Diagnostic Test 2 Practice Test

Youth voter turnout in the last national election rose notably, reversing a decades-long pattern of anemic participation. Commentators quickly credited a burst of social media activism, pointing to viral endorsements and clever explainer threads. But the logic of virality has been with us long enough to test its civic power, and its results are inconsistent at best. The more durable explanation for behavior that requires bureaucratic steps and calendared follow-through is institutional: schools have spent the past ten years reimagining civics as more than memorizing branches of government. They have made voting a practiced habit long before graduation.

Educators describe a shift from recitation to rehearsal. Rather than quizzing students on obscure clauses, they ask them to attend school board meetings, analyze local budgets, and run mock elections that teach not only how to fill out a ballot but how to navigate the mundane obstacles that keep first-timers away: finding a polling place, bringing the right ID, knowing what's on the ballot. Many districts now facilitate pre-registration at sixteen or seventeen, so that an eighteen-year-old who wakes up on Election Day is not learning the rules for the first time. Counselors send reminders timed to registration deadlines alongside the cascade of messages about financial aid and college visits. By the time students leave, they have rehearsed the civic act, and rehearsal begets performance.

This approach has little of the glamour that attracts headlines. It is slow, local work, and it rarely produces viral content. Yet it addresses the specific frictions that most reliably suppress youth participation: uncertainty and inconvenience. If a young person sees voting as something done by people like them—because they have done it in class, because adults around them expect and facilitate it—the act feels thinkable and therefore likely. The rise in turnout appears, on this account, not as a flash in a feed but as the harvest of a decade's curricular labor.

There is a tendency to attribute civic shifts to the loudest recent noise. But votes are cast not in the ether of discourse but in places with lines and forms. Schools that have treated civics as practice rather than pageantry have shifted the odds. The most plausible explanation for the increase in youth turnout is not a sudden conversion by meme, but the steady accretion of confidence and competence fostered by sustained educational reform.

Which of the following, if true, would best provide an alternative explanation for the increase in youth voter turnout described in the passage?

We ask too much of law when we expect it to transform a society overnight, and too little when we treat it as mere ornament to habits already in place. A better image is a map: not the terrain itself, but a widely shared chart of how to move through it. A statute, like a map, proposes routes and warns of hazards; it marks roads we are invited to take and boundaries we are told to respect. People equipped with a trustworthy map travel differently than those without one. They cluster along certain paths, avoid others, and grow confident venturing into zones they might have shunned. Over time, this patterned movement can feed back into the ground. What began as a suggestion of a viable route can become a well-trodden track, while areas ignored may grow over with weeds, literal or social. Law exhibits similar path dependence. Seatbelt mandates, for instance, did not instantly produce a safety culture, but they coordinated expectations; as compliance rose and social approval followed, the practice came to feel not only legal but normal. The terrain did not change, but the map altered how we saw and used it, and those new uses reshaped the surface in return through enforcement, infrastructure design, and habits of attention. This image resists two tempting distortions. One is the blueprint fantasy, which imagines that a law specifies the building down to its smallest joint and that the finished structure will simply match the drawing if followed with enough fidelity. But social life is not a controlled site, and citizens are not carpenters working to a plan; they interpret, appropriate, and sometimes contest what the law says. The other distortion is the weather analogy, where statutes become forecasts we can heed or ignore while the storm rages on, indifferent. This drains law of any shaping power and reduces it to commentary. The map image steers between these extremes. It grants law the authority to orient walkers without pretending to pave the earth. It acknowledges that travelers sometimes redraw the map, whether by political reform, court decision, or civil disobedience, and that the revised chart will in turn reroute movement. In this way, legal change is less a single leap than an ongoing recalibration of shared bearings, a process in which description and prescription mingle.

The relationship between statutory law and everyday social behavior is most analogous to: