Read Grade-Level Literary Nonfiction Practice Test

Read the biographical passage and answer the question.

In the winter of 1906, Ida B. Wells wrote with the stubborn precision of someone who refused to let rumors do the work of history. By then, she was already known for investigating lynching—collecting names, dates, and testimonies when many newspapers treated violence against Black Americans as either entertainment or silence.

Her method was not glamorous. She read local reports line by line, noticing contradictions others ignored: a man described as “dangerous” in one paragraph and “successful” in the next, as if prosperity itself were evidence. She wrote letters to ministers and editors, asking for confirmation, and she kept records that could be checked, not merely believed.

In speeches, Wells did something even riskier than accusation: she demanded that audiences examine their own comfort. One listener recalled her saying, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” The phrase sounds simple, but it contains a challenge. Light reveals; it also makes it harder to look away.

Wells faced threats, and she faced a different kind of resistance too—polite dismissal. Some people said she was “too intense,” as if intensity were a flaw rather than a response to injustice. Yet her insistence on evidence helped shift the conversation from excuses to accountability, forcing readers to confront what had been strategically ignored.

Question: What is the author’s purpose in describing Wells’s “not glamorous” method and her emphasis on evidence?​

Read the personal essay and answer the question.

I used to think silence was empty—an awkward pause waiting to be filled with something clever. Then my grandmother began losing her hearing, and our conversations changed shape. Phone calls became exhausting puzzles: I repeated myself until my voice sounded like a copy of a copy, thinner each time. When I visited, she watched my mouth more than my eyes. I started to understand that listening is not only a function of ears; it is also a decision.

One afternoon, we sat on her porch while the neighborhood carried on without us: a lawn mower whining, a dog barking at its own boredom, wind tapping a loose shutter like impatient fingers. My grandmother handed me a bowl of peaches and pointed to the tree in the yard. She didn’t say, “Remember when your grandfather planted that?” She just touched the air, as if tracing a line from the fruit back to its roots.

I wanted to translate her gesture into a sentence—something neat and shareable. Instead, I waited. In that waiting, I noticed details I usually rushed past: the bruised spot on one peach, the way her hands paused before they moved, the calm stubbornness of the tree holding its leaves in late summer.

Later, I realized the porch had become a classroom. My grandmother was teaching me a different kind of fluency, one that doesn’t depend on perfect sound. Silence, I learned, isn’t a blank page; it’s a margin where meaning can gather if you stop trying to crowd it out.

Question: What does the author’s metaphor comparing silence to “a margin where meaning can gather” suggest?