curve of
90 the moon. The young man had never for one second
deserted Mr. Peters. He was always there, tugging at
Mr. Peters’ elbow, making him do things that were
not becoming in a man of forty-five.

Q. As used in line 93, “becoming” most nearly means

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Daniyal Mueenuddin, “Nawabdin Electrician.” ©2009 by Daniyal Mueenuddin.
Another man might have thrown up his
hands—but not Nawabdin. His twelve daughters
acted as a spur to his genius, and he looked with
satisfaction in the mirror each morning at the face of
5 a warrior going out to do battle. Nawab of course
knew that he must proliferate his sources of
revenue—the salary he received from K. K. Harouni
for tending the tube wells would not even begin to
suffice. He set up a little one-room flour mill, run off
10 a condemned electric motor—condemned by him.
He tried his hand at fish-farming in a little pond at
the edge of his master’s fields. He bought broken
radios, fixed them, and resold them. He did not
demur even when asked to fix watches, though that
15 enterprise did spectacularly badly, and in fact earned
him more kicks than kudos, for no watch he took
apart ever kept time again.
K. K. Harouni rarely went to his farms, but lived
mostly in Lahore. Whenever the old man visited,
20 Nawab would place himself night and day at the door
leading from the servants’ sitting area into the walled
grove of ancient banyan trees where the old
farmhouse stood. Grizzled, his peculiar aviator
glasses bent and smudged, Nawab tended the
25 household machinery, the air conditioners, water
heaters, refrigerators, and water pumps, like an
engineer tending the boilers on a foundering steamer
in an Atlantic gale. By his superhuman efforts he
almost managed to maintain K. K. Harouni in the
30 same mechanical cocoon, cooled and bathed and
lighted and fed, that the landowner enjoyed in
Lahore.
Harouni of course became familiar with this
ubiquitous man, who not only accompanied him on
35 his tours of inspection, but morning and night could
be found standing on the master bed rewiring the
light fixture or in the bathroom poking at the water
heater. Finally, one evening at teatime, gauging the
psychological moment, Nawab asked if he might say
40 a word. The landowner, who was cheerfully filing his
nails in front of a crackling rosewood fire, told him
to go ahead.
“Sir, as you know, your lands stretch from here to
the Indus, and on these lands are fully seventeen tube
45 wells, and to tend these seventeen tube wells there is
but one man, me, your servant. In your service I have
earned these gray hairs”—here he bowed his head to
show the gray—“and now I cannot fulfill my duties
as I should. Enough, sir, enough. I beg you, forgive
50 me my weakness. Better a darkened house and proud
hunger within than disgrace in the light of day.
Release me, I ask you, I beg you.”
The old man, well accustomed to these sorts of
speeches, though not usually this florid, filed away at
55 his nails and waited for the breeze to stop.
“What’s the matter, Nawabdin?”
“Matter, sir? O what could be the matter in your
service. I’ve eaten your salt for all my years. But sir,
on the bicycle now, with my old legs, and with the
60 many injuries I’ve received when heavy machinery
fell on me—I cannot any longer bicycle about like a
bridegroom from farm to farm, as I could when I
first had the good fortune to enter your employment.
I beg you, sir, let me go.”
65 “And what’s the solution?” asked Harouni, seeing
that they had come to the crux. He didn’t particularly
care one way or the other, except that it touched on
his comfort—a matter of great interest to him.
“Well, sir, if I had a motorcycle, then I could
70 somehow limp along, at least until I train up some
younger man.”
The crops that year had been good, Harouni felt
expansive in front of the fire, and so, much to the
disgust of the farm managers, Nawab received a
75 brand-new motorcycle, a Honda 70. He even
managed to extract an allowance for gasoline.
The motorcycle increased his status, gave him
weight, so that people began calling him “Uncle,” and
asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he
80 knew absolutely nothing. He could now range
further, doing a much wider business. Best of all,
now he could spend every night with his wife, who
had begged to live not on the farm but near her
family in Firoza, where also they could educate at
85 least the two eldest daughters. A long straight road
ran from the canal headworks near Firoza all the way
to the Indus, through the heart of the K. K. Harouni
lands. Nawab would fly down this road on his new
machine, with bags and cloths hanging from every
90 knob and brace, so that the bike, when he hit a bump,
seemed to be flapping numerous small vestigial
wings; and with his grinning face, as he rolled up to
whichever tube well needed servicing, with his ears
almost blown off, he shone with the speed of his
95 arrival.

Q. Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?

Question is based on the following passage.
This passage is adapted from Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas. ©1938 by Harcourt, Inc. Here, Woolf considers the situation of women in English society.

Close at hand is a bridge over the River Thames,
an admirable vantage ground for us to make a
survey. The river flows beneath; barges pass, laden
with timber, bursting with corn; there on one side are
5 the domes and spires of the city; on the other,
Westminster and the Houses of Parliament. It is a
place to stand on by the hour, dreaming. But not
now. Now we are pressed for time. Now we are here
to consider facts; now we must fix our eyes upon the
10 procession—the procession of the sons of educated
men.
There they go, our brothers who have been
educated at public schools and universities,
mounting those steps, passing in and out of those
15 doors, ascending those pulpits, preaching, teaching,
administering justice, practising medicine,
transacting business, making money. It is a solemn
sight always—a procession, like a caravanserai
crossing a desert. . . . But now, for the past twenty
20 years or so, it is no longer a sight merely, a
photograph, or fresco scrawled upon the walls of
time, at which we can look with merely an esthetic
appreciation. For there, trapesing along at the tail
end of the procession, we go ourselves. And that
25 makes a difference. We who have looked so long at
the pageant in books, or from a curtained window
watched educated men leaving the house at about
nine-thirty to go to an office, returning to the house
at about six-thirty from an office, need look passively
30 no longer. We too can leave the house, can mount
those steps, pass in and out of those doors,... make
money, administer justice. . . . We who now agitate
these humble pens may in another century or two
speak from a pulpit. Nobody will dare contradict us
35 then; we shall be the mouthpieces of the divine
spirit—a solemn thought, is it not? Who can say
whether, as time goes on, we may not dress in
military uniform, with gold lace on our breasts,
swords at our sides, and something like the old
40 family coal-scuttle on our heads, save that that
venerable object was never decorated with plumes of
white horsehair. You laugh—indeed the shadow of
the private house still makes those dresses look a
little queer. We have worn private clothes so
45 long. . . . But we have not come here to laugh, or to
talk of fashions—men’s and women’s. We are here,
on the bridge, to ask ourselves certain questions.
And they are very important questions; and we have
very little time in which to answer them. The
50 questions that we have to ask and to answer about
that procession during this moment of transition are
so important that they may well change the lives of
all men and women for ever. For we have to ask
ourselves, here and now, do we wish to join that
55 procession, or don’t we? On what terms shall we join
that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the
procession of educated men? The moment is short; it
may last five years; ten years, or perhaps only a
matter of a few months longer.... But, you will
60 object, you have no time to think; you have your
battles to fight, your rent to pay, your bazaars to
organize. That excuse shall not serve you, Madam.
As you know from your own experience, and there
are facts that prove it, the daughters of educated men
65 have always done their thinking from hand to
mouth; not under green lamps at study tables in the
cloisters of secluded colleges. They have thought
while they stirred the pot, while they rocked the
cradle. It was thus that they won us the right to our
70 brand-new sixpence. It falls to us now to go on
thinking; how are we to spend that sixpence? Think
we must. Let us think in offices; in omnibuses; while
we are standing in the crowd watching Coronations
and Lord Mayor’s Shows; let us think . . . in the
75 gallery of the House of Commons; in the Law Courts;
let us think at baptisms and marriages and funerals.
Let us never cease from thinking—what is this
“civilization” in which we find ourselves? What are
these ceremonies and why should we take part in
80 them? What are these professions and why
should we make money out of them? Where in
short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of
educated men?

Q. Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from George Eliot, Silas Marner. Originally published in 1861. Silas was a weaver and a
notorious miser, but then the gold he had hoarded was stolen. Shortly after, Silas adopted a young child, Eppie, the
daughter of an impoverished woman who had died suddenly.
Unlike the gold which needed nothing, and must
be worshipped in close-locked solitude—which was
hidden away from the daylight, was deaf to the song
of birds, and started to no human tones—Eppie was a
5 creature of endless claims and ever-growing desires,
seeking and loving sunshine, and living sounds, and
living movements; making trial of everything, with
trust in new joy, and stirring the human kindness in
all eyes that looked on her. The gold had kept his
10 thoughts in an ever-repeated circle, leading to
nothing beyond itself; but Eppie was an object
compacted of changes and hopes that forced his
thoughts onward, and carried them far away from
their old eager pacing towards the same blank
15 limit—carried them away to the new things that
would come with the coming years, when Eppie
would have learned to understand how her father
Silas cared for her; and made him look for images of
that time in the ties and charities that bound together
20 the families of his neighbors. The gold had asked that
he should sit weaving longer and longer, deafened
and blinded more and more to all things except the
monotony of his loom and the repetition of his web;
but Eppie called him away from his weaving, and
25 made him think all its pauses a holiday, reawakening
his senses with her fresh life, even to the old
winter-flies that came crawling forth in the early
spring sunshine, and warming him into joy because
she had joy.
30 And when the sunshine grew strong and lasting,
so that the buttercups were thick in the meadows,
Silas might be seen in the sunny mid-day, or in the
late afternoon when the shadows were lengthening
under the hedgerows, strolling out with uncovered
35 head to carry Eppie beyond the Stone-pits to where
the flowers grew, till they reached some favorite bank
where he could sit down, while Eppie toddled to
pluck the flowers, and make remarks to the winged
things that murmured happily above the bright
40 petals, calling “Dad-dad’s” attention continually by
bringing him the flowers. Then she would turn her
ear to some sudden bird-note, and Silas learned to
please her by making signs of hushed stillness, that
they might listen for the note to come again: so that
45 when it came, she set up her small back and laughed
with gurgling triumph. Sitting on the banks in this
way, Silas began to look for the once familiar herbs
again; and as the leaves, with their unchanged outline
and markings, lay on his palm, there was a sense of
50 crowding remembrances from which he turned away
timidly, taking refuge in Eppie’s little world, that lay
lightly on his enfeebled spirit.
As the child’s mind was growing into knowledge,
his mind was growing into memory: as her life
55 unfolded, his soul, long stupefied in a cold narrow
prison, was unfolding too, and trembling gradually
into full consciousness.
It was an influence which must gather force with
every new year: the tones that stirred Silas’ heart
60 grew articulate, and called for more distinct answers;
shapes and sounds grew clearer for Eppie’s eyes and
ears, and there was more that “Dad-dad” was
imperatively required to notice and account for.
Also, by the time Eppie was three years old, she
65 developed a fine capacity for mischief, and for
devising ingenious ways of being troublesome, which
found much exercise, not only for Silas’ patience, but
for his watchfulness and penetration. Sorely was poor
Silas puzzled on such occasions by the incompatible
70 demands of love.

Q. As compared with Silas’s gold, Eppie is portrayed as having more

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Patricia Waldron, “Why Birds Fly in a V Formation.” ©2014 by American Association for
the Advancement of Science.
Anyone watching the autumn sky knows that
migrating birds fly in a V formation, but scientists
have long debated why. A new study of ibises finds
that these big-winged birds carefully position their
5 wingtips and sync their flapping, presumably to catch
the preceding bird’s updraft—and save energy
during flight.
There are two reasons birds might fly in a
V formation: It may make flight easier, or they’re
10 simply following the leader. Squadrons of planes can
save fuel by flying in a V formation, and many
scientists suspect that migrating birds do the same.
Models that treated flapping birds like fixed-wing
airplanes estimate that they save energy by drafting
15 off each other, but currents created by airplanes are
far more stable than the oscillating eddies coming off
of a bird. “Air gets pretty unpredictable behind a
flapping wing,” says James Usherwood, a locomotor
biomechanist at the Royal Veterinary College at the
20 University of London in Hatfield, where the research
took place.
The study, published in Nature, took advantage of
an existing project to reintroduce endangered
northern bald ibises (Geronticus eremita) to Europe.
25 Scientists used a microlight plane to show
hand-raised birds their ancestral migration route
from Austria to Italy. A flock of 14 juveniles carried
data loggers specially built by Usherwood and his lab.
The device’s GPS determined each bird’s flight
30 position to within 30 cm, and an accelerometer
showed the timing of the wing flaps.
Just as aerodynamic estimates would predict, the
birds positioned themselves to fly just behind and to
the side of the bird in front, timing their wing beats
35 to catch the uplifting eddies. When a bird flew
directly behind another, the timing of the flapping
reversed so that it could minimize the effects of the
downdraft coming off the back of the bird’s body.
“We didn’t think this was possible,” Usherwood
40 says, considering that the feat requires careful
flight and incredible awareness of one’s neighbors.
“Perhaps these big V formation birds can be thought
of quite like an airplane with wings that go up and
down.”
45 The findings likely apply to other long-winged
birds, such as pelicans, storks, and geese, Usherwood
says. Smaller birds create more complex wakes that
would make drafting too difficult. The researchers
did not attempt to calculate the bird’s energy savings
50 because the necessary physiological measurements
would be too invasive for an endangered species.
Previous studies estimate that birds can use
20 percent to 30 percent less energy while
flying in a V.
55 “From a behavioral perspective it’s really a
breakthrough,” says David Lentink, a mechanical
engineer at Stanford University in Palo Alto,
California, who was not involved in the work.
“Showing that birds care about syncing their wing
60 beats is definitely an important insight that we didn’t
have before.”
Scientists do not know how the birds find
that aerodynamic sweet spot, but they suspect that
the animals align themselves either by sight or
65 by sensing air currents through their feathers.
Alternatively, they may move around until they find
the location with the least resistance. In future
studies, the researchers will switch to more common
birds, such as pigeons or geese. They plan to
70 investigate how the animals decide who sets the
course and the pace, and whether a mistake made by
the leader can ripple through the rest of the flock to
cause traffic jams.
“It’s a pretty impressive piece of work as it is, but
75 it does suggest that there’s a lot more to learn,”
says Ty Hedrick, a biologist at the University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who studies flight
aerodynamics in birds and insects. However they do
it, he says, “birds are awfully good hang-glider
80 pilots.”

Q. The main purpose of the passage is to

Question is based on the followingpassage.

This passage is adapted from William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf. ©1959 by William Maxwell. Originally published in 1945.
The Alcazar Restaurant was on Sheridan Road
near Devon Avenue. It was long and narrow, with
tables for two along the walls and tables for four
down the middle. The decoration was art moderne,
5 except for the series of murals depicting the four
seasons, and the sick ferns in the front window.
Lymie sat down at the second table from the cash
register, and ordered his dinner. The history book,
which he propped against the catsup and the glass
10 sugar bowl, had been used by others before him.
Blank pages front and back were filled in with maps,
drawings, dates, comic cartoons, and organs of the
body; also with names and messages no longer clear
and never absolutely legible. On nearly every other
15 page there was some marginal notation, either in ink
or in very hard pencil. And unless someone had
upset a glass of water, the marks on page 177 were
from tears.
While Lymie read about the Peace of Paris, signed
20 on the thirtieth of May, 1814, between France and
the Allied powers, his right hand managed again and
again to bring food up to his mouth. Sometimes he
chewed, sometimes he swallowed whole the food that
he had no idea he was eating. The Congress of
25 Vienna met, with some allowance for delays, early in
November of the same year, and all the powers
engaged in the war on either side sent
plenipotentiaries. It was by far the most splendid and
important assembly ever convoked to discuss and
30 determine the affairs of Europe. The Emperor of
Russia, the King of Prussia, the Kings of Bavaria,
Denmark, and Wurttemberg, all were present in
person at the court of the Emperor Francis I in the
Austrian capital. When Lymie put down his fork and
35 began to count them off, one by one, on the fingers
of his left hand, the waitress, whose name was Irma,
thought he was through eating and tried to take his
plate away. He stopped her. Prince Metternich (his
right thumb) presided over the Congress, and
40 Prince Talleyrand (the index finger) represented
France.
A party of four, two men and two women, came
into the restaurant, all talking at once, and took
possession of the center table nearest Lymie.
45 The women had shingled hair and short tight skirts
which exposed the underside of their knees when
they sat down. One of the women had the face of a
young boy but disguised by one trick or another
(rouge, lipstick, powder, wet bangs plastered against
50 the high forehead, and a pair of long pendent
earrings) to look like a woman of thirty-five, which
as a matter of fact she was. The men were older. They
laughed more than there seemed any occasion for,
while they were deciding between soup and shrimp
55 cocktail, and their laughter was too loud. But it was
the women’s voices, the terrible not quite sober pitch
of the women’s voices which caused Lymie to skim
over two whole pages without knowing what was on
them. Fortunately he realized this and went back.
60 Otherwise he might never have known about the
secret treaty concluded between England, France,
and Austria, when the pretensions of Prussia and
Russia, acting in concert, seemed to threaten a
renewal of the attack. The results of the Congress
65 were stated clearly at the bottom of page 67 and at
the top of page 68, but before Lymie got halfway
through them, a coat that he recognized as his
father’s was hung on the hook next to his chair.
Lymie closed the book and said, “I didn’t think you
70 were coming.”
Time is probably no more unkind to sporting
characters than it is to other people, but physical
decay unsustained by respectability is somehow more
noticeable. Mr. Peters’ hair was turning gray and his
75 scalp showed through on top. He had lost weight
also; he no longer filled out his clothes the way he
used to. His color was poor, and the flower had
disappeared from his buttonhole. In its place was an
American Legion button.
80 Apparently he himself was not aware that there
had been any change. He straightened his tie
self-consciously and when Irma handed him a menu,
he gestured with it so that the two women at the next
table would notice the diamond ring on the fourth
85 finger of his right hand. Both of these things, and
also the fact that his hands showed signs of the
manicurist, one can blame on the young man who
had his picture taken with a derby hat on the back of
his head, and also sitting with a girl in the curve of
90 the moon. The young man had never for one second
deserted Mr. Peters. He was always there, tugging at
Mr. Peters’ elbow, making him do things that were
not becoming in a man of forty-five.

Q. The main idea of the last paragraph is that Mr. Peters

Question is based on the following passage.
This passage is adapted from Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas. ©1938 by Harcourt, Inc. Here, Woolf considers the situation of women in English society.

Close at hand is a bridge over the River Thames,
an admirable vantage ground for us to make a
survey. The river flows beneath; barges pass, laden
with timber, bursting with corn; there on one side are
5 the domes and spires of the city; on the other,
Westminster and the Houses of Parliament. It is a
place to stand on by the hour, dreaming. But not
now. Now we are pressed for time. Now we are here
to consider facts; now we must fix our eyes upon the
10 procession—the procession of the sons of educated
men.
There they go, our brothers who have been
educated at public schools and universities,
mounting those steps, passing in and out of those
15 doors, ascending those pulpits, preaching, teaching,
administering justice, practising medicine,
transacting business, making money. It is a solemn
sight always—a procession, like a caravanserai
crossing a desert. . . . But now, for the past twenty
20 years or so, it is no longer a sight merely, a
photograph, or fresco scrawled upon the walls of
time, at which we can look with merely an esthetic
appreciation. For there, trapesing along at the tail
end of the procession, we go ourselves. And that
25 makes a difference. We who have looked so long at
the pageant in books, or from a curtained window
watched educated men leaving the house at about
nine-thirty to go to an office, returning to the house
at about six-thirty from an office, need look passively
30 no longer. We too can leave the house, can mount
those steps, pass in and out of those doors,... make
money, administer justice. . . . We who now agitate
these humble pens may in another century or two
speak from a pulpit. Nobody will dare contradict us
35 then; we shall be the mouthpieces of the divine
spirit—a solemn thought, is it not? Who can say
whether, as time goes on, we may not dress in
military uniform, with gold lace on our breasts,
swords at our sides, and something like the old
40 family coal-scuttle on our heads, save that that
venerable object was never decorated with plumes of
white horsehair. You laugh—indeed the shadow of
the private house still makes those dresses look a
little queer. We have worn private clothes so
45 long. . . . But we have not come here to laugh, or to
talk of fashions—men’s and women’s. We are here,
on the bridge, to ask ourselves certain questions.
And they are very important questions; and we have
very little time in which to answer them. The
50 questions that we have to ask and to answer about
that procession during this moment of transition are
so important that they may well change the lives of
all men and women for ever. For we have to ask
ourselves, here and now, do we wish to join that
55 procession, or don’t we? On what terms shall we join
that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the
procession of educated men? The moment is short; it
may last five years; ten years, or perhaps only a
matter of a few months longer.... But, you will
60 object, you have no time to think; you have your
battles to fight, your rent to pay, your bazaars to
organize. That excuse shall not serve you, Madam.
As you know from your own experience, and there
are facts that prove it, the daughters of educated men
65 have always done their thinking from hand to
mouth; not under green lamps at study tables in the
cloisters of secluded colleges. They have thought
while they stirred the pot, while they rocked the
cradle. It was thus that they won us the right to our
70 brand-new sixpence. It falls to us now to go on
thinking; how are we to spend that sixpence? Think
we must. Let us think in offices; in omnibuses; while
we are standing in the crowd watching Coronations
and Lord Mayor’s Shows; let us think . . . in the
75 gallery of the House of Commons; in the Law Courts;
let us think at baptisms and marriages and funerals.
Let us never cease from thinking—what is this
“civilization” in which we find ourselves? What are
these ceremonies and why should we take part in
80 them? What are these professions and why
should we make money out of them? Where in
short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of
educated men?

Q. Which choice most closely captures the meaning of the figurative “sixpence” referred to in lines 70 and 71?

Question is based on the following passage.
This passage is adapted from Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas. ©1938 by Harcourt, Inc. Here, Woolf considers the situation of women in English society.

Close at hand is a bridge over the River Thames,
an admirable vantage ground for us to make a
survey. The river flows beneath; barges pass, laden
with timber, bursting with corn; there on one side are
5 the domes and spires of the city; on the other,
Westminster and the Houses of Parliament. It is a
place to stand on by the hour, dreaming. But not
now. Now we are pressed for time. Now we are here
to consider facts; now we must fix our eyes upon the
10 procession—the procession of the sons of educated
men.
There they go, our brothers who have been
educated at public schools and universities,
mounting those steps, passing in and out of those
15 doors, ascending those pulpits, preaching, teaching,
administering justice, practising medicine,
transacting business, making money. It is a solemn
sight always—a procession, like a caravanserai
crossing a desert. . . . But now, for the past twenty
20 years or so, it is no longer a sight merely, a
photograph, or fresco scrawled upon the walls of
time, at which we can look with merely an esthetic
appreciation. For there, trapesing along at the tail
end of the procession, we go ourselves. And that
25 makes a difference. We who have looked so long at
the pageant in books, or from a curtained window
watched educated men leaving the house at about
nine-thirty to go to an office, returning to the house
at about six-thirty from an office, need look passively
30 no longer. We too can leave the house, can mount
those steps, pass in and out of those doors,... make
money, administer justice. . . . We who now agitate
these humble pens may in another century or two
speak from a pulpit. Nobody will dare contradict us
35 then; we shall be the mouthpieces of the divine
spirit—a solemn thought, is it not? Who can say
whether, as time goes on, we may not dress in
military uniform, with gold lace on our breasts,
swords at our sides, and something like the old
40 family coal-scuttle on our heads, save that that
venerable object was never decorated with plumes of
white horsehair. You laugh—indeed the shadow of
the private house still makes those dresses look a
little queer. We have worn private clothes so
45 long. . . . But we have not come here to laugh, or to
talk of fashions—men’s and women’s. We are here,
on the bridge, to ask ourselves certain questions.
And they are very important questions; and we have
very little time in which to answer them. The
50 questions that we have to ask and to answer about
that procession during this moment of transition are
so important that they may well change the lives of
all men and women for ever. For we have to ask
ourselves, here and now, do we wish to join that
55 procession, or don’t we? On what terms shall we join
that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the
procession of educated men? The moment is short; it
may last five years; ten years, or perhaps only a
matter of a few months longer.... But, you will
60 object, you have no time to think; you have your
battles to fight, your rent to pay, your bazaars to
organize. That excuse shall not serve you, Madam.
As you know from your own experience, and there
are facts that prove it, the daughters of educated men
65 have always done their thinking from hand to
mouth; not under green lamps at study tables in the
cloisters of secluded colleges. They have thought
while they stirred the pot, while they rocked the
cradle. It was thus that they won us the right to our
70 brand-new sixpence. It falls to us now to go on
thinking; how are we to spend that sixpence? Think
we must. Let us think in offices; in omnibuses; while
we are standing in the crowd watching Coronations
and Lord Mayor’s Shows; let us think . . . in the
75 gallery of the House of Commons; in the Law Courts;
let us think at baptisms and marriages and funerals.
Let us never cease from thinking—what is this
“civilization” in which we find ourselves? What are
these ceremonies and why should we take part in
80 them? What are these professions and why
should we make money out of them? Where in
short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of
educated men?

Q. Woolf characterizes the questions in lines 53-57 (“For we... men”) as both

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from a speech delivered in 1838 by Sara T. Smith at the Second Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women.
We are told that it is not within the “province of
woman,” to discuss the subject of slavery; that it is a
“political question,” and we are “stepping out of our
Line sphere,” when we take part in its discussion. It is not
5 true that it is merely a political question, it is likewise
a question of justice, of humanity, of morality, of
religion; a question which, while it involves
considerations of immense importance to the welfare
and prosperity of our country, enters deeply into the
10 home-concerns, the every-day feelings of millions of
our fellow beings. Whether the laborer shall receive
the reward of his labor, or be driven daily to
unrequited toil—whether he shall walk erect in the
dignity of conscious manhood, or be reckoned
15 among the beasts which perish—whether his bones
and sinews shall be his own, or another’s—whether
his child shall receive the protection of its natural
guardian, or be ranked among the live-stock of the
estate, to be disposed of as the caprice or interest of
20 the master may dictate—. . . these considerations are
all involved in the question of liberty or slavery.
And is a subject comprehending interests of such
magnitude, merely a “political question,” and one in
which woman “can take no part without losing
25 something of the modesty and gentleness which are
her most appropriate ornaments”? May not the
“ornament of a meek and quiet spirit” exist with an
upright mind and enlightened intellect, and must
woman necessarily be less gentle because her heart is
30 open to the claims of humanity, or less modest
because she feels for the degradation of her enslaved
sisters, and would stretch forth her hand for their
rescue?
By the Constitution of the United States, the
35 whole physical power of the North is pledged for the
suppression of domestic insurrections, and should
the slaves, maddened by oppression, endeavor to
shake off the yoke of the taskmaster, the men of the
North are bound to make common cause with the
40 tyrant, and put down, at the point of the bayonet,
every effort on the part of the slave, for the
attainment of his freedom. And when the father,
husband, son, and brother shall have left their homes
to mingle in the unholy warfare, “to become the
45 executioners of their brethren, or to fall themselves
by their hands,”1 will the mother, wife, daughter, and
sister feel that they have no interest in this subject?
Will it be easy to convince them that it is no concern
of theirs, that their homes are rendered desolate, and
50 their habitations the abodes of wretchedness?
Surely this consideration is of itself sufficient to
arouse the slumbering energies of woman, for the
overthrow of a system which thus threatens to lay in
ruins the fabric of her domestic happiness; and she
55 will not be deterred from the performance of her
duty to herself, her family, and her country, by the
cry of political question.
But admitting it to be a political question, have we
no interest in the welfare of our country? May we not
60 permit a thought to stray beyond the narrow limits of
our own family circle, and of the present hour? May
we not breathe a sigh over the miseries of our
countrymen, nor utter a word of remonstrance
against the unjust laws that are crushing them to the
65 earth? Must we witness “the headlong rage or
heedless folly,” with which our nation is rushing
onward to destruction, and not seek to arrest its
downward course? Shall we silently behold the land
which we love with all the heart-warm affection of
70 children, rendered a hissing and a reproach
throughout the world, by this system which is already
tolling the death-bell of her decease among the
nations? No: the events of the last two years have cast
their dark shadows before, overclouding the bright
75 prospects of the future, and shrouding the destinies
of our country in more than midnight gloom, and we
cannot remain inactive. Our country is as dear to us
as to the proudest statesman, and the more closely
our hearts cling to “our altars and our homes,” the
80 more fervent are our aspirations that every
inhabitant of our land may be protected in his
fireside enjoyments by just and equal laws; that the
foot of the tyrant may no longer invade the domestic
sanctuary, nor his hand tear asunder those whom
85 God himself has united by the most holy ties. Let our
course, then, still be onward!
1 A quotation from the Declaration of Independence

Q. How does Smith develop her argument about slavery as a “political question” (line 3) over the course of the passage?

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is from Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel’s Game. ©2008 by Dragonworks, S.L. Translation ©2009 by Lucia Graves. The narrator, a writer, recalls his childhood in early twentieth-century Barcelona.
Even then my only friends were made of paper
and ink. At school I had learned to read and write
long before the other children. Where my school
friends saw notches of ink on incomprehensible
5 pages, I saw light, streets, and people. Words and the
mystery of their hidden science fascinated me, and I
saw in them a key with which I could unlock a
boundless world, a safe haven from that home, those
streets, and those troubled days in which even I
10 could sense that only a limited fortune awaited me.
My father didn’t like to see books in the house.
There was something about them—apart from the
letters he could not decipher—that offended him.
He used to tell me that as soon as I was ten he would
15 send me off to work and that I’d better get rid of all
my scatterbrained ideas if I didn’t want to end up a
loser, a nobody. I used to hide my books under the
mattress and wait for him to go out or fall asleep so
that I could read. Once he caught me reading at night
20 and flew into a rage. He tore the book from my
hands and flung it out of the window.
“If I catch you wasting electricity again, reading
all this nonsense, you’ll be sorry.”
My father was not a miser and, despite the
25 hardships we suffered, whenever he could he gave me
a few coins so that I could buy myself some treats like
the other children. He was convinced that I spent
them on licorice sticks, sunflower seeds, or sweets,
but I would keep them in a coffee tin under the bed,
30 and when I’d collected four or five reales I’d secretly
rush out to buy myself a book.
My favorite place in the whole city was the
Sempere & Sons bookshop on Calle Santa Ana. It
smelled of old paper and dust and it was my
35 sanctuary, my refuge. The bookseller would let me sit
on a chair in a corner and read any book I liked to
my heart’s content. He hardly ever allowed me to pay
for the books he placed in my hands, but when he
wasn’t looking I’d leave the coins I’d managed to
40 collect on the counter before I left. It was only small
change—if I’d had to buy a book with that pittance, I
would probably have been able to afford only a
booklet of cigarette papers. When it was time for me
to leave, I would do so dragging my feet, a weight on
45 my soul. If it had been up to me, I would have stayed
there forever.
One Christmas Sempere gave me the best gift I
have ever received. It was an old volume, read and
experienced to the full.
50 “Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens,” I read
on the cover.
I was aware that Sempere knew a few authors who
frequented his establishment and, judging by the care
with which he handled the volume, I thought
55 perhaps this Mr. Dickens was one of them.
“A friend of yours?”
“A lifelong friend. And from now on, he’s your
friend too.”
That afternoon I took my new friend home,
60 hidden under my clothes so that my father wouldn’t
see it. It was a rainy winter, with days as gray as lead,
and I read Great Expectations about nine times,
partly because I had no other book at hand, partly
because I did not think there could be a better one in
65 the whole world and I was beginning to suspect that
Mr. Dickens had written it just for me. Soon I was
convinced that I didn’t want to do anything else in
life but learn to do what Mr. Dickens had done.

Q. It can reasonably be inferred from the passage that the main reason that the narrator considers Great Expectations to be the best gift he ever received is because

Which statement about striped cucumber beetles can most reasonably be inferred from the passage?

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is from Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel’s Game. ©2008 by Dragonworks, S.L. Translation ©2009 by Lucia Graves. The narrator, a writer, recalls his childhood in early twentieth-century Barcelona.
Even then my only friends were made of paper
and ink. At school I had learned to read and write
long before the other children. Where my school
friends saw notches of ink on incomprehensible
5 pages, I saw light, streets, and people. Words and the
mystery of their hidden science fascinated me, and I
saw in them a key with which I could unlock a
boundless world, a safe haven from that home, those
streets, and those troubled days in which even I
10 could sense that only a limited fortune awaited me.
My father didn’t like to see books in the house.
There was something about them—apart from the
letters he could not decipher—that offended him.
He used to tell me that as soon as I was ten he would
15 send me off to work and that I’d better get rid of all
my scatterbrained ideas if I didn’t want to end up a
loser, a nobody. I used to hide my books under the
mattress and wait for him to go out or fall asleep so
that I could read. Once he caught me reading at night
20 and flew into a rage. He tore the book from my
hands and flung it out of the window.
“If I catch you wasting electricity again, reading
all this nonsense, you’ll be sorry.”
My father was not a miser and, despite the
25 hardships we suffered, whenever he could he gave me
a few coins so that I could buy myself some treats like
the other children. He was convinced that I spent
them on licorice sticks, sunflower seeds, or sweets,
but I would keep them in a coffee tin under the bed,
30 and when I’d collected four or five reales I’d secretly
rush out to buy myself a book.
My favorite place in the whole city was the
Sempere & Sons bookshop on Calle Santa Ana. It
smelled of old paper and dust and it was my
35 sanctuary, my refuge. The bookseller would let me sit
on a chair in a corner and read any book I liked to
my heart’s content. He hardly ever allowed me to pay
for the books he placed in my hands, but when he
wasn’t looking I’d leave the coins I’d managed to
40 collect on the counter before I left. It was only small
change—if I’d had to buy a book with that pittance, I
would probably have been able to afford only a
booklet of cigarette papers. When it was time for me
to leave, I would do so dragging my feet, a weight on
45 my soul. If it had been up to me, I would have stayed
there forever.
One Christmas Sempere gave me the best gift I
have ever received. It was an old volume, read and
experienced to the full.
50 “Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens,” I read
on the cover.
I was aware that Sempere knew a few authors who
frequented his establishment and, judging by the care
with which he handled the volume, I thought
55 perhaps this Mr. Dickens was one of them.
“A friend of yours?”
“A lifelong friend. And from now on, he’s your
friend too.”
That afternoon I took my new friend home,
60 hidden under my clothes so that my father wouldn’t
see it. It was a rainy winter, with days as gray as lead,
and I read Great Expectations about nine times,
partly because I had no other book at hand, partly
because I did not think there could be a better one in
65 the whole world and I was beginning to suspect that
Mr. Dickens had written it just for me. Soon I was
convinced that I didn’t want to do anything else in
life but learn to do what Mr. Dickens had done.

Q. Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is from Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel’s Game. ©2008 by Dragonworks, S.L. Translation ©2009 by Lucia Graves. The narrator, a writer, recalls his childhood in early twentieth-century Barcelona.
Even then my only friends were made of paper
and ink. At school I had learned to read and write
long before the other children. Where my school
friends saw notches of ink on incomprehensible
5 pages, I saw light, streets, and people. Words and the
mystery of their hidden science fascinated me, and I
saw in them a key with which I could unlock a
boundless world, a safe haven from that home, those
streets, and those troubled days in which even I
10 could sense that only a limited fortune awaited me.
My father didn’t like to see books in the house.
There was something about them—apart from the
letters he could not decipher—that offended him.
He used to tell me that as soon as I was ten he would
15 send me off to work and that I’d better get rid of all
my scatterbrained ideas if I didn’t want to end up a
loser, a nobody. I used to hide my books under the
mattress and wait for him to go out or fall asleep so
that I could read. Once he caught me reading at night
20 and flew into a rage. He tore the book from my
hands and flung it out of the window.
“If I catch you wasting electricity again, reading
all this nonsense, you’ll be sorry.”
My father was not a miser and, despite the
25 hardships we suffered, whenever he could he gave me
a few coins so that I could buy myself some treats like
the other children. He was convinced that I spent
them on licorice sticks, sunflower seeds, or sweets,
but I would keep them in a coffee tin under the bed,
30 and when I’d collected four or five reales I’d secretly
rush out to buy myself a book.
My favorite place in the whole city was the
Sempere & Sons bookshop on Calle Santa Ana. It
smelled of old paper and dust and it was my
35 sanctuary, my refuge. The bookseller would let me sit
on a chair in a corner and read any book I liked to
my heart’s content. He hardly ever allowed me to pay
for the books he placed in my hands, but when he
wasn’t looking I’d leave the coins I’d managed to
40 collect on the counter before I left. It was only small
change—if I’d had to buy a book with that pittance, I
would probably have been able to afford only a
booklet of cigarette papers. When it was time for me
to leave, I would do so dragging my feet, a weight on
45 my soul. If it had been up to me, I would have stayed
there forever.
One Christmas Sempere gave me the best gift I
have ever received. It was an old volume, read and
experienced to the full.
50 “Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens,” I read
on the cover.
I was aware that Sempere knew a few authors who
frequented his establishment and, judging by the care
with which he handled the volume, I thought
55 perhaps this Mr. Dickens was one of them.
“A friend of yours?”
“A lifelong friend. And from now on, he’s your
friend too.”
That afternoon I took my new friend home,
60 hidden under my clothes so that my father wouldn’t
see it. It was a rainy winter, with days as gray as lead,
and I read Great Expectations about nine times,
partly because I had no other book at hand, partly
because I did not think there could be a better one in
65 the whole world and I was beginning to suspect that
Mr. Dickens had written it just for me. Soon I was
convinced that I didn’t want to do anything else in
life but learn to do what Mr. Dickens had done.

Q. Over the course of the passage, the main focus shiftsfrom a

Question is based on the followingpassage.

This passage is adapted from William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf. ©1959 by William Maxwell. Originally published in 1945.
The Alcazar Restaurant was on Sheridan Road
near Devon Avenue. It was long and narrow, with
tables for two along the walls and tables for four
down the middle. The decoration was art moderne,
5 except for the series of murals depicting the four
seasons, and the sick ferns in the front window.
Lymie sat down at the second table from the cash
register, and ordered his dinner. The history book,
which he propped against the catsup and the glass
10 sugar bowl, had been used by others before him.
Blank pages front and back were filled in with maps,
drawings, dates, comic cartoons, and organs of the
body; also with names and messages no longer clear
and never absolutely legible. On nearly every other
15 page there was some marginal notation, either in ink
or in very hard pencil. And unless someone had
upset a glass of water, the marks on page 177 were
from tears.
While Lymie read about the Peace of Paris, signed
20 on the thirtieth of May, 1814, between France and
the Allied powers, his right hand managed again and
again to bring food up to his mouth. Sometimes he
chewed, sometimes he swallowed whole the food that
he had no idea he was eating. The Congress of
25 Vienna met, with some allowance for delays, early in
November of the same year, and all the powers
engaged in the war on either side sent
plenipotentiaries. It was by far the most splendid and
important assembly ever convoked to discuss and
30 determine the affairs of Europe. The Emperor of
Russia, the King of Prussia, the Kings of Bavaria,
Denmark, and Wurttemberg, all were present in
person at the court of the Emperor Francis I in the
Austrian capital. When Lymie put down his fork and
35 began to count them off, one by one, on the fingers
of his left hand, the waitress, whose name was Irma,
thought he was through eating and tried to take his
plate away. He stopped her. Prince Metternich (his
right thumb) presided over the Congress, and
40 Prince Talleyrand (the index finger) represented
France.
A party of four, two men and two women, came
into the restaurant, all talking at once, and took
possession of the center table nearest Lymie.
45 The women had shingled hair and short tight skirts
which exposed the underside of their knees when
they sat down. One of the women had the face of a
young boy but disguised by one trick or another
(rouge, lipstick, powder, wet bangs plastered against
50 the high forehead, and a pair of long pendent
earrings) to look like a woman of thirty-five, which
as a matter of fact she was. The men were older. They
laughed more than there seemed any occasion for,
while they were deciding between soup and shrimp
55 cocktail, and their laughter was too loud. But it was
the women’s voices, the terrible not quite sober pitch
of the women’s voices which caused Lymie to skim
over two whole pages without knowing what was on
them. Fortunately he realized this and went back.
60 Otherwise he might never have known about the
secret treaty concluded between England, France,
and Austria, when the pretensions of Prussia and
Russia, acting in concert, seemed to threaten a
renewal of the attack. The results of the Congress
65 were stated clearly at the bottom of page 67 and at
the top of page 68, but before Lymie got halfway
through them, a coat that he recognized as his
father’s was hung on the hook next to his chair.
Lymie closed the book and said, “I didn’t think you
70 were coming.”
Time is probably no more unkind to sporting
characters than it is to other people, but physical
decay unsustained by respectability is somehow more
noticeable. Mr. Peters’ hair was turning gray and his
75 scalp showed through on top. He had lost weight
also; he no longer filled out his clothes the way he
used to. His color was poor, and the flower had
disappeared from his buttonhole. In its place was an
American Legion button.
80 Apparently he himself was not aware that there
had been any change. He straightened his tie
self-consciously and when Irma handed him a menu,
he gestured with it so that the two women at the next
table would notice the diamond ring on the fourth
85 finger of his right hand. Both of these things, and
also the fact that his hands showed signs of the
manicurist, one can blame on the young man who
had his picture taken with a derby hat on the back of
his head, and also sitting with a girl in the curve of
90 the moon. The young man had never for one second
deserted Mr. Peters. He was always there, tugging at
Mr. Peters’ elbow, making him do things that were
not becoming in a man of forty-five.

Q. Lymie’s primary impression of the “party of four” (line 42) is that they

Question is based on the followingpassage.

This passage is adapted from William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf. ©1959 by William Maxwell. Originally published in 1945.
The Alcazar Restaurant was on Sheridan Road
near Devon Avenue. It was long and narrow, with
tables for two along the walls and tables for four
down the middle. The decoration was art moderne,
5 except for the series of murals depicting the four
seasons, and the sick ferns in the front window.
Lymie sat down at the second table from the cash
register, and ordered his dinner. The history book,
which he propped against the catsup and the glass
10 sugar bowl, had been used by others before him.
Blank pages front and back were filled in with maps,
drawings, dates, comic cartoons, and organs of the
body; also with names and messages no longer clear
and never absolutely legible. On nearly every other
15 page there was some marginal notation, either in ink
or in very hard pencil. And unless someone had
upset a glass of water, the marks on page 177 were
from tears.
While Lymie read about the Peace of Paris, signed
20 on the thirtieth of May, 1814, between France and
the Allied powers, his right hand managed again and
again to bring food up to his mouth. Sometimes he
chewed, sometimes he swallowed whole the food that
he had no idea he was eating. The Congress of
25 Vienna met, with some allowance for delays, early in
November of the same year, and all the powers
engaged in the war on either side sent
plenipotentiaries. It was by far the most splendid and
important assembly ever convoked to discuss and
30 determine the affairs of Europe. The Emperor of
Russia, the King of Prussia, the Kings of Bavaria,
Denmark, and Wurttemberg, all were present in
person at the court of the Emperor Francis I in the
Austrian capital. When Lymie put down his fork and
35 began to count them off, one by one, on the fingers
of his left hand, the waitress, whose name was Irma,
thought he was through eating and tried to take his
plate away. He stopped her. Prince Metternich (his
right thumb) presided over the Congress, and
40 Prince Talleyrand (the index finger) represented
France.
A party of four, two men and two women, came
into the restaurant, all talking at once, and took
possession of the center table nearest Lymie.
45 The women had shingled hair and short tight skirts
which exposed the underside of their knees when
they sat down. One of the women had the face of a
young boy but disguised by one trick or another
(rouge, lipstick, powder, wet bangs plastered against
50 the high forehead, and a pair of long pendent
earrings) to look like a woman of thirty-five, which
as a matter of fact she was. The men were older. They
laughed more than there seemed any occasion for,
while they were deciding between soup and shrimp
55 cocktail, and their laughter was too loud. But it was
the women’s voices, the terrible not quite sober pitch
of the women’s voices which caused Lymie to skim
over two whole pages without knowing what was on
them. Fortunately he realized this and went back.
60 Otherwise he might never have known about the
secret treaty concluded between England, France,
and Austria, when the pretensions of Prussia and
Russia, acting in concert, seemed to threaten a
renewal of the attack. The results of the Congress
65 were stated clearly at the bottom of page 67 and at
the top of page 68, but before Lymie got halfway
through them, a coat that he recognized as his
father’s was hung on the hook next to his chair.
Lymie closed the book and said, “I didn’t think you
70 were coming.”
Time is probably no more unkind to sporting
characters than it is to other people, but physical
decay unsustained by respectability is somehow more
noticeable. Mr. Peters’ hair was turning gray and his
75 scalp showed through on top. He had lost weight
also; he no longer filled out his clothes the way he
used to. His color was poor, and the flower had
disappeared from his buttonhole. In its place was an
American Legion button.
80 Apparently he himself was not aware that there
had been any change. He straightened his tie
self-consciously and when Irma handed him a menu,
he gestured with it so that the two women at the next
table would notice the diamond ring on the fourth
85 finger of his right hand. Both of these things, and
also the fact that his hands showed signs of the
manicurist, one can blame on the young man who
had his picture taken with a derby hat on the back of
his head, and also sitting with a girl in the curve of
90 the moon. The young man had never for one second
deserted Mr. Peters. He was always there, tugging at
Mr. Peters’ elbow, making him do things that were
not becoming in a man of forty-five.

Q. Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Amy Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter. ©2001 by Amy Tan.
At last, Old Widow Lau was done haggling with
the driver and we stepped inside Father’s shop. It was
north-facing, quite dim inside, and perhaps this was
Line why Father did not see us at first. He was busy with a
5 customer, a man who was distinguished-looking, like
the scholars of two decades before. The two men
were bent over a glass case, discussing the different
qualities of inksticks. Big Uncle welcomed us and
invited us to be seated. From his formal tone, I knew
10 he did not recognize who we were. So I called his
name in a shy voice. And he squinted at me, then
laughed and announced our arrival to Little Uncle,
who apologized many times for not rushing over
sooner to greet us. They rushed us to be seated at one
15 of two tea tables for customers. Old Widow Lau
refused their invitation three times, exclaiming that
my father and uncles must be too busy for visitors.
She made weak efforts to leave. On the fourth
insistence, we finally sat. Then Little Uncle brought
20 us hot tea and sweet oranges, as well as bamboo
latticework fans with which to cool ourselves.
I tried to notice everything so I could later tell
GaoLing what I had seen, and tease out her envy. The
floors of the shop were of dark wood, polished and
25 clean, no dirty footprints, even though this was
during the dustiest part of the summer. And along
the walls were display cases made of wood and glass.
The glass was very shiny and not one pane was
broken. Within those glass cases were our silk-
30 wrapped boxes, all our hard work. They looked so
much nicer than they had in the ink-making studio
at Immortal Heart village.
I saw that Father had opened several of the boxes.
He set sticks and cakes and other shapes on a silk
35 cloth covering a glass case that served as a table on
which he and the customer leaned. First he pointed
to a stick with a top shaped like a fairy boat and said
with graceful importance, “Your writing will flow as
smoothly as a keel cutting through a glassy lake.”
40 He picked up a bird shape: “Your mind will soar into
the clouds of higher thought.” He waved toward a
row of ink cakes embellished with designs of peonies
and bamboo: “Your ledgers will blossom into
abundance while bamboo surrounds your quiet
45 mind.”
As he said this, Precious Auntie came back into
mind. I was remembering how she taught me that
everything, even ink, had a purpose and a meaning:
Good ink cannot be the quick kind, ready to pour out
50 of a bottle. You can never be an artist if your work
comes without effort. That is the problem of modern
ink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You
simply write what is swimming on the top of your
brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead
55 leaves, and mosquito spawn. But when you push an
inkstick along an inkstone, you take the first step to
cleansing your mind and your heart. You push and
you ask yourself, What are my intentions? What is in
my heart that matches my mind?
60 I remembered this, and yet that day in the ink
shop, I listened to what Father was saying, and his
words became far more important than anything
Precious Auntie had thought. “Look here,” Father
said to his customer, and I looked. He held up an
65 inkstick and rotated it in the light. “See? It’s the right
hue, purple-black, not brown or gray like the cheap
brands you might find down the street. And listen to
this.” And I heard a sound as clean and pure as a
small silver bell. “The high-pitched tone tells you that
70 the soot is very fine, as smooth as the sliding banks of
old rivers. And the scent—can you smell the balance
of strength and delicacy, the musical notes of the
ink’s perfume? Expensive, and everyone who sees
you using it will know that it was well worth the high
75 price.”
I was very proud to hear Father speak of our
family’s ink this way.

Q. Which choice best summarizes the passage?

Question is based on the following passage.
This passage is adapted from Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas. ©1938 by Harcourt, Inc. Here, Woolf considers the situation of women in English society.

Close at hand is a bridge over the River Thames,
an admirable vantage ground for us to make a
survey. The river flows beneath; barges pass, laden
with timber, bursting with corn; there on one side are
5 the domes and spires of the city; on the other,
Westminster and the Houses of Parliament. It is a
place to stand on by the hour, dreaming. But not
now. Now we are pressed for time. Now we are here
to consider facts; now we must fix our eyes upon the
10 procession—the procession of the sons of educated
men.
There they go, our brothers who have been
educated at public schools and universities,
mounting those steps, passing in and out of those
15 doors, ascending those pulpits, preaching, teaching,
administering justice, practising medicine,
transacting business, making money. It is a solemn
sight always—a procession, like a caravanserai
crossing a desert. . . . But now, for the past twenty
20 years or so, it is no longer a sight merely, a
photograph, or fresco scrawled upon the walls of
time, at which we can look with merely an esthetic
appreciation. For there, trapesing along at the tail
end of the procession, we go ourselves. And that
25 makes a difference. We who have looked so long at
the pageant in books, or from a curtained window
watched educated men leaving the house at about
nine-thirty to go to an office, returning to the house
at about six-thirty from an office, need look passively
30 no longer. We too can leave the house, can mount
those steps, pass in and out of those doors,... make
money, administer justice. . . . We who now agitate
these humble pens may in another century or two
speak from a pulpit. Nobody will dare contradict us
35 then; we shall be the mouthpieces of the divine
spirit—a solemn thought, is it not? Who can say
whether, as time goes on, we may not dress in
military uniform, with gold lace on our breasts,
swords at our sides, and something like the old
40 family coal-scuttle on our heads, save that that
venerable object was never decorated with plumes of
white horsehair. You laugh—indeed the shadow of
the private house still makes those dresses look a
little queer. We have worn private clothes so
45 long. . . . But we have not come here to laugh, or to
talk of fashions—men’s and women’s. We are here,
on the bridge, to ask ourselves certain questions.
And they are very important questions; and we have
very little time in which to answer them. The
50 questions that we have to ask and to answer about
that procession during this moment of transition are
so important that they may well change the lives of
all men and women for ever. For we have to ask
ourselves, here and now, do we wish to join that
55 procession, or don’t we? On what terms shall we join
that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the
procession of educated men? The moment is short; it
may last five years; ten years, or perhaps only a
matter of a few months longer.... But, you will
60 object, you have no time to think; you have your
battles to fight, your rent to pay, your bazaars to
organize. That excuse shall not serve you, Madam.
As you know from your own experience, and there
are facts that prove it, the daughters of educated men
65 have always done their thinking from hand to
mouth; not under green lamps at study tables in the
cloisters of secluded colleges. They have thought
while they stirred the pot, while they rocked the
cradle. It was thus that they won us the right to our
70 brand-new sixpence. It falls to us now to go on
thinking; how are we to spend that sixpence? Think
we must. Let us think in offices; in omnibuses; while
we are standing in the crowd watching Coronations
and Lord Mayor’s Shows; let us think . . . in the
75 gallery of the House of Commons; in the Law Courts;
let us think at baptisms and marriages and funerals.
Let us never cease from thinking—what is this
“civilization” in which we find ourselves? What are
these ceremonies and why should we take part in
80 them? What are these professions and why
should we make money out of them? Where in
short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of
educated men?

Q. The main purpose of the passage is to

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. ©2011 by Joshua Foer.

In 2000, a neuroscientist at University College
London named Eleanor Maguire wanted to find out
what effect, if any, all that driving around the
labyrinthine streets of London might have on
5 cabbies’ brains. When she brought sixteen taxi
drivers into her lab and examined their brains in an
MRI scanner, she found one surprising and
important difference. The right posterior
hippocampus, a part of the brain known to be
10 involved in spatial navigation, was 7 percent larger
than normal in the cabbies—a small but very
significant difference. Maguire concluded that all of
that way-finding around London had physically
altered the gross structure of their brains. The more
15 years a cabbie had been on the road, the more
pronounced the effect.
The brain is a mutable organ, capable—within
limits—of reorganizing itself and readapting to new
kinds of sensory input, a phenomenon known as
20 neuroplasticity. It had long been thought that the
adult brain was incapable of spawning new
neurons—that while learning caused synapses to
rearrange themselves and new links between brain
cells to form, the brain’s basic anatomical structure
25 was more or less static. Maguire’s study suggested the
old inherited wisdom was simply not true.
After her groundbreaking study of London
cabbies, Maguire decided to turn her attention to
mental athletes. She teamed up with Elizabeth
30 Valentine and John Wilding, authors of the academic
monograph Superior Memory, to study ten
individuals who had finished near the top of the
World Memory Championship. They wanted to find
out if the memorizers’ brains were—like the London
35 cabbies’—structurally different from the rest of ours,
or if they were somehow just making better use of
memory abilities that we all possess.
The researchers put both the mental athletes and a
group of matched control subjects into MRI scanners
40 and asked them to memorize three-digit numbers,
black-and-white photographs of people’s faces, and
magnified images of snowflakes, while their brains
were being scanned. Maguire and her team thought it
was possible that they might discover anatomical
45 differences in the brains of the memory champs,
evidence that their brains had somehow reorganized
themselves in the process of doing all that intensive
remembering. But when the researchers reviewed the
imaging data, not a single significant structural
50 difference turned up. The brains of the mental
athletes appeared to be indistinguishable from those
of the control subjects. What’s more, on every single
test of general cognitive ability, the mental athletes’
scores came back well within the normal range. The
55 memory champs weren’t smarter, and they didn’t
have special brains.
But there was one telling difference between the
brains of the mental athletes and the control subjects:
When the researchers looked at which parts of the
60 brain were lighting up when the mental athletes were
memorizing, they found that they were activating
entirely different circuitry. According to the
functional MRIs [fMRIs], regions of the brain that
were less active in the control subjects seemed to be
65 working in overdrive for the mental athletes.
Surprisingly, when the mental athletes were
learning new information, they were engaging
several regions of the brain known to be involved in
two specific tasks: visual memory and spatial
70 navigation, including the same right posterior
hippocampal region that the London cabbies had
enlarged with all their daily way-finding. At first
glance, this wouldn’t seem to make any sense.
Why would mental athletes be conjuring images in
75 their mind’s eye when they were trying to learn
three-digit numbers? Why should they be navigating
like London cabbies when they’re supposed to be
remembering the shapes of snowflakes?
Maguire and her team asked the mental athletes
80 to describe exactly what was going through their
minds as they memorized. The mental athletes said
they were consciously converting the information
they were being asked to memorize into images, and
distributing those images along familiar spatial
85 journeys. They weren’t doing this automatically, or
because it was an inborn talent they’d nurtured since
childhood. Rather, the unexpected patterns of neural
activity that Maguire’s fMRIs turned up were the
result of training and practice.

Q. According to the passage, Maguire’s findingsregarding taxi drivers are significant because they

Question is based on the followingpassage.

This passage is adapted from William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf. ©1959 by William Maxwell. Originally published in 1945.
The Alcazar Restaurant was on Sheridan Road
near Devon Avenue. It was long and narrow, with
tables for two along the walls and tables for four
down the middle. The decoration was art moderne,
5 except for the series of murals depicting the four
seasons, and the sick ferns in the front window.
Lymie sat down at the second table from the cash
register, and ordered his dinner. The history book,
which he propped against the catsup and the glass
10 sugar bowl, had been used by others before him.
Blank pages front and back were filled in with maps,
drawings, dates, comic cartoons, and organs of the
body; also with names and messages no longer clear
and never absolutely legible. On nearly every other
15 page there was some marginal notation, either in ink
or in very hard pencil. And unless someone had
upset a glass of water, the marks on page 177 were
from tears.
While Lymie read about the Peace of Paris, signed
20 on the thirtieth of May, 1814, between France and
the Allied powers, his right hand managed again and
again to bring food up to his mouth. Sometimes he
chewed, sometimes he swallowed whole the food that
he had no idea he was eating. The Congress of
25 Vienna met, with some allowance for delays, early in
November of the same year, and all the powers
engaged in the war on either side sent
plenipotentiaries. It was by far the most splendid and
important assembly ever convoked to discuss and
30 determine the affairs of Europe. The Emperor of
Russia, the King of Prussia, the Kings of Bavaria,
Denmark, and Wurttemberg, all were present in
person at the court of the Emperor Francis I in the
Austrian capital. When Lymie put down his fork and
35 began to count them off, one by one, on the fingers
of his left hand, the waitress, whose name was Irma,
thought he was through eating and tried to take his
plate away. He stopped her. Prince Metternich (his
right thumb) presided over the Congress, and
40 Prince Talleyrand (the index finger) represented
France.
A party of four, two men and two women, came
into the restaurant, all talking at once, and took
possession of the center table nearest Lymie.
45 The women had shingled hair and short tight skirts
which exposed the underside of their knees when
they sat down. One of the women had the face of a
young boy but disguised by one trick or another
(rouge, lipstick, powder, wet bangs plastered against
50 the high forehead, and a pair of long pendent
earrings) to look like a woman of thirty-five, which
as a matter of fact she was. The men were older. They
laughed more than there seemed any occasion for,
while they were deciding between soup and shrimp
55 cocktail, and their laughter was too loud. But it was
the women’s voices, the terrible not quite sober pitch
of the women’s voices which caused Lymie to skim
over two whole pages without knowing what was on
them. Fortunately he realized this and went back.
60 Otherwise he might never have known about the
secret treaty concluded between England, France,
and Austria, when the pretensions of Prussia and
Russia, acting in concert, seemed to threaten a
renewal of the attack. The results of the Congress
65 were stated clearly at the bottom of page 67 and at
the top of page 68, but before Lymie got halfway
through them, a coat that he recognized as his
father’s was hung on the hook next to his chair.
Lymie closed the book and said, “I didn’t think you
70 were coming.”
Time is probably no more unkind to sporting
characters than it is to other people, but physical
decay unsustained by respectability is somehow more
noticeable. Mr. Peters’ hair was turning gray and his
75 scalp showed through on top. He had lost weight
also; he no longer filled out his clothes the way he
used to. His color was poor, and the flower had
disappeared from his buttonhole. In its place was an
American Legion button.
80 Apparently he himself was not aware that there
had been any change. He straightened his tie
self-consciously and when Irma handed him a menu,
he gestured with it so that the two women at the next
table would notice the diamond ring on the fourth
85 finger of his right hand. Both of these things, and
also the fact that his hands showed signs of the
manicurist, one can blame on the young man who
had his picture taken with a derby hat on the back of
his head, and also sitting with a girl in the curve of
90 the moon. The young man had never for one second
deserted Mr. Peters. He was always there, tugging at
Mr. Peters’ elbow, making him do things that were
not becoming in a man of forty-five.

Q. Which choice best supports the conclusion that Mr. Peters wants to attract attention?

Question is based on the followingpassage.

This passage is adapted from William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf. ©1959 by William Maxwell. Originally published in 1945.
The Alcazar Restaurant was on Sheridan Road
near Devon Avenue. It was long and narrow, with
tables for two along the walls and tables for four
down the middle. The decoration was art moderne,
5 except for the series of murals depicting the four
seasons, and the sick ferns in the front window.
Lymie sat down at the second table from the cash
register, and ordered his dinner. The history book,
which he propped against the catsup and the glass
10 sugar bowl, had been used by others before him.
Blank pages front and back were filled in with maps,
drawings, dates, comic cartoons, and organs of the
body; also with names and messages no longer clear
and never absolutely legible. On nearly every other
15 page there was some marginal notation, either in ink
or in very hard pencil. And unless someone had
upset a glass of water, the marks on page 177 were
from tears.
While Lymie read about the Peace of Paris, signed
20 on the thirtieth of May, 1814, between France and
the Allied powers, his right hand managed again and
again to bring food up to his mouth. Sometimes he
chewed, sometimes he swallowed whole the food that
he had no idea he was eating. The Congress of
25 Vienna met, with some allowance for delays, early in
November of the same year, and all the powers
engaged in the war on either side sent
plenipotentiaries. It was by far the most splendid and
important assembly ever convoked to discuss and
30 determine the affairs of Europe. The Emperor of
Russia, the King of Prussia, the Kings of Bavaria,
Denmark, and Wurttemberg, all were present in
person at the court of the Emperor Francis I in the
Austrian capital. When Lymie put down his fork and
35 began to count them off, one by one, on the fingers
of his left hand, the waitress, whose name was Irma,
thought he was through eating and tried to take his
plate away. He stopped her. Prince Metternich (his
right thumb) presided over the Congress, and
40 Prince Talleyrand (the index finger) represented
France.
A party of four, two men and two women, came
into the restaurant, all talking at once, and took
possession of the center table nearest Lymie.
45 The women had shingled hair and short tight skirts
which exposed the underside of their knees when
they sat down. One of the women had the face of a
young boy but disguised by one trick or another
(rouge, lipstick, powder, wet bangs plastered against
50 the high forehead, and a pair of long pendent
earrings) to look like a woman of thirty-five, which
as a matter of fact she was. The men were older. They
laughed more than there seemed any occasion for,
while they were deciding between soup and shrimp
55 cocktail, and their laughter was too loud. But it was
the women’s voices, the terrible not quite sober pitch
of the women’s voices which caused Lymie to skim
over two whole pages without knowing what was on
them. Fortunately he realized this and went back.
60 Otherwise he might never have known about the
secret treaty concluded between England, France,
and Austria, when the pretensions of Prussia and
Russia, acting in concert, seemed to threaten a
renewal of the attack. The results of the Congress
65 were stated clearly at the bottom of page 67 and at
the top of page 68, but before Lymie got halfway
through them, a coat that he recognized as his
father’s was hung on the hook next to his chair.
Lymie closed the book and said, “I didn’t think you
70 were coming.”
Time is probably no more unkind to sporting
characters than it is to other people, but physical
decay unsustained by respectability is somehow more
noticeable. Mr. Peters’ hair was turning gray and his
75 scalp showed through on top. He had lost weight
also; he no longer filled out his clothes the way he
used to. His color was poor, and the flower had
disappeared from his buttonhole. In its place was an
American Legion button.
80 Apparently he himself was not aware that there
had been any change. He straightened his tie
self-consciously and when Irma handed him a menu,
he gestured with it so that the two women at the next
table would notice the diamond ring on the fourth
85 finger of his right hand. Both of these things, and
also the fact that his hands showed signs of the
manicurist, one can blame on the young man who
had his picture taken with a derby hat on the back of
his head, and also sitting with a girl in the curve of
90 the moon. The young man had never for one second
deserted Mr. Peters. He was always there, tugging at
Mr. Peters’ elbow, making him do things that were
not becoming in a man of forty-five.

Q. Over the course of the passage, the primary focusshifts from

Question is based on the followingpassage.

This passage is adapted from William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf. ©1959 by William Maxwell. Originally published in 1945.
The Alcazar Restaurant was on Sheridan Road
near Devon Avenue. It was long and narrow, with
tables for two along the walls and tables for four
down the middle. The decoration was art moderne,
5 except for the series of murals depicting the four
seasons, and the sick ferns in the front window.
Lymie sat down at the second table from the cash
register, and ordered his dinner. The history book,
which he propped against the catsup and the glass
10 sugar bowl, had been used by others before him.
Blank pages front and back were filled in with maps,
drawings, dates, comic cartoons, and organs of the
body; also with names and messages no longer clear
and never absolutely legible. On nearly every other
15 page there was some marginal notation, either in ink
or in very hard pencil. And unless someone had
upset a glass of water, the marks on page 177 were
from tears.
While Lymie read about the Peace of Paris, signed
20 on the thirtieth of May, 1814, between France and
the Allied powers, his right hand managed again and
again to bring food up to his mouth. Sometimes he
chewed, sometimes he swallowed whole the food that
he had no idea he was eating. The Congress of
25 Vienna met, with some allowance for delays, early in
November of the same year, and all the powers
engaged in the war on either side sent
plenipotentiaries. It was by far the most splendid and
important assembly ever convoked to discuss and
30 determine the affairs of Europe. The Emperor of
Russia, the King of Prussia, the Kings of Bavaria,
Denmark, and Wurttemberg, all were present in
person at the court of the Emperor Francis I in the
Austrian capital. When Lymie put down his fork and
35 began to count them off, one by one, on the fingers
of his left hand, the waitress, whose name was Irma,
thought he was through eating and tried to take his
plate away. He stopped her. Prince Metternich (his
right thumb) presided over the Congress, and
40 Prince Talleyrand (the index finger) represented
France.
A party of four, two men and two women, came
into the restaurant, all talking at once, and took
possession of the center table nearest Lymie.
45 The women had shingled hair and short tight skirts
which exposed the underside of their knees when
they sat down. One of the women had the face of a
young boy but disguised by one trick or another
(rouge, lipstick, powder, wet bangs plastered against
50 the high forehead, and a pair of long pendent
earrings) to look like a woman of thirty-five, which
as a matter of fact she was. The men were older. They
laughed more than there seemed any occasion for,
while they were deciding between soup and shrimp
55 cocktail, and their laughter was too loud. But it was
the women’s voices, the terrible not quite sober pitch
of the women’s voices which caused Lymie to skim
over two whole pages without knowing what was on
them. Fortunately he realized this and went back.
60 Otherwise he might never have known about the
secret treaty concluded between England, France,
and Austria, when the pretensions of Prussia and
Russia, acting in concert, seemed to threaten a
renewal of the attack. The results of the Congress
65 were stated clearly at the bottom of page 67 and at
the top of page 68, but before Lymie got halfway
through them, a coat that he recognized as his
father’s was hung on the hook next to his chair.
Lymie closed the book and said, “I didn’t think you
70 were coming.”
Time is probably no more unkind to sporting
characters than it is to other people, but physical
decay unsustained by respectability is somehow more
noticeable. Mr. Peters’ hair was turning gray and his
75 scalp showed through on top. He had lost weight
also; he no longer filled out his clothes the way he
used to. His color was poor, and the flower had
disappeared from his buttonhole. In its place was an
American Legion button.
80 Apparently he himself was not aware that there
had been any change. He straightened his tie
self-consciously and when Irma handed him a menu,
he gestured with it so that the two women at the next
table would notice the diamond ring on the fourth
85 finger of his right hand. Both of these things, and
also the fact that his hands showed signs of the
manicurist, one can blame on the young man who
had his picture taken with a derby hat on the back of
his head, and also sitting with a girl in the curve of
90 the moon. The young man had never for one second
deserted Mr. Peters. He was always there, tugging at
Mr. Peters’ elbow, making him do things that were
not becoming in a man of forty-five.

Q. The primary impression created by the narrator’s description of Mr. Peters in lines 74-79 is that he is

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from MacDonald Harris, The Balloonist. ©2011 by The Estate of Donald Heiney. During the summer of 1897, the narrator of this story, afictional Swedish scientist, has set out for the North Pole in a hydrogen powered balloon.

My emotions are complicated and not
readily verifiable. I feel a vast yearning that is
simultaneously a pleasure and a pain. I am certain
of the consummation of this yearning, but I don’t
5 know yet what form it will take, since I do not
understand quite what it is that the yearning desires.
For the first time there is borne in upon me the full
truth of what I myself said to the doctor only an hour
ago: that my motives in this undertaking are not
10 entirely clear. For years, for a lifetime, the machinery
of my destiny has worked in secret to prepare for this
moment; its clockwork has moved exactly toward
this time and place and no other. Rising slowly from
the earth that bore me and gave me sustenance, I am
15 carried helplessly toward an uninhabited and hostile,
or at best indifferent, part of the earth, littered with
the bones of explorers and the wrecks of ships, frozen
supply caches, messages scrawled with chilled fingers
and hidden in cairns that no eye will ever see.
20 Nobody has succeeded in this thing, and many have
died. Yet in freely willing this enterprise, in choosing
this moment and no other when the south wind
will carry me exactly northward at a velocity of
eight knots, I have converted the machinery of my
25 fate into the servant of my will. All this I understand,
as I understand each detail of the technique by which
this is carried out. What I don’t understand is why I
am so intent on going to this particular place. Who
wants the North Pole! What good is it! Can you eat
30 it? Will it carry you from Gothenburg to Malmö like
a railway? The Danish ministers have declared from
their pulpits that participation in polar expeditions is
beneficial to the soul’s eternal well-being, or so I read
in a newspaper. It isn’t clear how this doctrine is to
35 be interpreted, except that the Pole is something
difficult or impossible to attain which must
nevertheless be sought for, because man is
condemned to seek out and know everything
whether or not the knowledge gives him pleasure. In
40 short, it is the same unthinking lust for knowledge
that drove our First Parents out of the garden.
And suppose you were to find it in spite of all, this
wonderful place that everybody is so anxious to stand
on! What would you find? Exactly nothing.
45 A point precisely identical to all the others in a
completely featureless wasteland stretching around it
for hundreds of miles. It is an abstraction, a
mathematical fiction. No one but a Swedish madman
could take the slightest interest in it. Here I am. The
50 wind is still from the south, bearing us steadily
northward at the speed of a trotting dog. Behind us,
perhaps forever, lie the Cities of Men with their
teacups and their brass bedsteads. I am going forth of
my own volition to join the ghosts of Bering and
55 poor Franklin, of frozen De Long and his men.
What I am on the brink of knowing, I now see, is not
an ephemeral mathematical spot but myself. The
doctor was right, even though I dislike him.
Fundamentally I am a dangerous madman, and what
60 I do is both a challenge to my egotism and a
surrender to it.

Q. Over the course of the passage, the narrator’s attitudeshifts from

Question is based on the following passage.
This passage is adapted from Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas. ©1938 by Harcourt, Inc. Here, Woolf considers the situation of women in English society.

Close at hand is a bridge over the River Thames,
an admirable vantage ground for us to make a
survey. The river flows beneath; barges pass, laden
with timber, bursting with corn; there on one side are
5 the domes and spires of the city; on the other,
Westminster and the Houses of Parliament. It is a
place to stand on by the hour, dreaming. But not
now. Now we are pressed for time. Now we are here
to consider facts; now we must fix our eyes upon the
10 procession—the procession of the sons of educated
men.
There they go, our brothers who have been
educated at public schools and universities,
mounting those steps, passing in and out of those
15 doors, ascending those pulpits, preaching, teaching,
administering justice, practising medicine,
transacting business, making money. It is a solemn
sight always—a procession, like a caravanserai
crossing a desert. . . . But now, for the past twenty
20 years or so, it is no longer a sight merely, a
photograph, or fresco scrawled upon the walls of
time, at which we can look with merely an esthetic
appreciation. For there, trapesing along at the tail
end of the procession, we go ourselves. And that
25 makes a difference. We who have looked so long at
the pageant in books, or from a curtained window
watched educated men leaving the house at about
nine-thirty to go to an office, returning to the house
at about six-thirty from an office, need look passively
30 no longer. We too can leave the house, can mount
those steps, pass in and out of those doors,... make
money, administer justice. . . . We who now agitate
these humble pens may in another century or two
speak from a pulpit. Nobody will dare contradict us
35 then; we shall be the mouthpieces of the divine
spirit—a solemn thought, is it not? Who can say
whether, as time goes on, we may not dress in
military uniform, with gold lace on our breasts,
swords at our sides, and something like the old
40 family coal-scuttle on our heads, save that that
venerable object was never decorated with plumes of
white horsehair. You laugh—indeed the shadow of
the private house still makes those dresses look a
little queer. We have worn private clothes so
45 long. . . . But we have not come here to laugh, or to
talk of fashions—men’s and women’s. We are here,
on the bridge, to ask ourselves certain questions.
And they are very important questions; and we have
very little time in which to answer them. The
50 questions that we have to ask and to answer about
that procession during this moment of transition are
so important that they may well change the lives of
all men and women for ever. For we have to ask
ourselves, here and now, do we wish to join that
55 procession, or don’t we? On what terms shall we join
that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the
procession of educated men? The moment is short; it
may last five years; ten years, or perhaps only a
matter of a few months longer.... But, you will
60 object, you have no time to think; you have your
battles to fight, your rent to pay, your bazaars to
organize. That excuse shall not serve you, Madam.
As you know from your own experience, and there
are facts that prove it, the daughters of educated men
65 have always done their thinking from hand to
mouth; not under green lamps at study tables in the
cloisters of secluded colleges. They have thought
while they stirred the pot, while they rocked the
cradle. It was thus that they won us the right to our
70 brand-new sixpence. It falls to us now to go on
thinking; how are we to spend that sixpence? Think
we must. Let us think in offices; in omnibuses; while
we are standing in the crowd watching Coronations
and Lord Mayor’s Shows; let us think . . . in the
75 gallery of the House of Commons; in the Law Courts;
let us think at baptisms and marriages and funerals.
Let us never cease from thinking—what is this
“civilization” in which we find ourselves? What are
these ceremonies and why should we take part in
80 them? What are these professions and why
should we make money out of them? Where in
short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of
educated men?

Q. Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is from Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel’s Game. ©2008 by Dragonworks, S.L. Translation ©2009 by Lucia Graves. The narrator, a writer, recalls his childhood in early twentieth-century Barcelona.
Even then my only friends were made of paper
and ink. At school I had learned to read and write
long before the other children. Where my school
friends saw notches of ink on incomprehensible
5 pages, I saw light, streets, and people. Words and the
mystery of their hidden science fascinated me, and I
saw in them a key with which I could unlock a
boundless world, a safe haven from that home, those
streets, and those troubled days in which even I
10 could sense that only a limited fortune awaited me.
My father didn’t like to see books in the house.
There was something about them—apart from the
letters he could not decipher—that offended him.
He used to tell me that as soon as I was ten he would
15 send me off to work and that I’d better get rid of all
my scatterbrained ideas if I didn’t want to end up a
loser, a nobody. I used to hide my books under the
mattress and wait for him to go out or fall asleep so
that I could read. Once he caught me reading at night
20 and flew into a rage. He tore the book from my
hands and flung it out of the window.
“If I catch you wasting electricity again, reading
all this nonsense, you’ll be sorry.”
My father was not a miser and, despite the
25 hardships we suffered, whenever he could he gave me
a few coins so that I could buy myself some treats like
the other children. He was convinced that I spent
them on licorice sticks, sunflower seeds, or sweets,
but I would keep them in a coffee tin under the bed,
30 and when I’d collected four or five reales I’d secretly
rush out to buy myself a book.
My favorite place in the whole city was the
Sempere & Sons bookshop on Calle Santa Ana. It
smelled of old paper and dust and it was my
35 sanctuary, my refuge. The bookseller would let me sit
on a chair in a corner and read any book I liked to
my heart’s content. He hardly ever allowed me to pay
for the books he placed in my hands, but when he
wasn’t looking I’d leave the coins I’d managed to
40 collect on the counter before I left. It was only small
change—if I’d had to buy a book with that pittance, I
would probably have been able to afford only a
booklet of cigarette papers. When it was time for me
to leave, I would do so dragging my feet, a weight on
45 my soul. If it had been up to me, I would have stayed
there forever.
One Christmas Sempere gave me the best gift I
have ever received. It was an old volume, read and
experienced to the full.
50 “Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens,” I read
on the cover.
I was aware that Sempere knew a few authors who
frequented his establishment and, judging by the care
with which he handled the volume, I thought
55 perhaps this Mr. Dickens was one of them.
“A friend of yours?”
“A lifelong friend. And from now on, he’s your
friend too.”
That afternoon I took my new friend home,
60 hidden under my clothes so that my father wouldn’t
see it. It was a rainy winter, with days as gray as lead,
and I read Great Expectations about nine times,
partly because I had no other book at hand, partly
because I did not think there could be a better one in
65 the whole world and I was beginning to suspect that
Mr. Dickens had written it just for me. Soon I was
convinced that I didn’t want to do anything else in
life but learn to do what Mr. Dickens had done.

Q. With which of the following statements about his father would the narrator most likely agree?

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from George Eliot, Silas Marner. Originally published in 1861. Silas was a weaver and a
notorious miser, but then the gold he had hoarded was stolen. Shortly after, Silas adopted a young child, Eppie, the
daughter of an impoverished woman who had died suddenly.
Unlike the gold which needed nothing, and must
be worshipped in close-locked solitude—which was
hidden away from the daylight, was deaf to the song
of birds, and started to no human tones—Eppie was a
5 creature of endless claims and ever-growing desires,
seeking and loving sunshine, and living sounds, and
living movements; making trial of everything, with
trust in new joy, and stirring the human kindness in
all eyes that looked on her. The gold had kept his
10 thoughts in an ever-repeated circle, leading to
nothing beyond itself; but Eppie was an object
compacted of changes and hopes that forced his
thoughts onward, and carried them far away from
their old eager pacing towards the same blank
15 limit—carried them away to the new things that
would come with the coming years, when Eppie
would have learned to understand how her father
Silas cared for her; and made him look for images of
that time in the ties and charities that bound together
20 the families of his neighbors. The gold had asked that
he should sit weaving longer and longer, deafened
and blinded more and more to all things except the
monotony of his loom and the repetition of his web;
but Eppie called him away from his weaving, and
25 made him think all its pauses a holiday, reawakening
his senses with her fresh life, even to the old
winter-flies that came crawling forth in the early
spring sunshine, and warming him into joy because
she had joy.
30 And when the sunshine grew strong and lasting,
so that the buttercups were thick in the meadows,
Silas might be seen in the sunny mid-day, or in the
late afternoon when the shadows were lengthening
under the hedgerows, strolling out with uncovered
35 head to carry Eppie beyond the Stone-pits to where
the flowers grew, till they reached some favorite bank
where he could sit down, while Eppie toddled to
pluck the flowers, and make remarks to the winged
things that murmured happily above the bright
40 petals, calling “Dad-dad’s” attention continually by
bringing him the flowers. Then she would turn her
ear to some sudden bird-note, and Silas learned to
please her by making signs of hushed stillness, that
they might listen for the note to come again: so that
45 when it came, she set up her small back and laughed
with gurgling triumph. Sitting on the banks in this
way, Silas began to look for the once familiar herbs
again; and as the leaves, with their unchanged outline
and markings, lay on his palm, there was a sense of
50 crowding remembrances from which he turned away
timidly, taking refuge in Eppie’s little world, that lay
lightly on his enfeebled spirit.
As the child’s mind was growing into knowledge,
his mind was growing into memory: as her life
55 unfolded, his soul, long stupefied in a cold narrow
prison, was unfolding too, and trembling gradually
into full consciousness.
It was an influence which must gather force with
every new year: the tones that stirred Silas’ heart
60 grew articulate, and called for more distinct answers;
shapes and sounds grew clearer for Eppie’s eyes and
ears, and there was more that “Dad-dad” was
imperatively required to notice and account for.
Also, by the time Eppie was three years old, she
65 developed a fine capacity for mischief, and for
devising ingenious ways of being troublesome, which
found much exercise, not only for Silas’ patience, but
for his watchfulness and penetration. Sorely was poor
Silas puzzled on such occasions by the incompatible
70 demands of love.

Q. The narrator uses the phrase “making trial of everything” (line 7) to present Eppie as

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from a speech delivered in 1838 by Sara T. Smith at the Second Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women.
We are told that it is not within the “province of
woman,” to discuss the subject of slavery; that it is a
“political question,” and we are “stepping out of our
Line sphere,” when we take part in its discussion. It is not
5 true that it is merely a political question, it is likewise
a question of justice, of humanity, of morality, of
religion; a question which, while it involves
considerations of immense importance to the welfare
and prosperity of our country, enters deeply into the
10 home-concerns, the every-day feelings of millions of
our fellow beings. Whether the laborer shall receive
the reward of his labor, or be driven daily to
unrequited toil—whether he shall walk erect in the
dignity of conscious manhood, or be reckoned
15 among the beasts which perish—whether his bones
and sinews shall be his own, or another’s—whether
his child shall receive the protection of its natural
guardian, or be ranked among the live-stock of the
estate, to be disposed of as the caprice or interest of
20 the master may dictate—. . . these considerations are
all involved in the question of liberty or slavery.
And is a subject comprehending interests of such
magnitude, merely a “political question,” and one in
which woman “can take no part without losing
25 something of the modesty and gentleness which are
her most appropriate ornaments”? May not the
“ornament of a meek and quiet spirit” exist with an
upright mind and enlightened intellect, and must
woman necessarily be less gentle because her heart is
30 open to the claims of humanity, or less modest
because she feels for the degradation of her enslaved
sisters, and would stretch forth her hand for their
rescue?
By the Constitution of the United States, the
35 whole physical power of the North is pledged for the
suppression of domestic insurrections, and should
the slaves, maddened by oppression, endeavor to
shake off the yoke of the taskmaster, the men of the
North are bound to make common cause with the
40 tyrant, and put down, at the point of the bayonet,
every effort on the part of the slave, for the
attainment of his freedom. And when the father,
husband, son, and brother shall have left their homes
to mingle in the unholy warfare, “to become the
45 executioners of their brethren, or to fall themselves
by their hands,”1 will the mother, wife, daughter, and
sister feel that they have no interest in this subject?
Will it be easy to convince them that it is no concern
of theirs, that their homes are rendered desolate, and
50 their habitations the abodes of wretchedness?
Surely this consideration is of itself sufficient to
arouse the slumbering energies of woman, for the
overthrow of a system which thus threatens to lay in
ruins the fabric of her domestic happiness; and she
55 will not be deterred from the performance of her
duty to herself, her family, and her country, by the
cry of political question.
But admitting it to be a political question, have we
no interest in the welfare of our country? May we not
60 permit a thought to stray beyond the narrow limits of
our own family circle, and of the present hour? May
we not breathe a sigh over the miseries of our
countrymen, nor utter a word of remonstrance
against the unjust laws that are crushing them to the
65 earth? Must we witness “the headlong rage or
heedless folly,” with which our nation is rushing
onward to destruction, and not seek to arrest its
downward course? Shall we silently behold the land
which we love with all the heart-warm affection of
70 children, rendered a hissing and a reproach
throughout the world, by this system which is already
tolling the death-bell of her decease among the
nations? No: the events of the last two years have cast
their dark shadows before, overclouding the bright
75 prospects of the future, and shrouding the destinies
of our country in more than midnight gloom, and we
cannot remain inactive. Our country is as dear to us
as to the proudest statesman, and the more closely
our hearts cling to “our altars and our homes,” the
80 more fervent are our aspirations that every
inhabitant of our land may be protected in his
fireside enjoyments by just and equal laws; that the
foot of the tyrant may no longer invade the domestic
sanctuary, nor his hand tear asunder those whom
85 God himself has united by the most holy ties. Let our
course, then, still be onward!
1 A quotation from the Declaration of Independence

Q. Smith’s main purpose in the passage is to

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Sabrina Richards, “Pleasant tothe Touch.” ©2012 by The Scientist.
In the early 1990s, textbooks acknowledged that
humans had slow-conducting nerves, but asserted
that those nerves only responded to two types of
Line stimuli: pain and temperature. Sensations of pressure
5 and vibration were believed to travel only along
myelinated, fast-signaling nerve fibers, which also
give information about location. Experiments
blocking nerve fibers supported this notion.
Preventing fast fibers from firing (either by clamping
10 the relevant nerve or by injecting the local anesthetic
lidocaine) seemed to eliminate the sensation of
pressure altogether, but blocking slow fibers only
seemed to reduce sensitivity to warmth or a small
painful shock.
15 Håkan Olausson and his Gothenburg University
colleagues Åke Vallbo and Johan Wessberg
wondered if slow fibers responsive to gentle pressure
might be active in humans as well as in other
mammals. In 1993, they corralled 28 young
20 volunteers and recorded nerve signals while gently
brushing the subjects’ arms with their fingertips.
Using a technique called microneurography, in
which a fine filament is inserted into a single nerve to
capture its electrical impulses, the scientists were able
25 to measure how quickly—or slowly—the nerves
fired. They showed that soft stroking prompted
two different signals, one immediate and one
delayed. The delay, Olausson explains, means that
the signal from a gentle touch on the forearm will
30 reach the brain about a half second later. This delay
identified nerve impulses traveling at speeds
characteristic of slow, unmyelinated fibers—about
1 meter/second—confirming the presence of these
fibers in human hairy skin. (In contrast, fast-
35 conducting fibers, already known to respond to
touch, signal at a rate between 35 and 75 m/s.)
Then, in 1999, the group looked more closely at
the characteristics of the slow fibers. They named
these “low-threshold” nerves “C-tactile,” or CT,
40 fibers, said Olausson, because of their “exquisite
sensitivity” to slow, gentle tactile stimulation, but
unresponsiveness to noxious stimuli like pinpricks.
But why exactly humans might have such fibers,
which respond only to a narrow range of rather
45 subtle stimuli, was initially mystifying. Unlike other
types of sensory nerves, CT fibers could be found
only in hairy human skin—such as the forearm and
thigh. No amount of gentle stroking of hairless skin,
such as the palms and soles of the feet, prompted
50 similar activity signatures. Olausson and his
colleagues decided that these fibers must be
conveying a different dimension of sensory
information than fast-conducting fibers.
Although microneurography can give
55 information about how a single nerve responds to
gentle brushing and pressure, it cannot tease out
what aspect of sensation that fiber relays, says
Olausson. He wanted to know if that same slow
nerve can distinguish where the brush touches the
60 arm, and whether it can discern the difference
between a goat-hair brush and a feather. Most
importantly, could that same fiber convey a pleasant
sensation?
To address the question, Olausson’s group sought
65 out a patient known as G.L. who had an unusual
nerve defect. More than 2 decades earlier, she had
developed numbness across many parts of her body
after taking penicillin to treat a cough and fever.
Testing showed that she had lost responsiveness to
70 pressure, and a nerve biopsy confirmed that G.L.’s
quick-conducting fibers were gone, resulting in an
inability to sense any pokes, prods, or pinpricks
below her nose. But she could still sense warmth,
suggesting that her slow-conducting unmyelinated
75 fibers were intact.
Upon recruiting G.L., Olausson tested her by
brushing her arm gently at the speed of between
2–10 centimeters per second. She had more trouble
distinguishing the direction or pressure of the brush
80 strokes than most subjects, but reported feeling a
pleasant sensation. When the researchers tried
brushing her palm, where CT fibers are not found,
she felt nothing.
Olausson used functional MRI studies to examine
85 which areas of the brain lit up when G.L.’s arm was
gently brushed to activate CT fibers. In normal
subjects, both the somatosensory and insular cortices
were activated, but only the insular cortex [which
processes emotion] was active when researchers
90 brushed G.L.’s arm. This solidified the notion that
CT fibers convey a more emotional quality of touch,
rather than the conscious aspect that helps us
describe what we are sensing. CT fibers, it seemed,
specifically provide pleasurable sensations.

Q. It can reasonably be inferred that one of the intended goals of the 1999 experiment was to determine the

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from MacDonald Harris, The Balloonist. ©2011 by The Estate of Donald Heiney. During the summer of 1897, the narrator of this story, afictional Swedish scientist, has set out for the North Pole in a hydrogen powered balloon.

My emotions are complicated and not
readily verifiable. I feel a vast yearning that is
simultaneously a pleasure and a pain. I am certain
of the consummation of this yearning, but I don’t
5 know yet what form it will take, since I do not
understand quite what it is that the yearning desires.
For the first time there is borne in upon me the full
truth of what I myself said to the doctor only an hour
ago: that my motives in this undertaking are not
10 entirely clear. For years, for a lifetime, the machinery
of my destiny has worked in secret to prepare for this
moment; its clockwork has moved exactly toward
this time and place and no other. Rising slowly from
the earth that bore me and gave me sustenance, I am
15 carried helplessly toward an uninhabited and hostile,
or at best indifferent, part of the earth, littered with
the bones of explorers and the wrecks of ships, frozen
supply caches, messages scrawled with chilled fingers
and hidden in cairns that no eye will ever see.
20 Nobody has succeeded in this thing, and many have
died. Yet in freely willing this enterprise, in choosing
this moment and no other when the south wind
will carry me exactly northward at a velocity of
eight knots, I have converted the machinery of my
25 fate into the servant of my will. All this I understand,
as I understand each detail of the technique by which
this is carried out. What I don’t understand is why I
am so intent on going to this particular place. Who
wants the North Pole! What good is it! Can you eat
30 it? Will it carry you from Gothenburg to Malmö like
a railway? The Danish ministers have declared from
their pulpits that participation in polar expeditions is
beneficial to the soul’s eternal well-being, or so I read
in a newspaper. It isn’t clear how this doctrine is to
35 be interpreted, except that the Pole is something
difficult or impossible to attain which must
nevertheless be sought for, because man is
condemned to seek out and know everything
whether or not the knowledge gives him pleasure. In
40 short, it is the same unthinking lust for knowledge
that drove our First Parents out of the garden.
And suppose you were to find it in spite of all, this
wonderful place that everybody is so anxious to stand
on! What would you find? Exactly nothing.
45 A point precisely identical to all the others in a
completely featureless wasteland stretching around it
for hundreds of miles. It is an abstraction, a
mathematical fiction. No one but a Swedish madman
could take the slightest interest in it. Here I am. The
50 wind is still from the south, bearing us steadily
northward at the speed of a trotting dog. Behind us,
perhaps forever, lie the Cities of Men with their
teacups and their brass bedsteads. I am going forth of
my own volition to join the ghosts of Bering and
55 poor Franklin, of frozen De Long and his men.
What I am on the brink of knowing, I now see, is not
an ephemeral mathematical spot but myself. The
doctor was right, even though I dislike him.
Fundamentally I am a dangerous madman, and what
60 I do is both a challenge to my egotism and a
surrender to it.

Q. The narrator indicates that many previous explorers seeking the North Pole have

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Emily Anthes, Frankenstein's Cat. ©2013 by Emily Anthes.
When scientists first learned how to edit the
genomes of animals, they began to imagine all the
ways they could use this new power. Creating
brightly colored novelty pets was not a high priority.
5 Instead, most researchers envisioned far more
consequential applications, hoping to create
genetically engineered animals that saved human
lives. One enterprise is now delivering on this dream.
Welcome to the world of “pharming,” in which
10 simple genetic tweaks turn animals into living
pharmaceutical factories.
Many of the proteins that our cells crank out
naturally make for good medicine. Our bodies’ own
enzymes, hormones, clotting factors, and antibodies
15 are commonly used to treat cancer, diabetes,
autoimmune diseases, and more. The trouble is that
it’s difficult and expensive to make these compounds
on an industrial scale, and as a result, patients can
face shortages of the medicines they need. Dairy
20 animals, on the other hand, are expert protein
producers, their udders swollen with milk. So the
creation of the first transgenic animals—first mice,
then other species—in the 1980s gave scientists an
idea: What if they put the gene for a human antibody
25 or enzyme into a cow, goat, or sheep? If they put the
gene in just the right place, under the control of the
right molecular switch, maybe they could engineer
animals that produced healing human proteins in
their milk. Then doctors could collect medicine by
30 the bucketful.
Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, studies provided
proof of principle, as scientists created transgenic
mice, sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, and rabbits that did in
fact make therapeutic compounds in their milk.
35 At first, this work was merely gee-whiz, scientific
geekery, lab-bound thought experiments come true.
That all changed with ATryn, a drug produced by the
Massachusetts firm GTC Biotherapeutics. ATryn is
antithrombin, an anticoagulant that can be used to
40 prevent life-threatening blood clots. The compound,
made by our liver cells, plays a key role in keeping
our bodies clot-free. It acts as a molecular bouncer,
sidling up to clot-forming compounds and escorting
them out of the bloodstream. But as many as 1 in
45 2,000 Americans are born with a genetic mutation
that prevents them from making antithrombin.
These patients are prone to clots, especially in their
legs and lungs, and they are at elevated risk of
suffering from fatal complications during surgery
50 and childbirth. Supplemental antithrombin can
reduce this risk, and GTC decided to try to
manufacture the compound using genetically
engineered goats.
To create its special herd of goats, GTC used
55 microinjection, the same technique that produced
GloFish and AquAdvantage salmon. The company’s
scientists took the gene for human antithrombin and
injected it directly into fertilized goat eggs. Then they
implanted the eggs in the wombs of female goats.
60 When the kids were born, some of them proved to be
transgenic, the human gene nestled safely in their
cells. The researchers paired the antithrombin gene
with a promoter (which is a sequence of DNA that
controls gene activity) that is normally active in the
65 goat’s mammary glands during milk production.
When the transgenic females lactated, the promoter
turned the transgene on and the goats’ udders filled
with milk containing antithrombin. All that was left
to do was to collect the milk, and extract and purify
70 the protein. Et voilà—human medicine! And, for
GTC, liquid gold. ATryn hit the market in 2006,
becoming the world’s first transgenic animal drug.
Over the course of a year, the “milking parlors” on
GTC’s 300-acre farm in Massachusetts can collect
75 more than a kilogram of medicine from a single
animal.

Q. Which of the following does the author suggest about the “female goats” mentioned in line 59?

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Mary Helen Stefaniak, The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia: A Novel. ©2010 by Mary Helen Stefaniak.
Miss Grace Spivey arrived in Threestep, Georgia,
in August 1938. She stepped off the train wearing a
pair of thick-soled boots suitable for hiking, a navy
Line blue dress, and a little white tam that rode the waves
5 of her red hair at a gravity-defying angle. August was
a hellish month to step off the train in Georgia,
although it was nothing, she said, compared to the
119 degrees that greeted her when she arrived one
time in Timbuktu, which, she assured us, was a real
10 place in Africa. I believe her remark irritated some of
the people gathered to welcome her on the burned
grass alongside the tracks. When folks are sweating
through their shorts, they don’t like to hear that this
is nothing compared to someplace else. Irritated or
15 not, the majority of those present were inclined to see
the arrival of the new schoolteacher in a positive
light. Hard times were still upon us in 1938, but, like
my momma said, “We weren’t no poorer than we’d
ever been,” and the citizens of Threestep were in the
20 mood for a little excitement.
Miss Spivey looked like just the right person to
give it to them. She was, by almost anyone’s
standards, a woman of the world. She’d gone to
boarding schools since she was six years old; she’d
25 studied French in Paris and drama in London; and
during what she called a “fruitful intermission” in her
formal education, she had traveled extensively in the
Near East and Africa with a friend of her
grandmother’s, one Janet Miller, who was a medical
30 doctor from Nashville, Tennessee. After her travels
with Dr. Miller, Miss Spivey continued her education
by attending Barnard College in New York City. She
told us all that at school the first day. When my little
brother Ralphord asked what did she study at
35 Barnyard College, Miss Spivey explained that
Barnard, which she wrote on the blackboard, was the
sister school of Columbia University, of which, she
expected, we all had heard.
It was there, she told us, in the midst of trying to
40 find her true mission in life, that she wandered one
afternoon into a lecture by the famous John Dewey,
who was talking about his famous book, Democracy
and Education. Professor Dewey was in his seventies
by then, Miss Spivey said, but he still liked to chat
45 with students after a lecture—especially female
students, she added—sometimes over coffee, and see
in their eyes the fire his words could kindle. It was
after this lecture and subsequent coffee that Miss
Spivey had marched to the Teacher’s College and
50 signed up, all aflame. Two years later, she told a
cheery blue-suited woman from the WPA1 that she
wanted to bring democracy and education to the
poorest, darkest, most remote and forgotten corner
of America.
55 They sent her to Threestep, Georgia.
Miss Spivey paused there for questions, avoiding
my brother Ralphord’s eye.
What we really wanted to know about—all
twenty-six of us across seven grade levels in the one
60 room—was the pearly white button hanging on a
string in front of the blackboard behind the teacher’s
desk up front. That button on a string was something
new. When Mavis Davis (the only bona fide seventh
grader, at age thirteen) asked what it was for, Miss
65 Spivey gave the string a tug, and to our astonishment,
the whole world—or at least a wrinkled map of
it—unfolded before our eyes. Her predecessor, Miss
Chandler, had never once made use of that map,
which was older than our fathers, and until that
70 moment, not a one of us knew it was there.
Miss Spivey showed us on the map how she and
Dr. Janet Miller had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean
and past the Rock of Gibraltar into the
Mediterranean Sea. Using the end of a ruler, she
75 gently tapped such places as Morocco and Tunis and
Algiers to mark their route along the top of Africa.
They spent twenty hours on the train to Baghdad, she
said, swathed in veils against the sand that crept in
every crack and crevice.
80 “And can you guess what we saw from the train?”
Miss Spivey asked. We could not. “Camels!” she said.
“We saw a whole caravan of camels.” She looked
around the room, waiting for us to be amazed and
delighted at the thought.
85 We all hung there for a minute, thinking hard,
until Mavis Davis spoke up.
“She means like the three kings rode to
Bethlehem,” Mavis said, and she folded her hands
smugly on her seventh-grade desk in the back of the
90 room.
Miss Spivey made a mistake right then. Instead of
beaming upon Mavis the kind of congratulatory
smile that old Miss Chandler would have bestowed
on her for having enlightened the rest of us, Miss
95 Spivey simply said, “That’s right.”
¹The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a government
agency that hired people for public and cultural development
projects and services.

Q. In the passage, when Miss Spivey announces that she had seen camels, the students’ reaction suggests that they are

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Mary Helen Stefaniak, The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia: A Novel. ©2010 by Mary Helen Stefaniak.
Miss Grace Spivey arrived in Threestep, Georgia,
in August 1938. She stepped off the train wearing a
pair of thick-soled boots suitable for hiking, a navy
Line blue dress, and a little white tam that rode the waves
5 of her red hair at a gravity-defying angle. August was
a hellish month to step off the train in Georgia,
although it was nothing, she said, compared to the
119 degrees that greeted her when she arrived one
time in Timbuktu, which, she assured us, was a real
10 place in Africa. I believe her remark irritated some of
the people gathered to welcome her on the burned
grass alongside the tracks. When folks are sweating
through their shorts, they don’t like to hear that this
is nothing compared to someplace else. Irritated or
15 not, the majority of those present were inclined to see
the arrival of the new schoolteacher in a positive
light. Hard times were still upon us in 1938, but, like
my momma said, “We weren’t no poorer than we’d
ever been,” and the citizens of Threestep were in the
20 mood for a little excitement.
Miss Spivey looked like just the right person to
give it to them. She was, by almost anyone’s
standards, a woman of the world. She’d gone to
boarding schools since she was six years old; she’d
25 studied French in Paris and drama in London; and
during what she called a “fruitful intermission” in her
formal education, she had traveled extensively in the
Near East and Africa with a friend of her
grandmother’s, one Janet Miller, who was a medical
30 doctor from Nashville, Tennessee. After her travels
with Dr. Miller, Miss Spivey continued her education
by attending Barnard College in New York City. She
told us all that at school the first day. When my little
brother Ralphord asked what did she study at
35 Barnyard College, Miss Spivey explained that
Barnard, which she wrote on the blackboard, was the
sister school of Columbia University, of which, she
expected, we all had heard.
It was there, she told us, in the midst of trying to
40 find her true mission in life, that she wandered one
afternoon into a lecture by the famous John Dewey,
who was talking about his famous book, Democracy
and Education. Professor Dewey was in his seventies
by then, Miss Spivey said, but he still liked to chat
45 with students after a lecture—especially female
students, she added—sometimes over coffee, and see
in their eyes the fire his words could kindle. It was
after this lecture and subsequent coffee that Miss
Spivey had marched to the Teacher’s College and
50 signed up, all aflame. Two years later, she told a
cheery blue-suited woman from the WPA1 that she
wanted to bring democracy and education to the
poorest, darkest, most remote and forgotten corner
of America.
55 They sent her to Threestep, Georgia.
Miss Spivey paused there for questions, avoiding
my brother Ralphord’s eye.
What we really wanted to know about—all
twenty-six of us across seven grade levels in the one
60 room—was the pearly white button hanging on a
string in front of the blackboard behind the teacher’s
desk up front. That button on a string was something
new. When Mavis Davis (the only bona fide seventh
grader, at age thirteen) asked what it was for, Miss
65 Spivey gave the string a tug, and to our astonishment,
the whole world—or at least a wrinkled map of
it—unfolded before our eyes. Her predecessor, Miss
Chandler, had never once made use of that map,
which was older than our fathers, and until that
70 moment, not a one of us knew it was there.
Miss Spivey showed us on the map how she and
Dr. Janet Miller had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean
and past the Rock of Gibraltar into the
Mediterranean Sea. Using the end of a ruler, she
75 gently tapped such places as Morocco and Tunis and
Algiers to mark their route along the top of Africa.
They spent twenty hours on the train to Baghdad, she
said, swathed in veils against the sand that crept in
every crack and crevice.
80 “And can you guess what we saw from the train?”
Miss Spivey asked. We could not. “Camels!” she said.
“We saw a whole caravan of camels.” She looked
around the room, waiting for us to be amazed and
delighted at the thought.
85 We all hung there for a minute, thinking hard,
until Mavis Davis spoke up.
“She means like the three kings rode to
Bethlehem,” Mavis said, and she folded her hands
smugly on her seventh-grade desk in the back of the
90 room.
Miss Spivey made a mistake right then. Instead of
beaming upon Mavis the kind of congratulatory
smile that old Miss Chandler would have bestowed
on her for having enlightened the rest of us, Miss
95 Spivey simply said, “That’s right.”
¹The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a government
agency that hired people for public and cultural development
projects and services.

Q. Miss Spivey most likely uses the phrase “fruitful intermission” (line 26) to indicate that

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Sabrina Richards, “Pleasant tothe Touch.” ©2012 by The Scientist.
In the early 1990s, textbooks acknowledged that
humans had slow-conducting nerves, but asserted
that those nerves only responded to two types of
Line stimuli: pain and temperature. Sensations of pressure
5 and vibration were believed to travel only along
myelinated, fast-signaling nerve fibers, which also
give information about location. Experiments
blocking nerve fibers supported this notion.
Preventing fast fibers from firing (either by clamping
10 the relevant nerve or by injecting the local anesthetic
lidocaine) seemed to eliminate the sensation of
pressure altogether, but blocking slow fibers only
seemed to reduce sensitivity to warmth or a small
painful shock.
15 Håkan Olausson and his Gothenburg University
colleagues Åke Vallbo and Johan Wessberg
wondered if slow fibers responsive to gentle pressure
might be active in humans as well as in other
mammals. In 1993, they corralled 28 young
20 volunteers and recorded nerve signals while gently
brushing the subjects’ arms with their fingertips.
Using a technique called microneurography, in
which a fine filament is inserted into a single nerve to
capture its electrical impulses, the scientists were able
25 to measure how quickly—or slowly—the nerves
fired. They showed that soft stroking prompted
two different signals, one immediate and one
delayed. The delay, Olausson explains, means that
the signal from a gentle touch on the forearm will
30 reach the brain about a half second later. This delay
identified nerve impulses traveling at speeds
characteristic of slow, unmyelinated fibers—about
1 meter/second—confirming the presence of these
fibers in human hairy skin. (In contrast, fast-
35 conducting fibers, already known to respond to
touch, signal at a rate between 35 and 75 m/s.)
Then, in 1999, the group looked more closely at
the characteristics of the slow fibers. They named
these “low-threshold” nerves “C-tactile,” or CT,
40 fibers, said Olausson, because of their “exquisite
sensitivity” to slow, gentle tactile stimulation, but
unresponsiveness to noxious stimuli like pinpricks.
But why exactly humans might have such fibers,
which respond only to a narrow range of rather
45 subtle stimuli, was initially mystifying. Unlike other
types of sensory nerves, CT fibers could be found
only in hairy human skin—such as the forearm and
thigh. No amount of gentle stroking of hairless skin,
such as the palms and soles of the feet, prompted
50 similar activity signatures. Olausson and his
colleagues decided that these fibers must be
conveying a different dimension of sensory
information than fast-conducting fibers.
Although microneurography can give
55 information about how a single nerve responds to
gentle brushing and pressure, it cannot tease out
what aspect of sensation that fiber relays, says
Olausson. He wanted to know if that same slow
nerve can distinguish where the brush touches the
60 arm, and whether it can discern the difference
between a goat-hair brush and a feather. Most
importantly, could that same fiber convey a pleasant
sensation?
To address the question, Olausson’s group sought
65 out a patient known as G.L. who had an unusual
nerve defect. More than 2 decades earlier, she had
developed numbness across many parts of her body
after taking penicillin to treat a cough and fever.
Testing showed that she had lost responsiveness to
70 pressure, and a nerve biopsy confirmed that G.L.’s
quick-conducting fibers were gone, resulting in an
inability to sense any pokes, prods, or pinpricks
below her nose. But she could still sense warmth,
suggesting that her slow-conducting unmyelinated
75 fibers were intact.
Upon recruiting G.L., Olausson tested her by
brushing her arm gently at the speed of between
2–10 centimeters per second. She had more trouble
distinguishing the direction or pressure of the brush
80 strokes than most subjects, but reported feeling a
pleasant sensation. When the researchers tried
brushing her palm, where CT fibers are not found,
she felt nothing.
Olausson used functional MRI studies to examine
85 which areas of the brain lit up when G.L.’s arm was
gently brushed to activate CT fibers. In normal
subjects, both the somatosensory and insular cortices
were activated, but only the insular cortex [which
processes emotion] was active when researchers
90 brushed G.L.’s arm. This solidified the notion that
CT fibers convey a more emotional quality of touch,
rather than the conscious aspect that helps us
describe what we are sensing. CT fibers, it seemed,
specifically provide pleasurable sensations.

Q. According to the passage, G.L. differed from Olausson’s other test subjects in terms of the

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from a speech delivered in 1838 by Sara T. Smith at the Second Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women.
We are told that it is not within the “province of
woman,” to discuss the subject of slavery; that it is a
“political question,” and we are “stepping out of our
Line sphere,” when we take part in its discussion. It is not
5 true that it is merely a political question, it is likewise
a question of justice, of humanity, of morality, of
religion; a question which, while it involves
considerations of immense importance to the welfare
and prosperity of our country, enters deeply into the
10 home-concerns, the every-day feelings of millions of
our fellow beings. Whether the laborer shall receive
the reward of his labor, or be driven daily to
unrequited toil—whether he shall walk erect in the
dignity of conscious manhood, or be reckoned
15 among the beasts which perish—whether his bones
and sinews shall be his own, or another’s—whether
his child shall receive the protection of its natural
guardian, or be ranked among the live-stock of the
estate, to be disposed of as the caprice or interest of
20 the master may dictate—. . . these considerations are
all involved in the question of liberty or slavery.
And is a subject comprehending interests of such
magnitude, merely a “political question,” and one in
which woman “can take no part without losing
25 something of the modesty and gentleness which are
her most appropriate ornaments”? May not the
“ornament of a meek and quiet spirit” exist with an
upright mind and enlightened intellect, and must
woman necessarily be less gentle because her heart is
30 open to the claims of humanity, or less modest
because she feels for the degradation of her enslaved
sisters, and would stretch forth her hand for their
rescue?
By the Constitution of the United States, the
35 whole physical power of the North is pledged for the
suppression of domestic insurrections, and should
the slaves, maddened by oppression, endeavor to
shake off the yoke of the taskmaster, the men of the
North are bound to make common cause with the
40 tyrant, and put down, at the point of the bayonet,
every effort on the part of the slave, for the
attainment of his freedom. And when the father,
husband, son, and brother shall have left their homes
to mingle in the unholy warfare, “to become the
45 executioners of their brethren, or to fall themselves
by their hands,”1 will the mother, wife, daughter, and
sister feel that they have no interest in this subject?
Will it be easy to convince them that it is no concern
of theirs, that their homes are rendered desolate, and
50 their habitations the abodes of wretchedness?
Surely this consideration is of itself sufficient to
arouse the slumbering energies of woman, for the
overthrow of a system which thus threatens to lay in
ruins the fabric of her domestic happiness; and she
55 will not be deterred from the performance of her
duty to herself, her family, and her country, by the
cry of political question.
But admitting it to be a political question, have we
no interest in the welfare of our country? May we not
60 permit a thought to stray beyond the narrow limits of
our own family circle, and of the present hour? May
we not breathe a sigh over the miseries of our
countrymen, nor utter a word of remonstrance
against the unjust laws that are crushing them to the
65 earth? Must we witness “the headlong rage or
heedless folly,” with which our nation is rushing
onward to destruction, and not seek to arrest its
downward course? Shall we silently behold the land
which we love with all the heart-warm affection of
70 children, rendered a hissing and a reproach
throughout the world, by this system which is already
tolling the death-bell of her decease among the
nations? No: the events of the last two years have cast
their dark shadows before, overclouding the bright
75 prospects of the future, and shrouding the destinies
of our country in more than midnight gloom, and we
cannot remain inactive. Our country is as dear to us
as to the proudest statesman, and the more closely
our hearts cling to “our altars and our homes,” the
80 more fervent are our aspirations that every
inhabitant of our land may be protected in his
fireside enjoyments by just and equal laws; that the
foot of the tyrant may no longer invade the domestic
sanctuary, nor his hand tear asunder those whom
85 God himself has united by the most holy ties. Let our
course, then, still be onward!
1 A quotation from the Declaration of Independence

Q. In the passage, Smith most strongly suggests that slavery affects the United States by

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Amy Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter. ©2001 by Amy Tan.
At last, Old Widow Lau was done haggling with
the driver and we stepped inside Father’s shop. It was
north-facing, quite dim inside, and perhaps this was
Line why Father did not see us at first. He was busy with a
5 customer, a man who was distinguished-looking, like
the scholars of two decades before. The two men
were bent over a glass case, discussing the different
qualities of inksticks. Big Uncle welcomed us and
invited us to be seated. From his formal tone, I knew
10 he did not recognize who we were. So I called his
name in a shy voice. And he squinted at me, then
laughed and announced our arrival to Little Uncle,
who apologized many times for not rushing over
sooner to greet us. They rushed us to be seated at one
15 of two tea tables for customers. Old Widow Lau
refused their invitation three times, exclaiming that
my father and uncles must be too busy for visitors.
She made weak efforts to leave. On the fourth
insistence, we finally sat. Then Little Uncle brought
20 us hot tea and sweet oranges, as well as bamboo
latticework fans with which to cool ourselves.
I tried to notice everything so I could later tell
GaoLing what I had seen, and tease out her envy. The
floors of the shop were of dark wood, polished and
25 clean, no dirty footprints, even though this was
during the dustiest part of the summer. And along
the walls were display cases made of wood and glass.
The glass was very shiny and not one pane was
broken. Within those glass cases were our silk-
30 wrapped boxes, all our hard work. They looked so
much nicer than they had in the ink-making studio
at Immortal Heart village.
I saw that Father had opened several of the boxes.
He set sticks and cakes and other shapes on a silk
35 cloth covering a glass case that served as a table on
which he and the customer leaned. First he pointed
to a stick with a top shaped like a fairy boat and said
with graceful importance, “Your writing will flow as
smoothly as a keel cutting through a glassy lake.”
40 He picked up a bird shape: “Your mind will soar into
the clouds of higher thought.” He waved toward a
row of ink cakes embellished with designs of peonies
and bamboo: “Your ledgers will blossom into
abundance while bamboo surrounds your quiet
45 mind.”
As he said this, Precious Auntie came back into
mind. I was remembering how she taught me that
everything, even ink, had a purpose and a meaning:
Good ink cannot be the quick kind, ready to pour out
50 of a bottle. You can never be an artist if your work
comes without effort. That is the problem of modern
ink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You
simply write what is swimming on the top of your
brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead
55 leaves, and mosquito spawn. But when you push an
inkstick along an inkstone, you take the first step to
cleansing your mind and your heart. You push and
you ask yourself, What are my intentions? What is in
my heart that matches my mind?
60 I remembered this, and yet that day in the ink
shop, I listened to what Father was saying, and his
words became far more important than anything
Precious Auntie had thought. “Look here,” Father
said to his customer, and I looked. He held up an
65 inkstick and rotated it in the light. “See? It’s the right
hue, purple-black, not brown or gray like the cheap
brands you might find down the street. And listen to
this.” And I heard a sound as clean and pure as a
small silver bell. “The high-pitched tone tells you that
70 the soot is very fine, as smooth as the sliding banks of
old rivers. And the scent—can you smell the balance
of strength and delicacy, the musical notes of the
ink’s perfume? Expensive, and everyone who sees
you using it will know that it was well worth the high
75 price.”
I was very proud to hear Father speak of our
family’s ink this way.

Q. Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Thor Hanson, Feathers. ©2011 by Thor Hanson. Scientists have long debated how the ancestors of birds evolved the ability to fly. The ground-up theory assumes they were fleet-footed ground dwellers that captured prey by leaping and flapping their upper limbs. The tree-down theory assumes they were tree climbers that leapt and glided among branches.

At field sites around the world, Ken Dial saw a
pattern in how young pheasants, quail, tinamous,
and other ground birds ran along behind their
parents. “They jumped up like popcorn,” he said,
5 describing how they would flap their half-formed
wings and take short hops into the air. So when a
group of graduate students challenged him
to come up with new data on the age-old
ground-up-tree-down debate, he designed a project
10 to see what clues might lie in how baby game birds
learned to fly.
Ken settled on the Chukar Partridge as a
model species, but he might not have made his
discovery without a key piece of advice from the local
15 rancher in Montana who was supplying him with
birds. When the cowboy stopped by to see how
things were going, Ken showed him his nice, tidy
laboratory setup and explained how the birds’ first
hops and flights would be measured. The rancher
20 was incredulous. “He took one look and said, in
pretty colorful language, ‘What are those birds doing
on the ground? They hate to be on the ground! Give
them something to climb on!’ ” At first it seemed
unnatural—ground birds don’t like the ground? But
25 as he thought about it Ken realized that all the
species he’d watched in the wild preferred to rest on
ledges, low branches, or other elevated perches where
they were safe from predators. They really only used
the ground for feeding and traveling. So he brought
30 in some hay bales for the Chukars to perch on and
then left his son in charge of feeding and data
collection while he went away on a short work trip.
Barely a teenager at the time, young Terry Dial
was visibly upset when his father got back. “I asked
35 him how it went,” Ken recalled, “and he said,
‘Terrible! The birds are cheating!’ ” Instead of flying
up to their perches, the baby Chukars were using
their legs. Time and again Terry had watched them
run right up the side of a hay bale, flapping all the
40 while. Ken dashed out to see for himself, and that
was the “aha” moment. “The birds were using their
wings and legs cooperatively,” he told me, and that
single observation opened up a world of possibilities.
Working together with Terry (who has since gone
45 on to study animal locomotion), Ken came up with a
series of ingenious experiments, filming the birds as
they raced up textured ramps tilted at increasing
angles. As the incline increased, the partridges began
to flap, but they angled their wings differently from
50 birds in flight. They aimed their flapping down and
backward, using the force not for lift but to keep
their feet firmly pressed against the ramp. “It’s like
the spoiler on the back of a race car,” he explained,
which is a very apt analogy. In Formula One racing,
55 spoilers are the big aerodynamic fins that push the
cars downward as they speed along, increasing
traction and handling. The birds were doing the very
same thing with their wings to help them scramble
up otherwise impossible slopes.
60 Ken called the technique WAIR, for wing-assisted
incline running, and went on to document it in a
wide range of species. It not only allowed young
birds to climb vertical surfaces within the first few
weeks of life but also gave adults an energy-efficient
65 alternative to flying. In the Chukar experiments,
adults regularly used WAIR to ascend ramps steeper
than 90 degrees, essentially running up the wall and
onto the ceiling.
In an evolutionary context, WAIR takes on
70 surprising explanatory powers. With one fell swoop,
the Dials came up with a viable origin for the
flapping flight stroke of birds (something gliding
animals don’t do and thus a shortcoming of the
tree-down theory) and an aerodynamic function for
75 half-formed wings (one of the main drawbacks to the
ground-up hypothesis).

Q. In the second paragraph (lines 12-32), the incident involving the local rancher mainly serves to

Question is based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Thor Hanson, Feathers. ©2011 by Thor Hanson. Scientists have long debated how the ancestors of birds evolved the ability to fly. The ground-up theory assumes they were fleet-footed ground dwellers that captured prey by leaping and flapping their upper limbs. The tree-down theory assumes they were tree climbers that leapt and glided among branches.

At field sites around the world, Ken Dial saw a
pattern in how young pheasants, quail, tinamous,
and other ground birds ran along behind their
parents. “They jumped up like popcorn,” he said,
5 describing how they would flap their half-formed
wings and take short hops into the air. So when a
group of graduate students challenged him
to come up with new data on the age-old
ground-up-tree-down debate, he designed a project
10 to see what clues might lie in how baby game birds
learned to fly.
Ken settled on the Chukar Partridge as a
model species, but he might not have made his
discovery without a key piece of advice from the local
15 rancher in Montana who was supplying him with
birds. When the cowboy stopped by to see how
things were going, Ken showed him his nice, tidy
laboratory setup and explained how the birds’ first
hops and flights would be measured. The rancher
20 was incredulous. “He took one look and said, in
pretty colorful language, ‘What are those birds doing
on the ground? They hate to be on the ground! Give
them something to climb on!’ ” At first it seemed
unnatural—ground birds don’t like the ground? But
25 as he thought about it Ken realized that all the
species he’d watched in the wild preferred to rest on
ledges, low branches, or other elevated perches where
they were safe from predators. They really only used
the ground for feeding and traveling. So he brought
30 in some hay bales for the Chukars to perch on and
then left his son in charge of feeding and data
collection while he went away on a short work trip.
Barely a teenager at the time, young Terry Dial
was visibly upset when his father got back. “I asked
35 him how it went,” Ken recalled, “and he said,
‘Terrible! The birds are cheating!’ ” Instead of flying
up to their perches, the baby Chukars were using
their legs. Time and again Terry had watched them
run right up the side of a hay bale, flapping all the
40 while. Ken dashed out to see for himself, and that
was the “aha” moment. “The birds were using their
wings and legs cooperatively,” he told me, and that
single observation opened up a world of possibilities.
Working together with Terry (who has since gone
45 on to study animal locomotion), Ken came up with a
series of ingenious experiments, filming the birds as
they raced up textured ramps tilted at increasing
angles. As the incline increased, the partridges began
to flap, but they angled their wings differently from
50 birds in flight. They aimed their flapping down and
backward, using the force not for lift but to keep
their feet firmly pressed against the ramp. “It’s like
the spoiler on the back of a race car,” he explained,
which is a very apt analogy. In Formula One racing,
55 spoilers are the big aerodynamic fins that push the
cars downward as they speed along, increasing
traction and handling. The birds were doing the very
same thing with their wings to help them scramble
up otherwise impossible slopes.
60 Ken called the technique WAIR, for wing-assisted
incline running, and went on to document it in a
wide range of species. It not only allowed young
birds to climb vertical surfaces within the first few
weeks of life but also gave adults an energy-efficient
65 alternative to flying. In the Chukar experiments,
adults regularly used WAIR to ascend ramps steeper
than 90 degrees, essentially running up the wall and
onto the ceiling.
In an evolutionary context, WAIR takes on
70 surprising explanatory powers. With one fell swoop,
the Dials came up with a viable origin for the
flapping flight stroke of birds (something gliding
animals don’t do and thus a shortcoming of the
tree-down theory) and an aerodynamic function for
75 half-formed wings (one of the main drawbacks to the
ground-up hypothesis).

Q. As used in line 7, “challenged” most nearly means