Identify Claims and Evidence Practice Test

Read the passage and answer the question.

Policy makers often praise standardized testing as a means of fairness: if every student answers the same questions under the same conditions, the resulting scores appear to offer an impartial comparison. Yet fairness is not guaranteed by uniformity alone. A test can be administered identically and still reward the kinds of preparation that are unevenly distributed across households, neighborhoods, and schools.

The appeal of standardization lies partly in its administrative simplicity. A single exam can be scored quickly, reported in tidy numbers, and used to sort applicants. But these conveniences can obscure what the exam is actually measuring. When a test emphasizes speed, it may capture familiarity with the test format as much as mastery of the subject. When it relies on culturally specific contexts, it may reward those who have encountered similar language at home or in enrichment programs.

Evidence of this mismatch appears in the test-preparation industry. Families with disposable income purchase practice materials, private tutoring, and repeated test sittings. Over time, students learn not only content but also the exam’s predictable patterns: which wrong answers are designed to tempt, how to allocate time, how to guess strategically. These skills can raise scores without a comparable increase in the underlying competencies that the test is presumed to represent.

None of this entails that assessment is unnecessary. Schools must make decisions with limited information, and some form of evaluation is unavoidable. The point is that treating a standardized score as a neutral indicator of merit mistakes the product of a social system for a property of an individual. If the goal is equity, then the design and interpretation of tests must account for the unequal conditions under which “equal” testing takes place.

A more credible approach would combine modest use of standardized measures with attention to coursework, portfolios, and opportunities that reveal sustained engagement. Such methods are imperfect, but they make visible what a single number tends to hide: the pathways by which achievement is produced.

Which option represents support for the author’s position?

Read the passage and answer the question.

A common story about scientific progress portrays it as a steady accumulation of facts. The author challenges this view by arguing that progress often depends on changes in what questions are considered worth asking. In this account, the history of science is not simply a ledger of discoveries but a record of shifting intellectual priorities.

The author explains that measurement tools and experimental techniques matter, but they do not automatically generate insight. A community may possess instruments capable of producing abundant data while still failing to notice certain patterns, because those patterns do not fit the questions the community has learned to value. The author suggests that what counts as an “interesting” anomaly is culturally trained.

To support this point, the author describes a period in which researchers cataloged plant varieties primarily to improve crop yields. In that context, irregularities that did not affect harvest were treated as noise. Only when a later generation became interested in inheritance and variation did those earlier irregularities become meaningful clues. The author emphasizes that the data were available, but their significance depended on a new set of questions.

The author also notes that institutions reward some inquiries more than others. Funding bodies and journals can amplify particular problems, making alternative lines of investigation appear fringe even when they are empirically promising. The author argues that such incentives influence not only what is studied but what is even imagined as study-worthy.

The author concludes that teaching science as mere fact-collection misrepresents how inquiry works. Students should learn to examine how questions emerge, because the capacity to revise questions is central to scientific change.

Which of the following best states a claim made by the author?