English Language Arts: Personal Connections (TEKS.ELA.9-12.6.A) Practice Test

At seventeen, I began to realize how much of myself had been assembled by invisible hands. My playlists learned my moods; my feed predicted my outrage and my awe. I mistook recognition for understanding, the mirror for depth. It felt comforting to be seen, and riskless to be guided, until I noticed what the guidance removed: the friction of surprise, the pause of doubt. In class, we spoke about authors who wrote against the grain of their times, and I wondered whether my grain had been sanded smooth. Choice still existed, but it was curated, like a museum with locked doors behind the exhibits. Were my convictions earned, or merely delivered? I thought of how a compass points north because the world insists, not because the needle dreams. If I wanted a truer north, I would need to invite interference: to seek voices that unsettled me, to let error be a teacher, to risk the embarrassment of asking real questions. Identity, I realized, is not a collage of likenesses but a conversation with resistance. What we refuse to click may matter as much as what we collect. I began practicing interruption, letting silence complicate certainty and widen perspective for me.

Driving west from Austin, the green thins quickly, and the road begins to measure water. Towns stretch their names across dry creeks, and windmills lift slow prayers from the ground. In Texas, water is a map of competing futures: cities expanding under summer heat, farms guarding a season's risk, ranches balancing grass and herd, springs trying to remember their way to the surface. Policy speaks in acre-feet and rights, but people speak in kitchens—what can we afford, who goes without, which promise do we keep? When a drought arrives, it does not argue; it reveals. Aquifers keep quiet until they cannot. We call this 'resource management,' as if resources were obedient and management were neutral. But every allocation is a story about belonging: who counts as neighbor, how far responsibility travels downstream, whether a river may be a citizen in our memory. The lesson is not that there is one fair solution; it is that fairness must be renewed like rain, and argued for when the sky refuses. Shared wells create shared obligations. To live here is to learn that thirst is physical and political, and that community is a decision rehearsed with every cup. And scarcity teaches us patience.