Section I — Multiple Choice

Section II — Free Response

Section I — Multiple Choice

Section II — Free Response

AP English Literature and Composition — Full Practice Exam

Section I: Multiple-Choice Questions

Time: 60 minutes. 55 questions.

Passage 1 (Poem)

After the Funeral

*The house exhales when the last guest departs — a settling, like breath released after holding, and the rooms recalibrate to absence, adjusting their dimensions to the shape of what is no longer there. The chairs that held bodies now hold only the impression of warmth, fading. The flowers — lilies, because you always said lilies were the only flowers worth the trouble — have begun their slow collapse, petals curling inward as if protecting a secret they have finally decided to keep. I move through the rooms collecting glasses, napkins, the small debris of consolation: a crumpled tissue, a half- eaten cookie no one wanted, a program with your name printed in a typeface too elegant for the occasion, too ornate for a life that was, in truth, mostly ordinary — which is, of course, what made it worth mourning. I set these things on the counter. I will deal with them tomorrow. Tonight I sit in the chair you sat in most often, and the house is so quiet I can hear the refrigerator, which has been humming this whole time — patient, mechanical, indifferent — its small drone the only proof I have that the house is still alive, or that I am.* The summer I was fourteen, my mother took a job at the textile mill on Route 9, which meant she left the house at five-thirty in the morning and returned at seven in the evening, which meant I was alone for thirteen and a half hours a day, which meant I learned to cook eggs six different ways and to talk to the dog as though he were a person capable of understanding not just words but the feeling behind them. The dog — a mutt named Bishop, after a television preacher my grandmother watched — did not, in fact, understand the feeling behind my words, but he listened with his whole body, leaning his weight against my leg in a way that I had learned, by August, to recognize as the closest thing to comfort I was going to get.

My father had left three summers earlier, in a departure so quiet it took me two days to notice. He had packed his suitcase — the brown one with the broken clasp — and placed it by the front door and driven away while I was at the pool. My mother told me when I came home, in the same tone she used to tell me the milk had expired, and I stood in the kitchen and thought: the milk comes back. You buy more milk. I did not understand yet that some things, once placed by the door and driven away, did not return.

That summer with Bishop, I began keeping a list. Not a diary — I had tried that and found it too demanding, too interested in feelings I did not want to name. A list. Numbered items. Factual observations. "July 12: Bishop lay in the square of sunlight on the kitchen floor from 10:14 a.m. to 2:37 p.m. He did not move except to scratch once behind his left ear." The list was, I see now, a form of control — a way of ordering the days, of giving them shape and sequence, of pretending that time was something I was managing rather than something that was happening to me. The Mapmaker's Wife

*He traces coastlines on vellum — careful curves that follow the reports of sailors, never the sea itself. I watch his hand move across the page, and I think: this is what it is to be known — reduced to an outline, a border, a name in small, precise type that fits neatly in the space provided.

*I am not a country. I have no coast. But he maps me anyway — charting my moods like weather, labeling my silences, coloring the regions where I am tender and leaving blank the territories he has not yet explored. I sit still for this. It is a kind of love, this desire to make me legible. But a map is not the land. A name is not the thing named.*

*There are places in me — deep valleys, unmapped rivers — that exist only because I have not shown them to him, have not let his compass needle swing toward their hidden north. I keep them the way a country keeps its secrets: not from malice but from the knowledge that once a place is found, it is no longer only yours. Some rooms, I think, should remain unvisited. Some darkness should be allowed to be dark.* MARTIN and RUTH sit across from each other at a restaurant table. A candle burns between them. The restaurant is otherwise empty.

MARTIN: I ordered for you. The salmon. You always order the salmon.

RUTH: I don't always order the salmon.

MARTIN: You almost always. Ninety percent of the time. Statistically, the salmon is your dish.

RUTH: "Statistically."

MARTIN: It was a joke.

RUTH: It wasn't.

(Pause.)

MARTIN: How are the children?

RUTH: You saw them on Tuesday.

MARTIN: I know. I'm asking how they are. As a conversation. Between two people who once —

RUTH: Don't.

(Pause. Longer.)

MARTIN: The candle's almost out.

RUTH: I know.

MARTIN: Should I ask for another?

RUTH: I think we should let it go.

(They both look at the candle. It flickers once, then steadies.)

MARTIN: (quietly) I don't know how to do this.

RUTH: Neither do I. That's the one thing we still have in common. *The painting hung in the hallway of the house where I grew up, and for the first twelve years of my life I believed it was a window. Not metaphorically — literally. It was the right size, the right shape, and it depicted a landscape so convincing that my child's eye could find no seam between the painted world and the real one beyond the glass. The sky in the painting was the gray-blue of late October, and the field stretched back to a line of trees whose branches were bare enough to suggest winter but not so bare as to announce it. There was a barn, red, with a roof that sagged slightly at one corner, and beside the barn a fence that ran parallel to the edge of the canvas and then, apparently, continued beyond it, into the wall, into whatever lay behind the wall, into the world the painting refused to show.

My mother told me, once, that the painting had belonged to my grandmother, who had bought it at a church sale for eleven dollars, which struck me then — and strikes me now — as an absurdly small price for something that contained an entire world, even if that world was only twelve inches by twenty-four. But perhaps that is the nature of all worlds: they appear vast from inside and diminutive from without. The child who stood before the painting and believed it was a window was standing inside a world of her own making, and from the outside — from the perspective of the adult I have become — that world looks small and framed and slightly faded, the way all childhoods do when viewed from the distance of the years that have passed since.

I do not know what became of the painting. When my mother sold the house, I did not ask about it. It seemed to me that to ask would be to try to possess it, and possession — I had learned this by then — was the surest way to lose the thing you wanted to keep. So I let it go, and I have kept it instead in the only way that works: not as an object but as a question, not as a thing I own but as a thing I remember, which is to say, a thing I have already begun to lose, and will continue to lose, until what remains is not the painting at all but the feeling of standing before it — a child, believing in windows. Nocturne in Yellow

The streetlights flicker on before the sky *has finished with its fading — they are eager, these lights, as though the dark were something they could prevent if only they arrived in time. But the dark does not wait for anyone. It seeps beneath the doors, it pools in the alleys, it fills the spaces *between the stars, which are, I realize, not points of light but gaps — perforations *in a fabric so vast we cannot see its edges, only the places where it tears.

*I walk. The sidewalk holds the warmth *of the day and gives it back in small, reluctant increments — a kind of charity *the concrete performs for no one's benefit *but my own. I am the only one *who walks this block at this hour, and the walk *feels like a conversation I am having *with the city, though the city, of course, does not know my name, has no interest in my route, and will continue its existence with perfect indifference when I am gone.

*Good. I prefer it that way. *To be known by a place is to be *responsible to it, and tonight I want nothing more than to move through the world without leaving a mark, without being the kind of person a street remembers. *The morning of the sale, Helen's mother stood at the kitchen counter slicing bread with a knife that was too large for the task, each stroke producing a slice so thin it was nearly translucent, as though she were trying to make the loaf last longer by dividing it into more pieces — which, Helen supposed, was exactly what she was doing. The house was already half-empty: the furniture that had been in the living room for twenty years was now stacked in the garage under a tarp, and the walls displayed the pale rectangles where paintings had hung, outlines that looked less like absence than like evidence — proof that something had once been there, had been valued enough to be displayed, and had now been removed with enough care to leave the shape of itself behind.

Helen's mother did not speak about the sale. She moved through the house performing the ordinary rituals of a morning — bread, coffee, the newspaper unfolded on the table — as though the date were not marked on the calendar in red ink, as though the strangers who would arrive at nine o'clock were not already, in some sense, standing in the rooms and running their fingers along the shelves and calculating the value of what remained. Helen watched her mother and thought: this is what bravery looks like when it has no audience. Not the grand defiance of a speech or a gesture, but the quiet, daily work of making bread when you have already agreed to sell the oven that baked it.

(A) A symbol of the narrator's desire for control in a destabilized life
(B) A literary device used to create suspense
(C) A form of diary that reveals the narrator's true feelings
(D) An unreliable account of the summer's events
(E) A celebration of the natural world's patterns

17. The narrator's statement "I see now" (paragraph 3) indicates: (A) A shift to present tense that collapses the distance between the fourteen-year-old and the adult narrator
(B) The narrator's realization that the list was a mistake
(C) A moment of dramatic irony
(D) The narrator's decision to stop keeping the list
(E) An apology to the reader for the list's banality

18. The passage's tone can best be described as: (A) Bitter and resentful
(B) Nostalgic and gentle, with undercurrents of loss
(C) Angry and confrontational
(D) Whimsical and carefree
(E) Clinical and detached

19. The final sentence of the passage — "pretending that time was something I was managing rather than something that was happening to me" — most directly supports which thematic idea? (A) The importance of daily routines in maintaining mental health
(B) The human tendency to create illusions of control in the face of powerlessness
(C) The value of factual observation over emotional expression
(D) The difference between childhood and adult perceptions of time
(E) The relationship between writing and self-deception

Passage 3 (Poem)

The Mapmaker's Wife

*He traces coastlines on vellum — careful curves that follow the reports of sailors, never the sea itself. I watch his hand move across the page, and I think: this is what it is to be known — reduced to an outline, a border, a name in small, precise type that fits neatly in the space provided.

*I am not a country. I have no coast. But he maps me anyway — charting my moods like weather, labeling my silences, coloring the regions where I am tender and leaving blank the territories he has not yet explored. I sit still for this. It is a kind of love, this desire to make me legible. But a map is not the land. A name is not the thing named.*

*There are places in me — deep valleys, unmapped rivers — that exist only because I have not shown them to him, have not let his compass needle swing toward their hidden north. I keep them the way a country keeps its secrets: not from malice but from the knowledge that once a place is found, it is no longer only yours. Some rooms, I think, should remain unvisited. Some darkness should be allowed to be dark.* MARTIN and RUTH sit across from each other at a restaurant table. A candle burns between them. The restaurant is otherwise empty.

MARTIN: I ordered for you. The salmon. You always order the salmon.

RUTH: I don't always order the salmon.

MARTIN: You almost always. Ninety percent of the time. Statistically, the salmon is your dish.

RUTH: "Statistically."

MARTIN: It was a joke.

RUTH: It wasn't.

(Pause.)

MARTIN: How are the children?

RUTH: You saw them on Tuesday.

MARTIN: I know. I'm asking how they are. As a conversation. Between two people who once —

RUTH: Don't.

(Pause. Longer.)

MARTIN: The candle's almost out.

RUTH: I know.

MARTIN: Should I ask for another?

RUTH: I think we should let it go.

(They both look at the candle. It flickers once, then steadies.)

MARTIN: (quietly) I don't know how to do this.

RUTH: Neither do I. That's the one thing we still have in common. *The painting hung in the hallway of the house where I grew up, and for the first twelve years of my life I believed it was a window. Not metaphorically — literally. It was the right size, the right shape, and it depicted a landscape so convincing that my child's eye could find no seam between the painted world and the real one beyond the glass. The sky in the painting was the gray-blue of late October, and the field stretched back to a line of trees whose branches were bare enough to suggest winter but not so bare as to announce it. There was a barn, red, with a roof that sagged slightly at one corner, and beside the barn a fence that ran parallel to the edge of the canvas and then, apparently, continued beyond it, into the wall, into whatever lay behind the wall, into the world the painting refused to show.

My mother told me, once, that the painting had belonged to my grandmother, who had bought it at a church sale for eleven dollars, which struck me then — and strikes me now — as an absurdly small price for something that contained an entire world, even if that world was only twelve inches by twenty-four. But perhaps that is the nature of all worlds: they appear vast from inside and diminutive from without. The child who stood before the painting and believed it was a window was standing inside a world of her own making, and from the outside — from the perspective of the adult I have become — that world looks small and framed and slightly faded, the way all childhoods do when viewed from the distance of the years that have passed since.

I do not know what became of the painting. When my mother sold the house, I did not ask about it. It seemed to me that to ask would be to try to possess it, and possession — I had learned this by then — was the surest way to lose the thing you wanted to keep. So I let it go, and I have kept it instead in the only way that works: not as an object but as a question, not as a thing I own but as a thing I remember, which is to say, a thing I have already begun to lose, and will continue to lose, until what remains is not the painting at all but the feeling of standing before it — a child, believing in windows. Nocturne in Yellow

The streetlights flicker on before the sky *has finished with its fading — they are eager, these lights, as though the dark were something they could prevent if only they arrived in time. But the dark does not wait for anyone. It seeps beneath the doors, it pools in the alleys, it fills the spaces *between the stars, which are, I realize, not points of light but gaps — perforations *in a fabric so vast we cannot see its edges, only the places where it tears.

*I walk. The sidewalk holds the warmth *of the day and gives it back in small, reluctant increments — a kind of charity *the concrete performs for no one's benefit *but my own. I am the only one *who walks this block at this hour, and the walk *feels like a conversation I am having *with the city, though the city, of course, does not know my name, has no interest in my route, and will continue its existence with perfect indifference when I am gone.

*Good. I prefer it that way. *To be known by a place is to be *responsible to it, and tonight I want nothing more than to move through the world without leaving a mark, without being the kind of person a street remembers. *The morning of the sale, Helen's mother stood at the kitchen counter slicing bread with a knife that was too large for the task, each stroke producing a slice so thin it was nearly translucent, as though she were trying to make the loaf last longer by dividing it into more pieces — which, Helen supposed, was exactly what she was doing. The house was already half-empty: the furniture that had been in the living room for twenty years was now stacked in the garage under a tarp, and the walls displayed the pale rectangles where paintings had hung, outlines that looked less like absence than like evidence — proof that something had once been there, had been valued enough to be displayed, and had now been removed with enough care to leave the shape of itself behind.

Helen's mother did not speak about the sale. She moved through the house performing the ordinary rituals of a morning — bread, coffee, the newspaper unfolded on the table — as though the date were not marked on the calendar in red ink, as though the strangers who would arrive at nine o'clock were not already, in some sense, standing in the rooms and running their fingers along the shelves and calculating the value of what remained. Helen watched her mother and thought: this is what bravery looks like when it has no audience. Not the grand defiance of a speech or a gesture, but the quiet, daily work of making bread when you have already agreed to sell the oven that baked it.

MARTIN: I ordered for you. The salmon. You always order the salmon.

RUTH: I don't always order the salmon.

MARTIN: You almost always. Ninety percent of the time. Statistically, the salmon is your dish.

RUTH: "Statistically."

MARTIN: It was a joke.

RUTH: It wasn't.

(Pause.)

MARTIN: How are the children?

RUTH: You saw them on Tuesday.

MARTIN: I know. I'm asking how they are. As a conversation. Between two people who once —

RUTH: Don't.

(Pause. Longer.)

MARTIN: The candle's almost out.

RUTH: I know.

MARTIN: Should I ask for another?

RUTH: I think we should let it go.

(They both look at the candle. It flickers once, then steadies.)

MARTIN: (quietly) I don't know how to do this.

RUTH: Neither do I. That's the one thing we still have in common. *The painting hung in the hallway of the house where I grew up, and for the first twelve years of my life I believed it was a window. Not metaphorically — literally. It was the right size, the right shape, and it depicted a landscape so convincing that my child's eye could find no seam between the painted world and the real one beyond the glass. The sky in the painting was the gray-blue of late October, and the field stretched back to a line of trees whose branches were bare enough to suggest winter but not so bare as to announce it. There was a barn, red, with a roof that sagged slightly at one corner, and beside the barn a fence that ran parallel to the edge of the canvas and then, apparently, continued beyond it, into the wall, into whatever lay behind the wall, into the world the painting refused to show.

My mother told me, once, that the painting had belonged to my grandmother, who had bought it at a church sale for eleven dollars, which struck me then — and strikes me now — as an absurdly small price for something that contained an entire world, even if that world was only twelve inches by twenty-four. But perhaps that is the nature of all worlds: they appear vast from inside and diminutive from without. The child who stood before the painting and believed it was a window was standing inside a world of her own making, and from the outside — from the perspective of the adult I have become — that world looks small and framed and slightly faded, the way all childhoods do when viewed from the distance of the years that have passed since.

I do not know what became of the painting. When my mother sold the house, I did not ask about it. It seemed to me that to ask would be to try to possess it, and possession — I had learned this by then — was the surest way to lose the thing you wanted to keep. So I let it go, and I have kept it instead in the only way that works: not as an object but as a question, not as a thing I own but as a thing I remember, which is to say, a thing I have already begun to lose, and will continue to lose, until what remains is not the painting at all but the feeling of standing before it — a child, believing in windows. Nocturne in Yellow

The streetlights flicker on before the sky *has finished with its fading — they are eager, these lights, as though the dark were something they could prevent if only they arrived in time. But the dark does not wait for anyone. It seeps beneath the doors, it pools in the alleys, it fills the spaces *between the stars, which are, I realize, not points of light but gaps — perforations *in a fabric so vast we cannot see its edges, only the places where it tears.

*I walk. The sidewalk holds the warmth *of the day and gives it back in small, reluctant increments — a kind of charity *the concrete performs for no one's benefit *but my own. I am the only one *who walks this block at this hour, and the walk *feels like a conversation I am having *with the city, though the city, of course, does not know my name, has no interest in my route, and will continue its existence with perfect indifference when I am gone.

*Good. I prefer it that way. *To be known by a place is to be *responsible to it, and tonight I want nothing more than to move through the world without leaving a mark, without being the kind of person a street remembers. *The morning of the sale, Helen's mother stood at the kitchen counter slicing bread with a knife that was too large for the task, each stroke producing a slice so thin it was nearly translucent, as though she were trying to make the loaf last longer by dividing it into more pieces — which, Helen supposed, was exactly what she was doing. The house was already half-empty: the furniture that had been in the living room for twenty years was now stacked in the garage under a tarp, and the walls displayed the pale rectangles where paintings had hung, outlines that looked less like absence than like evidence — proof that something had once been there, had been valued enough to be displayed, and had now been removed with enough care to leave the shape of itself behind.

Helen's mother did not speak about the sale. She moved through the house performing the ordinary rituals of a morning — bread, coffee, the newspaper unfolded on the table — as though the date were not marked on the calendar in red ink, as though the strangers who would arrive at nine o'clock were not already, in some sense, standing in the rooms and running their fingers along the shelves and calculating the value of what remained. Helen watched her mother and thought: this is what bravery looks like when it has no audience. Not the grand defiance of a speech or a gesture, but the quiet, daily work of making bread when you have already agreed to sell the oven that baked it.

(B) Symbolically: they should let the relationship end without further struggle
(C) Both A and B
(D) Neither A nor B
(E) Literally: they should leave the restaurant immediately

36. The final exchange — "I don't know how to do this" / "Neither do I. That's the one thing we still have in common" — achieves its effect through: (A) A return to the statistical language of the opening
(B) A moment of unexpected connection created through shared vulnerability
(C) A resolution of the play's central conflict
(D) A shift to prose poetry
(E) An allusion to a famous literary work

37. The overall tone of the scene can best be described as: (A) Comedic and lighthearted
(B) Tense, sad, and quietly revelatory
(C) Angry and hostile
(D) Romantic and hopeful
(E) Melodramatic and exaggerated

38. Martin's unfinished sentence — "Between two people who once —" — is cut off by Ruth's "Don't." This technique: (A) Creates suspense about what Martin was going to say
(B) Demonstrates Ruth's refusal to romanticize their shared past
(C) Suggests Martin's inability to complete his thoughts
(D) Shows that Ruth is the more powerful speaker in the dialogue
(E) Both A and B

39. The scene's dramatic irony lies in: (A) The audience knowing that Martin has already ordered dessert
(B) The gap between the characters' desire for connection and their inability to achieve it
(C) The audience knowing the restaurant will close soon
(D) The characters not knowing they are being observed
(E) The candle being almost out while neither character notices

40. The scene as a whole best exemplifies which dramatic convention? (A) The classical unities of time, place, and action
(B) Tragicomedy, blending sadness with moments of dark connection
(C) Theater of the Absurd, with its rejection of conventional dialogue
(D) The well-made play, with its carefully plotted surprises
(E) Epic theater, with its direct address to the audience

Passage 5 (Prose Fiction)

*The painting hung in the hallway of the house where I grew up, and for the first twelve years of my life I believed it was a window. Not metaphorically — literally. It was the right size, the right shape, and it depicted a landscape so convincing that my child's eye could find no seam between the painted world and the real one beyond the glass. The sky in the painting was the gray-blue of late October, and the field stretched back to a line of trees whose branches were bare enough to suggest winter but not so bare as to announce it. There was a barn, red, with a roof that sagged slightly at one corner, and beside the barn a fence that ran parallel to the edge of the canvas and then, apparently, continued beyond it, into the wall, into whatever lay behind the wall, into the world the painting refused to show.

My mother told me, once, that the painting had belonged to my grandmother, who had bought it at a church sale for eleven dollars, which struck me then — and strikes me now — as an absurdly small price for something that contained an entire world, even if that world was only twelve inches by twenty-four. But perhaps that is the nature of all worlds: they appear vast from inside and diminutive from without. The child who stood before the painting and believed it was a window was standing inside a world of her own making, and from the outside — from the perspective of the adult I have become — that world looks small and framed and slightly faded, the way all childhoods do when viewed from the distance of the years that have passed since.

I do not know what became of the painting. When my mother sold the house, I did not ask about it. It seemed to me that to ask would be to try to possess it, and possession — I had learned this by then — was the surest way to lose the thing you wanted to keep. So I let it go, and I have kept it instead in the only way that works: not as an object but as a question, not as a thing I own but as a thing I remember, which is to say, a thing I have already begun to lose, and will continue to lose, until what remains is not the painting at all but the feeling of standing before it — a child, believing in windows. Nocturne in Yellow

The streetlights flicker on before the sky *has finished with its fading — they are eager, these lights, as though the dark were something they could prevent if only they arrived in time. But the dark does not wait for anyone. It seeps beneath the doors, it pools in the alleys, it fills the spaces *between the stars, which are, I realize, not points of light but gaps — perforations *in a fabric so vast we cannot see its edges, only the places where it tears.

*I walk. The sidewalk holds the warmth *of the day and gives it back in small, reluctant increments — a kind of charity *the concrete performs for no one's benefit *but my own. I am the only one *who walks this block at this hour, and the walk *feels like a conversation I am having *with the city, though the city, of course, does not know my name, has no interest in my route, and will continue its existence with perfect indifference when I am gone.

*Good. I prefer it that way. *To be known by a place is to be *responsible to it, and tonight I want nothing more than to move through the world without leaving a mark, without being the kind of person a street remembers. *The morning of the sale, Helen's mother stood at the kitchen counter slicing bread with a knife that was too large for the task, each stroke producing a slice so thin it was nearly translucent, as though she were trying to make the loaf last longer by dividing it into more pieces — which, Helen supposed, was exactly what she was doing. The house was already half-empty: the furniture that had been in the living room for twenty years was now stacked in the garage under a tarp, and the walls displayed the pale rectangles where paintings had hung, outlines that looked less like absence than like evidence — proof that something had once been there, had been valued enough to be displayed, and had now been removed with enough care to leave the shape of itself behind.

Helen's mother did not speak about the sale. She moved through the house performing the ordinary rituals of a morning — bread, coffee, the newspaper unfolded on the table — as though the date were not marked on the calendar in red ink, as though the strangers who would arrive at nine o'clock were not already, in some sense, standing in the rooms and running their fingers along the shelves and calculating the value of what remained. Helen watched her mother and thought: this is what bravery looks like when it has no audience. Not the grand defiance of a speech or a gesture, but the quiet, daily work of making bread when you have already agreed to sell the oven that baked it.

(D) An argument for the value of perspective
(E) A rejection of subjective experience

46. The shift between the second and third paragraphs is marked by: (A) A change in verb tense
(B) A shift from reflection on the painting to reflection on the nature of memory and loss
(C) The introduction of a new character
(D) A change in the narrator's tone from nostalgic to angry
(E) A shift from first person to third person

47. The narrator's decision not to ask about the painting when her mother sold the house is explained by the belief that: (A) The painting was not valuable
(B) Her mother would not remember
(C) Possession leads to loss, and non-attachment allows the thing to be preserved in memory
(D) Asking would make her seem sentimental
(E) The painting would be too painful to see again

48. The passage's final sentence — "a child, believing in windows" — is effective because it: (A) Provides a satisfying resolution to the narrative
(B) Returns to the opening image, creating a circular structure that emphasizes what has been lost
(C) Suggests the narrator has recovered her childhood innocence
(D) Introduces a new metaphor that complicates the passage's meaning
(E) Criticizes the adult narrator's cynicism

49. The diction of the passage is best described as: (A) Highly colloquial and informal
(B) Precise and reflective, with a measured, contemplative pace
(C) Aggressively emotional and dramatic
(D) Technical and specialized
(E) Sparse and minimalist

50. The passage's syntax — particularly in the third paragraph — is notable for its: (A) Short, fragmented sentences that convey the narrator's anxiety
(B) Long, complex sentences with multiple subordinate clauses that create a sense of accumulation
(C) Use of questions to engage the reader
(D) Parallel structure that creates a musical rhythm
(E) Deliberate grammatical errors that mimic natural speech

51. The relationship between the narrator's childhood perception and her adult understanding can best be described as: (A) Complete contradiction — the adult rejects the child's belief entirely
(B) A layered relationship in which the adult understands the child's perception as both false and profoundly meaningful
(C) A simple progression from ignorance to knowledge
(D) An unresolved conflict between the two perspectives
(E) An identification of the painting as a source of childhood trauma

52. The passage suggests that art's power lies in its ability to: (A) Increase in financial value over time
(B) Create worlds that are compelling enough to be mistaken for reality
(C) Serve as a vehicle for social criticism
(D) Provide an escape from difficult emotions
(E) Preserve the artist's intentions across generations

53. The phrase "a thing I have already begun to lose, and will continue to lose" uses which of the following techniques? (A) Alliteration and consonance
(B) Parallel structure and progressive verb tenses
(C) Onomatopoeia and internal rhyme
(D) Euphemism and litotes
(E) Apostrophe and metaphor

54. The passage's theme can best be summarized as: (A) The financial value of art is irrelevant to its emotional value
(B) Memory transforms objects into symbols of loss, and the act of remembering is itself a form of losing
(C) Childhood misunderstandings should be corrected as early as possible
(D) Painting is a superior art form to other visual arts
(E) Adults cannot understand children's perceptions

55. The narrator's tone in the final paragraph is best described as: (A) Bitter and resentful
(B) Resigned and elegiac
(C) Celebratory and joyful
(D) Indifferent and detached
(E) Confused and uncertain

Section II: Free-Response Questions

Time: 120 minutes. 3 essays.

Question 1: Poetry Analysis (Suggested time — 40 minutes)

Nocturne in Yellow

The streetlights flicker on before the sky *has finished with its fading — they are eager, these lights, as though the dark were something they could prevent if only they arrived in time. But the dark does not wait for anyone. It seeps beneath the doors, it pools in the alleys, it fills the spaces *between the stars, which are, I realize, not points of light but gaps — perforations *in a fabric so vast we cannot see its edges, only the places where it tears.

*I walk. The sidewalk holds the warmth *of the day and gives it back in small, reluctant increments — a kind of charity *the concrete performs for no one's benefit *but my own. I am the only one *who walks this block at this hour, and the walk *feels like a conversation I am having *with the city, though the city, of course, does not know my name, has no interest in my route, and will continue its existence with perfect indifference when I am gone.

*Good. I prefer it that way. *To be known by a place is to be *responsible to it, and tonight I want nothing more than to move through the world without leaving a mark, without being the kind of person a street remembers. *The morning of the sale, Helen's mother stood at the kitchen counter slicing bread with a knife that was too large for the task, each stroke producing a slice so thin it was nearly translucent, as though she were trying to make the loaf last longer by dividing it into more pieces — which, Helen supposed, was exactly what she was doing. The house was already half-empty: the furniture that had been in the living room for twenty years was now stacked in the garage under a tarp, and the walls displayed the pale rectangles where paintings had hung, outlines that looked less like absence than like evidence — proof that something had once been there, had been valued enough to be displayed, and had now been removed with enough care to leave the shape of itself behind.

Helen's mother did not speak about the sale. She moved through the house performing the ordinary rituals of a morning — bread, coffee, the newspaper unfolded on the table — as though the date were not marked on the calendar in red ink, as though the strangers who would arrive at nine o'clock were not already, in some sense, standing in the rooms and running their fingers along the shelves and calculating the value of what remained. Helen watched her mother and thought: this is what bravery looks like when it has no audience. Not the grand defiance of a speech or a gesture, but the quiet, daily work of making bread when you have already agreed to sell the oven that baked it.

Question 2: Prose Analysis (Suggested time — 40 minutes)

*The morning of the sale, Helen's mother stood at the kitchen counter slicing bread with a knife that was too large for the task, each stroke producing a slice so thin it was nearly translucent, as though she were trying to make the loaf last longer by dividing it into more pieces — which, Helen supposed, was exactly what she was doing. The house was already half-empty: the furniture that had been in the living room for twenty years was now stacked in the garage under a tarp, and the walls displayed the pale rectangles where paintings had hung, outlines that looked less like absence than like evidence — proof that something had once been there, had been valued enough to be displayed, and had now been removed with enough care to leave the shape of itself behind.

Helen's mother did not speak about the sale. She moved through the house performing the ordinary rituals of a morning — bread, coffee, the newspaper unfolded on the table — as though the date were not marked on the calendar in red ink, as though the strangers who would arrive at nine o'clock were not already, in some sense, standing in the rooms and running their fingers along the shelves and calculating the value of what remained. Helen watched her mother and thought: this is what bravery looks like when it has no audience. Not the grand defiance of a speech or a gesture, but the quiet, daily work of making bread when you have already agreed to sell the oven that baked it.

Prompt: Read carefully the passage. Write an essay in which you analyze how the author uses imagery, detail, and perspective to convey Helen's understanding of her mother's response to loss.

Question 3: Free-Response (Suggested time — 40 minutes)

Prompt: In many works of literature, a character's relationship to a specific place — a house, a city, a landscape — reveals fundamental truths about that character's identity, desires, or conflicts.

Choose a novel or play of recognized literary merit in which a character's relationship to a place is significant to the meaning of the work as a whole. Write an essay in which you analyze how the character's relationship to this place reveals deeper aspects of the character and contributes to the work's thematic meaning. Do not merely summarize the plot.

END OF EXAM