English Language Arts: Questioning Text (TEKS.ELA.9-12.5.B) Practice Test

Cities increasingly outsource high-stakes decisions—loan approvals, hiring screens, policing predictions—to algorithms praised for neutrality yet trained on historical data soaked in bias. The passage contrasts two rival notions of fairness: procedural fairness, which values consistent rules and transparency about inputs, and outcome fairness, which evaluates whether results reproduce inequities even when procedures look clean. A hiring algorithm that ignores names and addresses may appear procedurally fair; yet if past performance reviews reflect biased mentorship patterns, the model could perpetuate disparities in promotions. The author suggests that debates often smuggle in unstated priorities: is fairness about equal treatment, equal opportunity, or equalized outcomes? Each choice redistributes error—who gets flagged as a risk, who is mistakenly excluded—and reconceives harm as a false positive, a false negative, or a muffled possibility never considered. The piece also questions whether explanations satisfy accountability if they merely reveal how bias traveled, not why it was permitted to travel. It proposes that auditability without a forum for remedy can launder injustice by making it legible but unchallenged. Ultimately, fairness, the author argues, is less a property of the tool than a governance decision about whose losses we are willing to normalize as the cost of efficiency.

Texas faces recurrent drought, booming urban corridors, and fragile springs fed by karst aquifers that store water like a network of hidden, leaky vaults. The passage argues that scarcity is not only meteorological but institutional: long-standing water rights prioritize historical pumping, while rapid development overlays new demands on old arrangements. Urban conservation campaigns trim household use, yet irrigation for high-value crops and upstream withdrawals can dwarf those savings. Environmental flows that keep rivers alive for whooping cranes or coastal fisheries often arrive last in legal hierarchies, even though those ecosystems underpin regional economies. The author traces the Edwards Aquifer dispute as a case where court-ordered caps forced a reimagining of 'property' as a shared, hydrologically entangled asset. Still, the piece warns against technocratic fixes that ignore equity: desalination and pipelines can shift costs onto ratepayers far from the political tables where deals are cut. It asks whether planning horizons match the lifespan of the state's infrastructure and aquifers, or merely the election cycle. Ultimately, the passage reframes water not as a commodity alone but as a temporal contract among past, present, and future Texans, in which allocating a gallon is also choosing who is asked to wait, to pay, or to risk.