1. Which of the following words best characterizes the author’s opinion of the plant in the following passage?

Sides of beef suspended from an overhead trolley swing toward a group of men. Each worker has a large knife in one hand and a steel hook in the other. They grab the meat with their hooks and attack it fiercely with their knives. As they hack away, using all their strength, grunting, the place suddenly feels different, primordial. The machinery seems beside the point, and what’s going on before me has been going on for thousands of years—the meat, the hook, the knife, men straining to cut more meat.

Work Cited

Schossler, Eric. “The Most Dangerous Job.” Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. 169-192. Print.

Question

2. Read the following passage.

Don’t be afraid. Just sit down next to a person you want to date and engage him or her in small talk. If you are in a classroom, talk about an assignment, the seating arrangement, or the instructor (be kind). If you are at work, talk about the building or some recent interesting event in the neighborhood. Ask your intended date how he or she feels about the situation. If you are at a group function and you have never been there before, tell the other person that you are there for the first time and ask for advice on how to relate to the group. Most people like to be spoken to. You’ll do just fine.

Work Cited:

Nevid, Jeffrey S., Spencer A. Rathus, and Hannah R. Rubenstein. Health in the New Millennium. New York, NY: Worth, 1998. Print.

What is the tone of the passage?

Question

3. Read the following passage.

Certainly one of the most important values of literature is that it nourishes our emotional lives. An effective literary work may seem to speak to us, especially if we are ripe for it. The inner life that good writers reveal in their characters often gives us glimpses of some portion of ourselves. We can be moved to laugh, cry, tremble, dream, ponder, shriek, or rage with a character by simply turning a page instead of turning our lives upside down. Although the experience itself is imagined, the emotion is real. . . . Human emotions speak a universal language regardless of when or where a work was written.

Work Cited:

Meyer, Michael. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. 10th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2013. Print.

What is the tone of the passage?

Question

4. Read the following passage.

One sad rainy morning last winter, I talked to a woman who was addicted to crack cocaine. She was twenty-two, stiletto thin, with eyes as old as tombs. She was living in two rooms in a welfare hotel with her children, who were two, three, and five years of age. Her story was the usual tangle of human woe: early pregnancy, dropping out of school, vanished men, smack and then crack, tricks with johns in parked cars to pay for the dope. I asked her why she did drugs. She shrugged in an empty way and couldn’t really answer beyond “makes me feel good.” While we talked and she told her tale of squalor, the children ignored us. They were watching television.

Work Cited:

Hamill, Pete. “Crack and the Box.” Piecework: Writings on Men and Women, Fools and Heroes, Lost Cities, Vanished Friends, Small Pleasures, Large Calamities, and How the Weather Was. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996. 99-103. Print.

The tone of the paragraph comes both from the facts the author presents and the descriptive language he uses. Which of the following sentences contributes to the tone only through the facts it presents, and not also through descriptive language?

Question

5. Read the following paragraph by Pete Hamill.

One sad rainy morning last winter, I talked to a woman who was addicted to crack cocaine. She was twenty-two, stiletto thin, with eyes as old as tombs. She was living in two rooms in a welfare hotel with her children, who were two, three, and five years of age. Her story was the usual tangle of human woe: early pregnancy, dropping out of school, vanished men, smack and then crack, tricks with johns in parked cars to pay for the dope. I asked her why she did drugs. She shrugged in an empty way and couldn’t really answer beyond “makes me feel good.” While we talked and she told her tale of squalor, the children ignored us. They were watching television.

Work Cited:

Hamill, Pete. “Crack and the Box.” Piecework: Writings on Men and Women, Fools and Heroes, Lost Cities, Vanished Friends, Small Pleasures, Large Calamities, and How the Weather Was. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996. 99-103. Print.

Which of the following pairs of words best describes the author’s tone in the paragraph?

Question

6. Read the following passage by Natalie Angier.

A hungry mother can be the stuff of nightmares—especially if it is the mother next door. Chimpanzees are exemplary mothers when it comes to caring for their own, said Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a primatologist and the author of Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection.

Unlike humans, Dr. Hrdy said, the apes never abandon or reject their young, no matter how diseased or crippled a baby may be. Yet because female chimpanzees live in troops with other nonrelated females, a ravenous, lactating mother feels little compunction about killing and eating the child of a group mate. “It’s a good way to get lipids,” Dr. Hrdy said.

Work Cited:

Angier, Natalie. “One thing They Aren’t: Maternal.” The New York Times. 9 May 2006. Web.

What does Angier want to convey by ending this passage with Dr. Hrdy’s statement, “[Eating a group mate’s child] is a good way to get lipids?

Question

7. Read the following passage by Mark Twain.

I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me and I had never seen anything like this at home.

Work Cited:

Twain, Mark. “Two Ways of Seeing a River.” Life on the Mississippi. Memphis, TN: General, 2010. Print.

Based on his use of figurative language in this passage, which statement best expresses the author’s point-of-view?

Question

8. Read the following passage.

[W]hen she pulled the bird from the oven, it had a dark, shriveled quality and I still wasn’t convinced that eating the goose was a good idea.

Then I took a bite. The meat was dark as liver, and earthy too, but not greasy or gamey. It was delicious. Aside from the lead shot my husband found embedded in his dinner, the Canada Goose made for a delicious meal and even our kids loved it. As for the debate about whether or not to eat the birds, I now wholeheartedly fall into the eat’em camp. This summer, Canada Geese that strayed too close to New York City’s airport were culled and shipped to Pennsylvania to be offered in food banks there. But if Manhattan’s chefs knew how scrumptious those birds were, there’s no way they would have left the island.

Work Cited:

Elton, Sarah. “My First Helping of Canada Goose.” The Atlantic. 19 Oct. 2011. Web.

Which statement best expresses the author’s opinion?

Question

9. Read the passage by Sue Hubbell below.

The reason I am hiring David this year is that a young man I have used in the past has moved away. We worked well together and he liked bees though even he was stung royally at first. I admired his courage the first day we were out together, for he stood holding a super from which I was blowing bees while his arm was fast turning into a pin cushion from stings.

When we carried the stacked supers to the honey house’s loading dock, he would scorn the hot bee veil as he wheeled the supers on the handtruck despite the cross bees flying around the dock. One time, as I opened the door for him to bring in the load, I noticed that his face was contorted in what I took to be the effort of getting the handtruck down the ramp. We quickly wheeled the load of supers up to the scale, where we weigh each load. He was going too fast, so that when he stopped at the scale he fell backward and 350 pounds of supers dropped on him. Pinned down, he loyally balanced himself on one fist so that he didn’t harm the honey pump against which he had fallen. The reason for his knotted face and his speed was obvious for the first time: He was being stung on the forehead by three bees.

Good boss that I am, I did not choose that moment to go to the cabin and make myself a cup of coffee; I picked the supers off his chest, scraped off the stingers and helped him to his feet. It became one of our shared legends of working together. This year I miss him.

Work Cited:

Hubbell, Sue. “The Beekeeper.” The New York Times. 2 Aug. 1984. Web.

Which description best fits the author’s point-of-view?

Question

10. Read the following excerpt from Garrett Hardin’s article “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor.”

On the average, poor countries undergo a 2.5 percent increase in population each year; rich countries, about 0.8 percent. Only rich countries have anything in the way of food reserves set aside, and even they do not have as much as they should. Poor countries have none. If poor countries received no food from the outside, the rate of their population growth would be periodically checked by crop failures and famines. But if they can always draw on a world food bank in time of need, their populations can continue to grow unchecked, and so will their “need” for aid. In the short run, a world food bank may diminish that need, but in the long run it actually increases the need without limit.

Without some system of worldwide food sharing, the proportion of people in the rich and poor nations might eventually stabilize. The overpopulated poor countries would decrease in numbers, while the rich countries that had room for more people would increase. But with a well-meaning system of sharing, such as a world food bank, the growth differential between the rich and the poor countries will not only persist, it will increase. Because of the higher rate of population growth in the poor countries of the world, 88 percent of today’s children are born poor, and only 12 percent rich. Year by year the ratio becomes worse, as the fast-reproducing poor outnumber the slow-reproducing rich.

Work Cited:

Hardin, Garrett. “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor.” Psychology Today. Sept. 1974. Web.

Based on this passage, which statement best expresses the author’s opinion of the effect of food sharing on population growth?

Question

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