English Language Arts: Reading Strategies (TEKS.ELA.9-12.5.I)

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Texas High School ELA › English Language Arts: Reading Strategies (TEKS.ELA.9-12.5.I)

Questions 1 - 7
1

Following the 2021 winter storm, proposals to harden the Texas grid braided engineering prescriptions with market revisions. Mandates for weatherization promised mechanical resilience, yet compliance timelines, cost recovery, and enforcement authority hinged on statutory phrasing that simultaneously widened and narrowed obligations. Meanwhile, capacity-style incentives were floated under names that avoided the term, seeking to preserve the state's energy-only ethos while procuring reliability insurance. The paradox is structural: if the market remains pure, scarcity rents must suffice; if reliability is socialized, prices cannot signal scarcity cleanly. Legislators threaded a needle by empowering regulators to stage targeted procurements, but the definitions of "targeted," "reliability," and "prudence" carry latent policy commitments. Consumers, generators, and transmission operators read the same clause for opposite guarantees. To evaluate the package, one must not only parse the argot but trace how each clause shifts risk among actors, revealing who pays for resilience, and under what weather conditions.

Given the dense policy language and shifting stakeholders in this excerpt about the Texas grid, which strategy would best help you monitor and improve comprehension?

Read only the first and last sentences of the excerpt to capture the gist.

Rely on what you already believe about the Texas grid instead of analyzing the wording.

Highlight every sentence to ensure nothing is missed.

Create a clause-by-clause margin map that paraphrases key terms (e.g., "targeted," "prudence"), reread those sentences, and note which stakeholder gains or bears risk in each clause.

Explanation

The difficulty lies in precise policy terms and how clauses reassign risk. A targeted reread with clause-by-clause paraphrasing and annotations aligning terms to stakeholders directly addresses this complexity and deepens understanding. The other options either skim, rely on bias, or indiscriminately highlight without analysis.

2

Critics often misread the novel's first-person plural as a quaint chorus, but the "we" operates less as community than as aperture, dilating and constricting to regulate what can be seen. When disaster touches the town, the pronoun widens to admit rumor, breath, gravel—materials of a shared world—only to tighten into a filament whenever grief would otherwise overwhelm the page. The effect is not unanimity but orchestration: individual voices surface, dissolve back into the plural, and recur altered, like motifs in a symphony. Temporal sequence, too, is braided to this grammar; scenes are not arranged chronologically so much as by pressure, with the "we" clustering moments that rhyme in feeling even when they are years apart. To read for plot alone is to miss how point of view composes time's fabric, suturing unlike hours so that cause seems to follow effect, when the novel arranges mood to do that work.

What strategy would most effectively help you monitor comprehension of the critic's nuanced claims about point of view and time?

Reread the sentences that describe the pronoun "we" and annotate how point of view organizes time; then write a one-sentence paraphrase of the critic's central claim.

Replace unfamiliar words with simpler synonyms and ignore complex syntax so the reading is smoother.

Read the excerpt aloud quickly to catch the rhythm without stopping for analysis.

Consult a plot summary of the novel to avoid dealing with the passage's argument about point of view.

Explanation

The passage hinges on how the pronoun "we" functions structurally. Strategic rereading with annotations that connect pronoun use to temporal organization, followed by a paraphrase, directly addresses the sophisticated analysis. The distractors avoid the conceptual challenge or oversimplify.

3

In public memory, the Alamo functions less as a building than as a narrative template: a story that selects, trims, and sequences facts to consecrate a particular kind of courage. Yet the template has never been singular. Tejano participants, Black Texans, and later migrants have each pressed different episodes to the foreground, contesting which losses count and why. Archival silences complicate the matter; records preserved by victors produce crisp heroes where the paper trail is thick and blurred motives where it thins. Commemorations translate these gaps into ritual, fixing one reading for a season before another generation re-edits. What appears as consensus is often choreography—museums, textbooks, and tours synchronizing disparate memories long enough to resemble unity. The task for historians is not to abolish legend but to annotate it, asking what the legend makes visible, what it hides, and how its uses have shifted with Texas's changing publics and responsibilities.

Faced with competing perspectives and references to archival silences in this Texas history analysis, which strategy best supports sophisticated comprehension?

Memorize dates and names mentioned and skip sentences about archives or ritual.

Highlight only the sentences that confirm what you already think about the Alamo.

Ask targeted questions about which voices are present or absent, annotate evidence of perspective and silence, and reread the links the author makes among archives, commemoration, and public memory.

Watch a popular film adaptation to get the storyline instead of engaging with the analysis.

Explanation

The passage challenges readers to navigate perspectives and gaps in evidence. Formulating questions about representation and annotating how the author connects archives, ritual, and public memory demonstrates active monitoring and addresses the complexity. The distractors avoid or oversimplify the analysis.

4

Recent analyses of semi-arid hydroclimates suggest that drought is not merely a deficit of rainfall but an emergent property of coupled land–atmosphere feedbacks. When soils desiccate, boundary-layer mixing deepens, entraining drier air aloft and suppressing convective initiation; the resulting negative moisture recycling further entrenches anomaly persistence. Yet this local mechanism is phase-locked, in probabilistic terms, to remote sea-surface temperature teleconnections, so that identical precipitation totals can yield divergent evapotranspiration regimes depending on antecedent energy balance. The literature distinguishes meteorological from agricultural drought, but the taxonomy obscures the nonlinear thresholds by which plant stomatal closure amplifies sensible heat flux, preconditioning the boundary layer for heat extremes. Parsing these interactions requires attention to timescale aliasing: weekly anomalies can masquerade as seasonal signals when observational windows are misaligned. Consequently, attribution studies must disaggregate causal pathways across scales rather than regress outcomes on a single climatic index.

Faced with dense causal chains and discipline-specific vocabulary in this passage, which comprehension monitoring strategy would be most effective?

Skim for the general idea and move on without slowing down.

Re-read complex sentences in chunks, annotating causal links and defining key terms in context.

Skip unfamiliar words, trusting that later examples will clarify the meaning.

Highlight every sentence without writing any margin notes.

Explanation

Chunking and re-reading while annotating causal links and defining technical terms directly addresses dense syntax and specialized vocabulary, promoting deeper understanding. The other options either avoid the challenge or oversimplify without ensuring comprehension.

5

In the aftermath of the 2021 winter outages, the Commission promulgates Subchapter X to establish minimum weather emergency preparedness standards for generation entities within the independent system operator's footprint. An entity shall implement, by December 1, measures reasonably designed to maintain functionality during forecasted extreme cold conditions, including but not limited to insulation of critical components, provision of backup fuel, and verification of heat-trace systems; provided, however, that an entity may petition for a variance upon a showing of undue burden supported by engineering analysis. Compliance shall be evidenced by an attestation filed under penalty of perjury and subject to inspection; failure to remediate deficiencies within the timelines specified in §X.105 constitutes a violation. Nothing in this subchapter precludes more stringent requirements imposed by interconnection agreements. Cross-references to §25.362 govern emergency operations coordination. For purposes of this section, 'extreme cold' is defined by reference to the operator's seasonal assessment, incorporated herein by reference.

This Texas policy excerpt contains layered obligations, exceptions, and cross-references. Which strategy best supports accurate comprehension?

Read faster to avoid getting stuck on legal language.

Rely on an online summary and skip the full text.

Underline only the verbs in each sentence and ignore the rest.

Diagram the provision's structure with margin notes labeling obligations, exceptions, and cross-references, then re-read the targeted clauses.

Explanation

Legal passages require tracking how obligations, exceptions, and cross-references relate. Diagramming and annotating the structure, then re-reading referenced clauses, directly addresses this complexity. The other choices either avoid engagement or oversimplify the document's logic.

6

Advocates of compatibilism insist that freedom is not antithetical to causation but to compulsion: to act freely, on this view, is to act in accordance with reasons one endorses, even if those reasons arise within a deterministic nexus. The worry, however, is that endorsement itself risks becoming epiphenomenal—merely the echo of prior causes dressed in the rhetoric of agency. To dissolve this worry by stipulation ('endorsement just is freedom') begs the question; to reply that alternative possibilities are unnecessary relocates, rather than resolves, our intuitions about responsibility. A more promising route distinguishes guidance control from regulative control, the former concerning the integrity of the reasons-responsive mechanism through which an agent deliberates. Yet the distinction threatens to collapse unless we specify how sensitivity to reasons differs from post hoc rationalization. The terrain here is conceptual rather than empirical, and the same term ('control') slides uneasily between usages across authors.

The argument hinges on abstract distinctions and shifting definitions across paragraphs. Which monitoring strategy is most effective here?

Pose guiding questions and write a 1–2 sentence paraphrase after each paragraph, marking where definitions shift.

Memorize a single striking quotation and move on.

Skip the abstract terminology and focus only on the concrete examples.

Rely on intuition about free will without checking the text's reasoning.

Explanation

Generating clarifying questions and paraphrasing each paragraph while tracking definition shifts ensures active monitoring of an abstract, evolving argument. The distractors either avoid the difficult conceptual work or fail to check understanding against the text.

7

In a borderlands novel set along the Rio Grande, the narrator's voice oscillates between communal 'we' and an intimate second person that addresses a younger self, a fluctuation that critics misread as inconsistency rather than technique. The shift signals a choreography of belonging: 'we' convenes the village's ritual memory, while 'you' isolates the private costs of that choreography. Motifs recur obliquely—the river appears not as scenery but as an unbordered measure of time, and the white heron's arrivals bracket chapters in which departures proliferate. Irony underwrites the surface hospitality of the fiesta scenes, where abundance is staged against cupboards that do not open on page; the feast is both gift and concealment. To track these undercurrents, the reader must follow how images echo across chapters and how pronouns quietly reassign witness and burden, especially when the narrative doubles back to retell a scene from a different vantage.

This passage emphasizes recurring motifs and subtle shifts in point of view. Which strategy best supports deep comprehension?

Read a brief plot summary instead of engaging with the text's structure.

Highlight every adjective to capture description.

Tag each recurrence of key motifs and each point-of-view shift with margin symbols, then re-read paired scenes to compare.

Count the number of paragraphs to estimate emphasis.

Explanation

Systematically tagging motifs and POV shifts, followed by targeted re-reading of paired scenes, directly addresses the text's nuanced patterns and relationships. The other options are superficial and do not promote sophisticated understanding.