English Language Arts: Using Evidence (TEKS.ELA.9-12.6.C) Practice Test

In the ash-blue hours after the barn burned, I took the long road by the river, rehearsing a story that might set the town's gaze elsewhere. It was the wind, I would say; everyone knows what late-summer gusts can do to a lantern's temper. Still, I felt the sentence thicken in my mouth, as if it already knew where it would be weighed. The boards had been dry for months, hungry; a spark would have found them with or without my hand. I was nowhere near the flame, I'd insist, because stories in this town travel faster than a man can. Yet all the while I kept testing words against the inside of my cheek—accident, misfortune, act of God—discarding each for the taste it left. I rehearsed what I would tell them: that my hand slipped—yes, my hand—but under orders from sleep. Call it accident, I said to the dark, though the word tasted like ash. I pictured the sheriff's pencil pausing, the quiet that follows the first lie, and I adjusted the lie to fit that silence.

Claim: Despite insisting on innocence, the narrator's self-justifying diction and rehearsed alibi reveal an underlying recognition of guilt.

In Texas, drought has shifted from weather to grammar: it shapes how policy speaks. Public campaigns cast conservation as an oath to neighbors, urging shorter showers and brown lawns as badges of belonging. At town halls, maps of receding lakes crowd the walls and patience thins with the shorelines. Yet beneath this moral vocabulary lies a ledger of exemptions. Municipalities fine residents for overuse, while large industrial users—petrochemical complexes, bottlers, refineries—qualify for discounted rates once they cross thresholds officials label "economic criticality." The discounts are explained as safeguards for jobs and tax bases, but they also signal that heavy consumption earns a reward for scale. In practice, households are tutored in virtue while pipelines learn arithmetic. Over the last decade, per person use fell modestly, even as total withdrawals rose with population and industrial demand. A policy can preach restraint, but if its structure treats abundance as merit, the sermon curdles into theater.

Claim: The state's conservation policy frames restraint as a moral duty while structurally rewarding high consumption through industrial exemptions, undermining its ethical rhetoric.