High School Reading: Grades 11-12 Quiz: Citing Evidence And Uncertainty Literature

A writer argues, "Our town needs a bigger library: my book club often can't find a quiet table." How well is the claim supported?

In "Grandpa called the old sedan reliable, and it was: reliably late, reliably loud, reliably his," what does "reliably his" suggest?

In "The committee welcomed her proposal the way a fortress welcomes a battering ram," the simile suggests the committee

A speaker says, "We were told the bridge was safe. We were told the water was clean. We were told to stop asking." The repetition mainly stresses

Read: "Mara set out two cups out of habit, then slowly returned one to the shelf." Which inference is best supported?

"Jonah counted the coins twice, then slid half across the table to his sister without a word." Which claim about Jonah does this line best support?

The proposal now before this Assembly — that the price of grain be fixed by statute — is offered to us as a remedy for the sufferings of the poor, and no man here doubts the reality of those sufferings. I would be the last to deny them; I have walked, as many of you have, through the lanes east of the cathedral, and I have seen what hunger looks like when it has taken up residence in a household and refuses to leave. But the question before us is not whether the poor suffer. The question is whether this remedy will relieve their suffering or deepen it. When, in the reign of the last king but one, a similar measure was enacted in the northern provinces, the immediate effect was applause; the medium-term effect was the vanishing of grain from the licit markets; and the final effect was a famine so severe that the statute was repealed by the very men who had drafted it, weeping. I do not offer this history as a curiosity. I offer it as a warning that a policy which soothes the conscience in the morning may, by evening, have starved the children it was written to feed.

Which sentence most strongly supports the inference that the speaker acknowledges the moral appeal of the proposal while ultimately opposing it?

When Aunt Lida arrived from Chicago, she brought with her, as she always did, the enormous leather suitcase that had accompanied her on every visit since I was a child. It was scuffed at the corners and its brass clasps had gone dull, and my mother had, more than once, offered to buy her a lighter, wheeled replacement. Lida always declined, gently but without wavering. That summer, when I was seventeen and had begun to notice such things, I asked her why. She was in the guest room, unpacking. She lifted a folded blouse from the case and held it a moment before answering. "Your grandfather bought this the year he came over," she said. "He had eleven dollars left, and he spent seven of them on this. He carried it from the ship to a boarding house on Ashland Avenue, and then to every apartment he lived in until he died. When I carry it, I am not carrying a suitcase. I am doing something else." She did not say what the something else was. She placed the blouse in a drawer, and then, as though she had told me too much, she asked me to bring her a glass of water from the kitchen.

Which detail from the passage most strongly supports the inference that Aunt Lida regards the suitcase as an act of remembrance rather than a mere possession?

Consider, then, the young republic as a ship newly launched. Her timbers are green; her sails, though bright, have not been tested against the gales that any long voyage must encounter; and her crew, drawn from every quarter of the harbor, has not yet learned to answer as one voice to the orders of the mate. It is the fashion, among certain gentlemen of leisure, to speak of such a vessel as though her seaworthiness were already established — as though the mere fact of her having been christened were proof against tempest. I confess I cannot share their confidence. A ship is not made seaworthy by the ceremony of her launching, nor a nation by the ratification of her charter. Both must be proven in weather, and the weather, gentlemen, is coming. Let us not be found, on that morning, congratulating ourselves upon a voyage we have not yet undertaken.

Which quotation from the passage most strongly supports the claim that the speaker regards early national self-congratulation as a specific and present danger?

My brother Ilya had, since childhood, been the family's designated success. Our mother declared it when he was seven and had won a regional mathematics competition; our father seconded it, more quietly, when Ilya, at fourteen, corrected an error in the university physicist's newspaper column. By the time he was twenty-four and had returned from Zurich with his doctorate, the designation had hardened into something none of us questioned. And so, when he sat at our kitchen table that August and said he was going to leave physics and open a bakery, my mother laughed. It was not a cruel laugh — she was incapable of cruelty — but it was the laugh of a person who has heard a joke and is waiting for the second, funnier line. Ilya did not deliver the second line. He looked at his coffee. My father, who had been reading the paper, set it down slowly, folded it in half, and folded it in half again, as though the paper might, if properly folded, contain what was happening. Neither of them spoke. It was I, the younger sister, the unremarkable one, who asked him what kind of bread.

Which detail from the passage most strongly supports the inference that Ilya's parents are struggling to accept his announcement despite their outward composure?

The town of Vermillion had two histories, and Priya had grown up hearing only one. It was the history recited at the Fourth of July picnic, printed on the placemats at the diner, and inscribed on the bronze plaque outside the courthouse: a story of founders and railroads, of a schoolhouse built by subscription, of a mayor who had refused a bribe from a coal syndicate in 1897. The second history Priya did not encounter until she was twenty-two and home from her first year of graduate school, when Mrs. Alcorn — who had taught her fourth grade and now, in retirement, spent her afternoons in the local archive — set a cardboard box on the reading-room table and said, "You are old enough now." Inside were the deed books, the census supplements, the letters no one had wanted printed on placemats. Priya read for six hours. When she looked up, the light had gone amber, and Mrs. Alcorn, watching her from across the table, said only, "Now you know why I waited."

Which quotation most strongly supports the inference that Mrs. Alcorn considers the contents of the box potentially destabilizing to a young reader's understanding of the town?

Fellow Citizens: It is said, and often, that our institutions are the marvel of the age — that the machinery of self-government, once so novel in its assembly, now hums with the steadiness of a mill wheel. I would not dispute the compliment; I would only remind those who offer it that a mill wheel turns because water is compelled to press against it, and the moment the sluice is closed, the wheel, however admired, stops. So too with liberty. It is not the ornament of our Republic but its motive power, and the citizen who imagines that the mere existence of our Constitution will, of itself, sustain freedom, mistakes the wheel for the water. Vigilance, my friends, is not a virtue we may practice occasionally, as one attends a concert or a fair; it is the daily labor of opening the sluice, and there is no morning on which we may sleep and expect the wheel to turn without us.

Which quotation best supports the claim that the speaker views civic vigilance as an ongoing obligation rather than an occasional exercise?

Dr. Renwick's laboratory, on the fourth floor of the old physiology building, was not a place where one visited casually. Graduate students spoke of it in the tones reserved for shrines and haunted houses. When I was assigned to work there in my second year, I expected — I am not sure what I expected. A cathedral of glassware, perhaps. What I found was a long, narrow room in which every surface, including the floor beneath the benches, was covered in labeled index cards. The cards were not decorative. Each recorded a single failed experiment: date, hypothesis, procedure, and, in Renwick's small precise hand, the sentence This was wrong because — followed by his best current guess. There were, I estimated later, more than four thousand cards. On my first day Renwick saw me staring and said, without turning from his microscope, "People think I keep them to remember. I keep them so I will not have to remember. The card remembers for me, and I am free to be wrong again tomorrow."

Which quotation best supports the inference that Renwick views his catalog of failures as a tool for future experimentation rather than as a monument to past error?

I had thought the garden a small thing — A plot my grandmother tended in her widowhood, A square of loam no larger than a parlor rug, Bordered by bricks she had carried, one by one, From the ruin of the old bakery on Vine Street. I had thought it a hobby, an indulgence, A way of filling the hours a husband had emptied. It was not until the drought of my thirtieth year, When the municipal water was rationed And my own tomatoes shriveled on their stakes, That I remembered her carrying pails from the rain barrel At four in the morning, in her nightgown, in November, And understood, at last, that what I had called a hobby Was a discipline she had refused to name, Because naming it would have invited the neighbors To call it something smaller than it was.

Which lines most strongly support the inference that the speaker's grandmother deliberately concealed the seriousness of her gardening?

Tomas had always maintained that he despised the theater — the artifice of it, the painted flats, the actors declaiming as though the back row were on another continent. When Ines invited him to accompany her to a production of an obscure Portuguese tragedy, he agreed only because refusing would have required an explanation he did not wish to give. In the lobby he made a show of examining the program with distaste. During the first act he sat with his arms folded, his face composed into the expression of a man enduring an ordeal for another's sake. But in the long scene at the beginning of the second act, when the aging queen speaks to her dead son as though he were still in the room, Tomas leaned forward without noticing he had done so, and did not lean back until the curtain fell. Afterward, in the lit foyer, he resumed his complaints — the pacing had been sluggish, the translation stiff, the lead's diction affected — and Ines, walking a step behind him, said nothing, and smiled.

Which detail from the passage most strongly supports the inference that Tomas's professed contempt for the theater is not entirely genuine?

The lamp in Miren's window had burned for six nights running, and on the seventh, when the wind rattled the shutters like a beggar demanding entry, she did not rise to fasten them. Her sister Ana, who had come from the coast believing the funeral would be over by now, watched Miren's hands: they lay open on the coverlet, palms upward, as though waiting for something to be placed in them. It was a posture Ana had never seen her sister assume — Miren, who had inherited their mother's habit of always clenching something, a rag, a rosary, the hem of her apron. Ana said nothing about the shutters. She said nothing about the lamp. She understood that the vigil was not for the dead man in the front room but for some part of Miren herself that had gone with him, and that to interrupt the burning would be to close a door her sister was not yet ready to close. Outside, the almond tree scraped the wall, and a dog barked once, far away, and was silent.

Which quotation from the passage most strongly supports the inference that Ana recognizes a fundamental change in her sister's inner life?