PSAT89_Test 2_Module 1

The following text is adapted from Lewis Carroll’s 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Alice, a child, is talking to her cat.

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“Do you hear the snow against the window-panes, Kitty? How nice and soft it sounds! Just as if someone was kissing the window all over outside.”

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As used in the text, what does the word “soft” most nearly mean?

• Gentle

• Sensitive

• Shapeless

• Bland

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The following text is adapted from Charles Chesnutt’s 1899 story “The Wife of His Youth.” Mr. Ryder is hosting a formal gathering where he will propose marriage to the woman he has been courting.

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[A] younger and less cautious man would long since have spoken. But he had made up his mind, and had only to determine the time when he would ask her to be his wife. He decided to give a ball in her honor, and at some time during the evening of the ball to offer her his heart and hand.

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As used in the text, what does the word “determine” most nearly mean?

• Choose

• Influence

• Demonstrate

• Measure

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It would be a mistake to ______ the exhibit that artist and curator Joe Baker, who is a member of the Lenape (Delaware) people, has organized at the Brooklyn Public Library. The exhibit, which includes Lenape beadwork from the 1850s as well as modern works that use traditional patterns, is essential viewing.

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Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

• complicate

• amplify

• overlook

• assemble

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Archaeologist Erika Karuzas works with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of Montana to preserve culturally significant sites. In 2015 they decided that creating a new national trail connecting many of these sites would ______ their preservation efforts, because the US government provides some protections to national trails that aren’t given to other areas.

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Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

• inspire

• ignore

• promote

• reduce

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Researcher Lucy Salazar is using radiocarbon dating to study Machu Picchu, an ancient Incan fortress in the Andes Mountains. She and her colleagues have found that the site’s age differs from the ______ estimate: it is approximately 20 years older than scholars thought when first encountering Machu Picchu in 1911.

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Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

• genuine

• intentional

• independent

• original

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The following text is adapted from Jason Reynolds’s 2016 novel Ghost. The narrator, who is in middle school, is at a bus stop.

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I just go there [to the bus stop] to look at the people working out. See, the gym across the street has this big window—like the whole wall is a window—and they have those machines that make you feel like you walking up steps and so everybody just be facing the bus stop, looking all crazy like they’re about to pass out. And trust me, there ain’t nothing funnier than that. So I check that out for a little while like it’s some kind of movie: The About to Pass Out Show, starring stair-stepper person one through ten.

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Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?

• To give a reason why the narrator is excited to start middle school

• To describe an activity that the narrator finds amusing

• To explain a problem that the narrator has overcome

• To discuss a movie that the narrator saw in a theater

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In 2020, rap artist and professor A.D. Carson published the first peer-reviewed rap album about his experiences with Black masculinity called “i used to love to dream.” Typically in peer review, experts evaluate scholarly articles prior to publication. For Carson’s album, dubbed a “mixtap/e/ssay,” peer review involved both scholars and rap artists. In combining elements of a mixtape album with scholarly essays that connect Carson’s lyrics to historical and contemporary contexts for listeners both inside and outside academia, Carson’s album helped redefine how scholarship is created and shared.

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Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?

• To compare the relative public impact of scholarly articles and albums

• To capture one scholar’s opinion of a new rap album

• To explain why a certain rap album is particularly innovative

• To describe how each step of the peer review process unfolds

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Historians have argued that a crucial component of the Civil Rights Movement’s success in the 1960s was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Citizen Education Program (CEP), which invited promising activists from across the South to its one-week training sessions in Dorchester, Georgia. Led by experienced organizers such as Dorothy Cotton and Septima Clark, CEP attendees—more than 7,000 in all—participated in workshops on topics ranging from public speaking to legal doctrine before returning home and using their newly acquired knowledge to spearhead local civil rights initiatives.

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Which choice best describes the function of the underlined portion in the text as a whole?

• It underscores the extent of the CEP’s impact on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

• It illustrates the CEP organizers’ efforts to educate participants on a wide variety of topics.

• It suggests that CEP attendees held a diverse array of opinions about the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s political philosophy.

• It establishes that criticism of the CEP was limited to a few individuals in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

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Text 1

Flamingos are known for their vibrant pink coloring, but they’re actually born with gray feathers. Their pink color comes from eating brine shrimp, but brine shrimp aren’t naturally pink either. Animals can’t produce carotenoids, the pigments that provide the pink hue. The algae that brine shrimp feed on, however, can produce these pigments. Thus, the pinker the flamingo, the more shrimp it has eaten.

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Text 2

Ecologist Juan Amat has found that flamingos apply a kind of makeup to make themselves appear pinker. A gland near their tail contains pigments that come from the food they eat. When the flamingos groom themselves using the pigments, their feathers become pinker. Flamingos may do this to improve their success during mating season, when they would benefit from looking pinker.

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Based on the texts, how would the ecologist in Text 2 most likely respond to the author’s conclusion in Text 1?

• By emphasizing that flamingos’ tail feathers are pinker than their other feathers are

• By claiming that the coloring of flamingos’ feathers doesn’t change significantly enough for most observers to notice

• By pointing out that the amount of shrimp eaten isn’t the only thing that influences flamingos’ coloring

• By arguing that flamingos’ diet doesn’t include much shrimp except during mating season

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The following text is from Beatrice Harraden’s 1894 novel Ships that Pass in the Night.

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In an old second-hand bookshop in London, an old man sat reading Gibbon’s History of Rome. He did not put down his book when the postman brought him a letter. He just glanced indifferently at the letter, and impatiently at the postman. Zerviah Holme did not like to be interrupted when he was reading Gibbon; and as he was always reading Gibbon, an interruption was always regarded by him as an insult.

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Based on the text, how did Zerviah Holme most likely feel when the letter was delivered?

• He felt relieved because he had been expecting an important letter.

• He felt excited because the letter was from a good friend.

• He felt sad because the postman did not stop to talk with him before leaving.

• He felt annoyed because he was interrupted while reading his favorite author.

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