Module I: Reading and Writing

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The following text is from Rudolfo Anaya's 1972 novel Bless Me, Ultima. The young narrator is eating breakfast with his two sisters in their home in rural New Mexico.
I sat across the table from Deborah and Teresa and ate my atole and the hot tortilla with butter. I said very little. I usually spoke very little to my two sisters. They were older than I and they were very close. They usually spent the entire day in the attic, playing dolls and giggling. I did not concern myself with those things.
As used in the text, what does the phrase "concern myself with" most nearly mean?
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craft
get angry about
care about
earn
The percentage of US forest land that a 2023 federal report identified as being either mature or old growth exceeds other recent estimates. Given how little _______ there is among scientists regarding the scope of these categories, this discrepancy shouldn't be surprising: forest researchers regularly dispute one another's classifications.  
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?  
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interest
deliberation
vigilance
consensus
Karam Kang has demonstrated that lobbying does little to alter the probability that a particular energy policy under consideration by the United States Congress will be enacted, but lobbying is not _______ finding seems to suggest. As Kang herself notes, lobbying can shape which policy proposals members of Congress bring forward for consideration in the first place.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?  
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counterproductive
cynical
biased
ineffectual
Though it does not guarantee a book's commercial success, _______ can play a big role in that success – a well-executed marketing campaign helped to make Danielle Steel's novel The Gift, the fourth-best-selling novel of 1994.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
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originality
publicity
complexity
practicality
People sometimes dismiss a claim if it comes from a source they regard as self-interested, but from a strictly logical perspective, the source of a claim is _______: it has no direct bearing on whether the claim is true.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
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implicit
indisputable
indistinct
irrelevant  
When people think of dinosaurs with feathers, they typically think of winged dinosaurs, such as the four-winged Microraptor. However, many dinosaurs that didn’t have wings also had feathers on their bodies. For instance, research indicates that the wingless, speedy Ornithomimus likely had feathers.
Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?
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It reveals that the dinosaurs mentioned earlier in the text used their feathers for an important purpose.
It gives an example of a dinosaur with the characteristics mentioned earlier in the text.
It defines a term related to the type of dinosaur feathers mentioned earlier in the text.
It indicates that the dinosaurs mentioned earlier in the text weren’t the only ones that had feathers.
The following text is from Annie Dillard's 1987 autobiographical novel An American Childhood. The narrator is a young girl living in Pittsburgh.
I walked. My mother had given me the freedom of the streets as soon as I could say our telephone number. I walked and memorized the neighborhood. I made a mental map and located myself upon it. At night in bed I rehearsed the small world's scheme and set challenges: Find the store using backyards only. Imagine a route from the school to my friend's house.  
Which choice best describes the function of the underlined portion in the text as a whole?
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It describes the narrator trying to memorize her telephone number.
It provides examples of what the narrator thinks about at night.
It gives directions to the narrator's favorite local store.
It portrays the narrator's relationship with her mother.
Gus Edwards's atmospheric play Black Body Blues was produced in 1978 by the groundbreaking Negro Ensemble Company (NEC). NEC cofounder Douglas Turner Ward, who worked as an actor, director, and playwright, had met actor and producer Robert Hooks while they were performing in a 1960 touring production of Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun. Together, they envisioned a theater company that would nurture and showcase the work of Black theater professionals. Since NEC's founding in 1967, its workshops and performances have given Black playwrights, including Edwards, a forum for their compelling stories.  
Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?
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To show how the play A Raisin in the Sun influenced Ward and Hooks.
To bring attention to a work by Gus Edwards.
To describe how Ward and Hooks's creative partnership changed over time.
To discuss the origin and importance of the NEC.
The food industry has long used thermal technologies to preserve food in large batches. Recent advancements in infrared heating were made through research in Mexico on the preservation of bean flour. Infrared heating is generally considered to be an improvement over more conventional thermal preservation methods: whereas conventional methods transfer energy from the surface of a food to its interior, infrared heating uses high-intensity infrared light to generate heat within the food itself, thus reducing industrial cooking times.  
Based on the text, what is one disadvantage of some conventional thermal methods?  
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They are especially vulnerable to technological breakdowns.
They are only effective in heating foods that are lightweight and small in size.
Their cooking times are longer than those of other methods.
They require more energy than other methods do.
“Cocoa” is an example of a loanword — that is, a word that originated in one language and was later adopted by another. The word came to English indirectly from cacao, the Spanish word for the plant that chocolate is made from. Spanish had borrowed it from Nahuatl, an Indigenous language of Central Mexico, in which the word’s original form is cacahuatl. “Iguana” is also Indigenous in origin and entered English through Spanish. But in this case, the original source was Taíno, a language of the Caribbean islands, in which the word for the group of related lizard species is iwana.
The author makes which point about the Spanish language?
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Mark for Review
It has served as a medium through which Indigenous languages have influenced English.
Its contribution to English vocabulary roughly equals the collective contribution by Indigenous languages.
It has borrowed words from Indigenous languages and contributed words to them.
It adopted Nahuatl and Taíno words in approximately equal numbers.
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