Section I — Multiple Choice

Section II — Free Response

Section I — Multiple Choice

Section II — Free Response

AP English Language and Composition — Full Practice Exam

Section I: Multiple-Choice Questions

Time: 60 minutes 45 questions

Passage 1 (Questions 1–9)

The following is an excerpt from a fictional essay about the relationship between walking and thinking.

"For most of human history, walking and thinking were not separate activities. The philosopher walked and thought. The farmer walked and planned. The shepherd walked and wondered. Walking was the medium through which the mind moved as naturally as the body. Then, somewhere in the last century, we decided that thinking required sitting — that the proper posture for serious intellectual work was stationary, preferably in a chair, ideally in a room with no windows. We built schools with desks bolted to the floor and offices with cubicles designed for immobility, and we told ourselves that this was progress. But the mind does not respect our architectural preferences. Research now confirms what every restless student has always suspected: walking improves creative thinking. A series of studies found that participants who walked — even on a treadmill facing a blank wall — produced significantly more creative responses than participants who sat. Walking outdoors produced the strongest effects, but even indoor walking outperformed sitting. The mechanism is not fully understood, though researchers suggest that the rhythmic, automatic nature of walking may free cognitive resources for creative tasks. Whatever the explanation, the practical implication is clear: we have designed our schools and workplaces to suppress one of the most accessible tools for thinking well. The costs of this design are invisible but real — stifled creativity, diminished focus, and the slow erosion of the connection between body and mind that walking sustains." The following is an excerpt from a fictional memoir about growing up in a bilingual household.

"My mother spoke to us in Spanish and to the world in English, and the boundary between these two languages was also the boundary between two versions of her. In Spanish, she was expansive — quick to laugh, generous with stories, willing to argue about politics or religion or whether the neighbors' dog was possessed by an unfriendly spirit. In English, she became careful. Not silent — she was never silent — but measured, as though each word in her second language cost something and she did not want to waste it. I understood, even as a child, that this was not a personality difference but a language difference. The same woman who would spent an hour telling a story about her childhood in Mexico — complete with sound effects and impersonations of her grandmother — would, in a parent-teacher conference, reduce the same story to a single sentence: 'We moved here for better opportunities.' It was accurate. It was also, I would learn years later, the least interesting thing about why we moved." The following is an excerpt from a fictional speech by a community leader about a proposed development project.

"I stand before you today not to oppose development. Let me be clear about that. I understand that this city needs to grow, that empty lots do not pay taxes, and that the proposed mixed-use development would bring jobs and revenue. I have read the economic impact statement. I have studied the traffic studies. The numbers are not in dispute. What is in dispute is what kind of city we want to be. The proposed development includes 400 residential units, a grocery store, and a parking garage. What it does not include — what no one on the development team has mentioned in any of the public meetings I have attended — is any space for the community that currently exists on this site. The farmers' market that has operated on this land every Saturday for fifteen years. The informal soccer games that bring together families from four different neighborhoods. The bench under the oak tree where Mr. Huang has eaten his lunch every day since he retired from the post office. These are not impediments to progress. They are the progress — the kind that cannot be measured in tax revenue but that makes a place worth living in. I am asking the council to require the developer to preserve these community uses within the new development. This is not anti-development. It is pro-community." The following is an excerpt from a fictional essay about the language of weather forecasts.

"Weather forecasts have a peculiar relationship with certainty. They are among the few professional predictions that we expect to be wrong — not occasionally, not as a rare failure, but routinely and without consequence. When a meteorologist announces a thirty percent chance of rain and it does not rain, no one demands an investigation. No one writes an editorial questioning the competence of the National Weather Service. We accept the uncertainty because we understand, at some intuitive level, that weather is complex and that perfect prediction is impossible. This acceptance stands in sharp contrast to our treatment of uncertainty in other domains. In politics, a candidate who changes position is called a flip-flopper, as though adjusting one's views in response to new information were a character flaw rather than a sign of intellectual honesty. In medicine, a doctor who says 'I'm not sure' is often perceived as less competent than one who delivers a diagnosis with unwavering confidence, even when the uncertain doctor may be more accurate. We have, in other words, a culture that rewards false certainty and punishes the honest acknowledgment of complexity. Perhaps we could learn something from the meteorologist — not about barometric pressure or wind shear but about the wisdom of saying 'here is what I think is most likely, and here is the degree of confidence I have in that prediction, and here is what could change.' That formulation, applied more broadly, might make our public discourse slightly more honest and our public officials slightly more humble." The following is an excerpt from a fictional essay about memorization and education.

"There was a time when memorization was the foundation of education. Students recited poems, chanted multiplication tables, and committed to memory the names of kings and the dates of battles. Then progressive educators declared that memorization was rote, mechanical, and hostile to genuine understanding. Education, they argued, should develop critical thinking, not train human tape recorders. This critique had merit. Memorization without understanding is indeed a hollow exercise — a student who can recite the Gettysburg Address but cannot explain why it matters has learned words, not ideas. But the progressive critique went too far. In discarding memorization, we discarded something essential: the relationship between knowing something and holding it in your mind. There is a difference between reading a poem and knowing a poem. When you have memorized a poem, you carry it with you. It becomes part of your interior landscape, available not just when you choose to look it up but when you need it — when a line surfaces unbidden during a moment of grief or joy or confusion and connects your experience to something larger than yourself. The same is true of historical dates, mathematical formulas, and scientific principles. Memorization is not the opposite of understanding. It is a prerequisite for the kind of fluent, flexible thinking that we claim to value. You cannot think critically about a subject you do not know, and knowing — truly knowing — means holding information in your mind, not merely knowing where to find it." "We admire generosity but we do not fund it. We praise the donor who gives millions to a hospital wing but we design an economic system that rewards accumulation and penalizes distribution. The wealthy are celebrated for what they give away, never questioned about what they keep — as though charity were a substitute for justice rather than a symptom of its absence. Consider the rhetoric: we speak of 'giving back,' a phrase that implies that something was taken, that the accumulation of wealth involved a withdrawal from the common good that generosity merely repays. If wealth were distributed justly in the first place, there would be nothing to give back. I do not say this to condemn generosity. Generosity is a virtue. But it is a virtue that should be unnecessary at the scale at which we currently practice it. When a society relies on the voluntary kindness of the wealthy to fund hospitals, schools, and disaster relief, it has outsourced its obligations to the discretionary goodwill of its most privileged citizens. This arrangement flatters the wealthy — you are a benefactor, a philanthropist, a changer of lives — while obscuring the structural conditions that make their generosity necessary and their wealth possible. The hospital wing named for a donor exists because the system that produced the donor's wealth also produced the poverty that makes the hospital necessary. These are not separate stories. They are the same story."

(D) Argue that modern society is inferior to premodern society

3. The phrase "the mind does not respect our architectural preferences" is an example of

(A) Simile
(B) Personification
(C) Metonymy
(D) Hyperbole

4. The passage's tone can best be described as

(A) Bitter and resentful
(B) Playful and satirical
(C) Thoughtful and mildly critical
(D) Urgent and alarmist

5. The author mentions research findings primarily to

(A) Establish logos by providing empirical support for the argument
(B) Appeal to pathos by showing how much we have lost
(C) Establish ethos by demonstrating the author's scientific expertise
(D) Refute a specific counterargument

6. The sentence "Whatever the explanation, the practical implication is clear" is an example of a

(A) Loose sentence
(B) Periodic sentence
(C) Fragment
(D) Run-on sentence

7. The author's claim that "we have designed our schools and workplaces to suppress one of the most accessible tools for thinking well" is best described as

(A) A claim of fact
(B) A claim of value
(C) A claim of policy
(D) An unsupported assertion

8. Which of the following best describes the organizational pattern of the passage?

(A) Chronological, tracing the history of walking
(B) Problem-solution, though the solution is only implied
(C) Cause and effect, explaining why walking improves thinking
(D) Spatial, describing different walking environments

9. The final clause ("the slow erosion of the connection between body and mind that walking sustains") uses which syntactic structure?

(A) A simple sentence
(B) An independent clause followed by a dependent clause
(C) A dependent clause that modifies "erosion"
(D) A compound sentence

Passage 2 (Questions 10–18)

The following is an excerpt from a fictional memoir about growing up in a bilingual household.

"My mother spoke to us in Spanish and to the world in English, and the boundary between these two languages was also the boundary between two versions of her. In Spanish, she was expansive — quick to laugh, generous with stories, willing to argue about politics or religion or whether the neighbors' dog was possessed by an unfriendly spirit. In English, she became careful. Not silent — she was never silent — but measured, as though each word in her second language cost something and she did not want to waste it. I understood, even as a child, that this was not a personality difference but a language difference. The same woman who would spent an hour telling a story about her childhood in Mexico — complete with sound effects and impersonations of her grandmother — would, in a parent-teacher conference, reduce the same story to a single sentence: 'We moved here for better opportunities.' It was accurate. It was also, I would learn years later, the least interesting thing about why we moved." The following is an excerpt from a fictional speech by a community leader about a proposed development project.

"I stand before you today not to oppose development. Let me be clear about that. I understand that this city needs to grow, that empty lots do not pay taxes, and that the proposed mixed-use development would bring jobs and revenue. I have read the economic impact statement. I have studied the traffic studies. The numbers are not in dispute. What is in dispute is what kind of city we want to be. The proposed development includes 400 residential units, a grocery store, and a parking garage. What it does not include — what no one on the development team has mentioned in any of the public meetings I have attended — is any space for the community that currently exists on this site. The farmers' market that has operated on this land every Saturday for fifteen years. The informal soccer games that bring together families from four different neighborhoods. The bench under the oak tree where Mr. Huang has eaten his lunch every day since he retired from the post office. These are not impediments to progress. They are the progress — the kind that cannot be measured in tax revenue but that makes a place worth living in. I am asking the council to require the developer to preserve these community uses within the new development. This is not anti-development. It is pro-community." The following is an excerpt from a fictional essay about the language of weather forecasts.

"Weather forecasts have a peculiar relationship with certainty. They are among the few professional predictions that we expect to be wrong — not occasionally, not as a rare failure, but routinely and without consequence. When a meteorologist announces a thirty percent chance of rain and it does not rain, no one demands an investigation. No one writes an editorial questioning the competence of the National Weather Service. We accept the uncertainty because we understand, at some intuitive level, that weather is complex and that perfect prediction is impossible. This acceptance stands in sharp contrast to our treatment of uncertainty in other domains. In politics, a candidate who changes position is called a flip-flopper, as though adjusting one's views in response to new information were a character flaw rather than a sign of intellectual honesty. In medicine, a doctor who says 'I'm not sure' is often perceived as less competent than one who delivers a diagnosis with unwavering confidence, even when the uncertain doctor may be more accurate. We have, in other words, a culture that rewards false certainty and punishes the honest acknowledgment of complexity. Perhaps we could learn something from the meteorologist — not about barometric pressure or wind shear but about the wisdom of saying 'here is what I think is most likely, and here is the degree of confidence I have in that prediction, and here is what could change.' That formulation, applied more broadly, might make our public discourse slightly more honest and our public officials slightly more humble." The following is an excerpt from a fictional essay about memorization and education.

"There was a time when memorization was the foundation of education. Students recited poems, chanted multiplication tables, and committed to memory the names of kings and the dates of battles. Then progressive educators declared that memorization was rote, mechanical, and hostile to genuine understanding. Education, they argued, should develop critical thinking, not train human tape recorders. This critique had merit. Memorization without understanding is indeed a hollow exercise — a student who can recite the Gettysburg Address but cannot explain why it matters has learned words, not ideas. But the progressive critique went too far. In discarding memorization, we discarded something essential: the relationship between knowing something and holding it in your mind. There is a difference between reading a poem and knowing a poem. When you have memorized a poem, you carry it with you. It becomes part of your interior landscape, available not just when you choose to look it up but when you need it — when a line surfaces unbidden during a moment of grief or joy or confusion and connects your experience to something larger than yourself. The same is true of historical dates, mathematical formulas, and scientific principles. Memorization is not the opposite of understanding. It is a prerequisite for the kind of fluent, flexible thinking that we claim to value. You cannot think critically about a subject you do not know, and knowing — truly knowing — means holding information in your mind, not merely knowing where to find it." "We admire generosity but we do not fund it. We praise the donor who gives millions to a hospital wing but we design an economic system that rewards accumulation and penalizes distribution. The wealthy are celebrated for what they give away, never questioned about what they keep — as though charity were a substitute for justice rather than a symptom of its absence. Consider the rhetoric: we speak of 'giving back,' a phrase that implies that something was taken, that the accumulation of wealth involved a withdrawal from the common good that generosity merely repays. If wealth were distributed justly in the first place, there would be nothing to give back. I do not say this to condemn generosity. Generosity is a virtue. But it is a virtue that should be unnecessary at the scale at which we currently practice it. When a society relies on the voluntary kindness of the wealthy to fund hospitals, schools, and disaster relief, it has outsourced its obligations to the discretionary goodwill of its most privileged citizens. This arrangement flatters the wealthy — you are a benefactor, a philanthropist, a changer of lives — while obscuring the structural conditions that make their generosity necessary and their wealth possible. The hospital wing named for a donor exists because the system that produced the donor's wealth also produced the poverty that makes the hospital necessary. These are not separate stories. They are the same story."

(A) Statistical comparison
(B) Specific, vivid examples that illustrate each version
(C) Expert testimony
(D) Hypothetical scenarios

12. The phrase "as though each word in her second language cost something" uses

(A) Simile
(B) Metaphor
(C) Personification
(D) Litotes

13. The final sentence ("It was accurate. It was also, I would learn years later, the least interesting thing about why we moved") primarily serves to

(A) Undermine the mother's credibility
(B) Suggest that the full truth of the family's story is richer and more complex than the simplified English version
(C) Criticize the parent-teacher conference format
(D) Demonstrate that English is an inadequate language

14. The author's tone toward her mother is best described as

(A) Critical and distant
(B) Affectionate and observant
(C) Pitying and condescending
(D) Admiring but uninformed

15. The sentence structure of "In Spanish, she was expansive — quick to laugh, generous with stories, willing to argue" uses which device?

(A) Anaphora
(B) Asyndeton
(C) Polysyndeton
(D) Antithesis

16. The passage as a whole supports which implicit claim?

(A) Bilingualism should be encouraged in all households.
(B) Language shapes not just communication but identity and expression.
(C) English is an inferior language for personal expression.
(D) Immigration stories are always more complex than they appear.

17. The author's use of the word "possessed" to describe the neighbors' dog primarily serves to

(A) Suggest the mother was superstitious
(B) Convey the mother's colorful, expressive way of speaking in Spanish
(C) Indicate that the dog was actually dangerous
(D) Create a serious, ominous tone

18. The passage primarily achieves its effect through

(A) Logical argumentation with statistical evidence
(B) Vivid characterization and specific illustrative details
(C) Emotional manipulation and guilt
(D) Abstract philosophical reasoning

Passage 3 (Questions 19–27)

The following is an excerpt from a fictional speech by a community leader about a proposed development project.

"I stand before you today not to oppose development. Let me be clear about that. I understand that this city needs to grow, that empty lots do not pay taxes, and that the proposed mixed-use development would bring jobs and revenue. I have read the economic impact statement. I have studied the traffic studies. The numbers are not in dispute. What is in dispute is what kind of city we want to be. The proposed development includes 400 residential units, a grocery store, and a parking garage. What it does not include — what no one on the development team has mentioned in any of the public meetings I have attended — is any space for the community that currently exists on this site. The farmers' market that has operated on this land every Saturday for fifteen years. The informal soccer games that bring together families from four different neighborhoods. The bench under the oak tree where Mr. Huang has eaten his lunch every day since he retired from the post office. These are not impediments to progress. They are the progress — the kind that cannot be measured in tax revenue but that makes a place worth living in. I am asking the council to require the developer to preserve these community uses within the new development. This is not anti-development. It is pro-community." The following is an excerpt from a fictional essay about the language of weather forecasts.

"Weather forecasts have a peculiar relationship with certainty. They are among the few professional predictions that we expect to be wrong — not occasionally, not as a rare failure, but routinely and without consequence. When a meteorologist announces a thirty percent chance of rain and it does not rain, no one demands an investigation. No one writes an editorial questioning the competence of the National Weather Service. We accept the uncertainty because we understand, at some intuitive level, that weather is complex and that perfect prediction is impossible. This acceptance stands in sharp contrast to our treatment of uncertainty in other domains. In politics, a candidate who changes position is called a flip-flopper, as though adjusting one's views in response to new information were a character flaw rather than a sign of intellectual honesty. In medicine, a doctor who says 'I'm not sure' is often perceived as less competent than one who delivers a diagnosis with unwavering confidence, even when the uncertain doctor may be more accurate. We have, in other words, a culture that rewards false certainty and punishes the honest acknowledgment of complexity. Perhaps we could learn something from the meteorologist — not about barometric pressure or wind shear but about the wisdom of saying 'here is what I think is most likely, and here is the degree of confidence I have in that prediction, and here is what could change.' That formulation, applied more broadly, might make our public discourse slightly more honest and our public officials slightly more humble." The following is an excerpt from a fictional essay about memorization and education.

"There was a time when memorization was the foundation of education. Students recited poems, chanted multiplication tables, and committed to memory the names of kings and the dates of battles. Then progressive educators declared that memorization was rote, mechanical, and hostile to genuine understanding. Education, they argued, should develop critical thinking, not train human tape recorders. This critique had merit. Memorization without understanding is indeed a hollow exercise — a student who can recite the Gettysburg Address but cannot explain why it matters has learned words, not ideas. But the progressive critique went too far. In discarding memorization, we discarded something essential: the relationship between knowing something and holding it in your mind. There is a difference between reading a poem and knowing a poem. When you have memorized a poem, you carry it with you. It becomes part of your interior landscape, available not just when you choose to look it up but when you need it — when a line surfaces unbidden during a moment of grief or joy or confusion and connects your experience to something larger than yourself. The same is true of historical dates, mathematical formulas, and scientific principles. Memorization is not the opposite of understanding. It is a prerequisite for the kind of fluent, flexible thinking that we claim to value. You cannot think critically about a subject you do not know, and knowing — truly knowing — means holding information in your mind, not merely knowing where to find it." "We admire generosity but we do not fund it. We praise the donor who gives millions to a hospital wing but we design an economic system that rewards accumulation and penalizes distribution. The wealthy are celebrated for what they give away, never questioned about what they keep — as though charity were a substitute for justice rather than a symptom of its absence. Consider the rhetoric: we speak of 'giving back,' a phrase that implies that something was taken, that the accumulation of wealth involved a withdrawal from the common good that generosity merely repays. If wealth were distributed justly in the first place, there would be nothing to give back. I do not say this to condemn generosity. Generosity is a virtue. But it is a virtue that should be unnecessary at the scale at which we currently practice it. When a society relies on the voluntary kindness of the wealthy to fund hospitals, schools, and disaster relief, it has outsourced its obligations to the discretionary goodwill of its most privileged citizens. This arrangement flatters the wealthy — you are a benefactor, a philanthropist, a changer of lives — while obscuring the structural conditions that make their generosity necessary and their wealth possible. The hospital wing named for a donor exists because the system that produced the donor's wealth also produced the poverty that makes the hospital necessary. These are not separate stories. They are the same story."

20. The speaker's claim that "What is in dispute is what kind of city we want to be" is best described as

(A) A claim of fact
(B) A claim of value
(C) A claim of policy
(D) An enthymeme

21. The list of community activities (farmers' market, soccer games, Mr. Huang's bench) serves as

(A) Expert testimony
(B) Statistical evidence
(C) Concrete, emotionally resonant examples that give human dimension to an abstract argument
(D) A logical proof that the development should be stopped

22. The antithesis "not anti-development. It is pro-community" primarily serves to

(A) Redefine the debate by showing that supporting community and supporting development are not mutually exclusive
(B) Concede that the development is necessary
(C) Attack the developer's motives
(D) Introduce a new counterargument

23. Which appeal is dominant in the examples of the farmers' market, soccer games, and Mr. Huang?

(A) Logos
(B) Ethos
(C) Pathos
(D) Kairos

24. The speaker's statement "The numbers are not in dispute" functions primarily to

(A) Agree with the developer's data
(B) Acknowledge the strength of the opposing evidence before shifting to a different kind of argument
(C) Suggest that numbers are unimportant
(D) Introduce new statistical evidence

25. The organizational pattern of the speech is best described as

(A) Classical argument (exordium, narratio, confirmatio, refutatio, peroratio)
(B) Rogerian argument (neutral introduction, empathetic understanding of opposition, own position, common ground)
(C) Chronological narration
(D) Toulmin model with explicit labeling of each component

26. The reference to Mr. Huang eating lunch "every day since he retired from the post office" is an example of

(A) Abstract diction
(B) Concrete, specific detail that creates pathos by humanizing a statistic
(C) Statistical evidence about retirement
(D) A logical fallacy

27. The speaker's overall argument strategy is best described as

(A) Rejecting the development entirely
(B) Accepting the development's premises but arguing that the plan should be modified to preserve community space
(C) Proposing an alternative development plan
(D) Attacking the developer's credibility

Passage 4 (Questions 28–36)

The following is an excerpt from a fictional essay about the language of weather forecasts.

"Weather forecasts have a peculiar relationship with certainty. They are among the few professional predictions that we expect to be wrong — not occasionally, not as a rare failure, but routinely and without consequence. When a meteorologist announces a thirty percent chance of rain and it does not rain, no one demands an investigation. No one writes an editorial questioning the competence of the National Weather Service. We accept the uncertainty because we understand, at some intuitive level, that weather is complex and that perfect prediction is impossible. This acceptance stands in sharp contrast to our treatment of uncertainty in other domains. In politics, a candidate who changes position is called a flip-flopper, as though adjusting one's views in response to new information were a character flaw rather than a sign of intellectual honesty. In medicine, a doctor who says 'I'm not sure' is often perceived as less competent than one who delivers a diagnosis with unwavering confidence, even when the uncertain doctor may be more accurate. We have, in other words, a culture that rewards false certainty and punishes the honest acknowledgment of complexity. Perhaps we could learn something from the meteorologist — not about barometric pressure or wind shear but about the wisdom of saying 'here is what I think is most likely, and here is the degree of confidence I have in that prediction, and here is what could change.' That formulation, applied more broadly, might make our public discourse slightly more honest and our public officials slightly more humble." The following is an excerpt from a fictional essay about memorization and education.

"There was a time when memorization was the foundation of education. Students recited poems, chanted multiplication tables, and committed to memory the names of kings and the dates of battles. Then progressive educators declared that memorization was rote, mechanical, and hostile to genuine understanding. Education, they argued, should develop critical thinking, not train human tape recorders. This critique had merit. Memorization without understanding is indeed a hollow exercise — a student who can recite the Gettysburg Address but cannot explain why it matters has learned words, not ideas. But the progressive critique went too far. In discarding memorization, we discarded something essential: the relationship between knowing something and holding it in your mind. There is a difference between reading a poem and knowing a poem. When you have memorized a poem, you carry it with you. It becomes part of your interior landscape, available not just when you choose to look it up but when you need it — when a line surfaces unbidden during a moment of grief or joy or confusion and connects your experience to something larger than yourself. The same is true of historical dates, mathematical formulas, and scientific principles. Memorization is not the opposite of understanding. It is a prerequisite for the kind of fluent, flexible thinking that we claim to value. You cannot think critically about a subject you do not know, and knowing — truly knowing — means holding information in your mind, not merely knowing where to find it." "We admire generosity but we do not fund it. We praise the donor who gives millions to a hospital wing but we design an economic system that rewards accumulation and penalizes distribution. The wealthy are celebrated for what they give away, never questioned about what they keep — as though charity were a substitute for justice rather than a symptom of its absence. Consider the rhetoric: we speak of 'giving back,' a phrase that implies that something was taken, that the accumulation of wealth involved a withdrawal from the common good that generosity merely repays. If wealth were distributed justly in the first place, there would be nothing to give back. I do not say this to condemn generosity. Generosity is a virtue. But it is a virtue that should be unnecessary at the scale at which we currently practice it. When a society relies on the voluntary kindness of the wealthy to fund hospitals, schools, and disaster relief, it has outsourced its obligations to the discretionary goodwill of its most privileged citizens. This arrangement flatters the wealthy — you are a benefactor, a philanthropist, a changer of lives — while obscuring the structural conditions that make their generosity necessary and their wealth possible. The hospital wing named for a donor exists because the system that produced the donor's wealth also produced the poverty that makes the hospital necessary. These are not separate stories. They are the same story."

(B) Argue that our culture should be more accepting of uncertainty
(C) Criticize the National Weather Service
(D) Propose specific reforms to political campaigning

29. The passage primarily uses which rhetorical mode?

(A) Narration
(B) Comparison and contrast
(C) Process analysis
(D) Description

30. The author's comparison of weather forecasting with politics and medicine primarily serves to

(A) Demonstrate that weather forecasters are more skilled than politicians and doctors
(B) Highlight the inconsistency in how we treat uncertainty across different domains
(C) Argue that politicians and doctors should be held to the same standards as meteorologists
(D) Provide examples of logical fallacies

31. The phrase "a culture that rewards false certainty and punishes the honest acknowledgment of complexity" uses which device?

(A) Simile
(B) Antithesis
(C) Anaphora
(D) Metaphor

32. The author's tone in this passage is best described as

(A) Angry and confrontational
(B) Humorous and satirical
(C) Reflective and mildly critical
(D) Nostalgic and sentimental

33. Which of the following best describes the passage's reasoning?

(A) Deductive reasoning from a general principle about honesty
(B) Inductive reasoning from specific observations about how we treat uncertainty in different domains
(C) Neither — the passage does not use reasoning
(D) Circular reasoning

34. The sentence "That formulation, applied more broadly, might make our public discourse slightly more honest" is an example of

(A) An unqualified claim with no evidence
(B) A qualified claim that modestly proposes the application of the essay's insight
(C) A logical fallacy
(D) An emotional appeal

35. The author uses the example of weather forecasting primarily because

(A) It is a familiar experience that most readers share
(B) It provides the strongest evidence for the argument
(C) It allows the author to demonstrate expertise in meteorology
(D) It is the most important domain where uncertainty is accepted

36. The repetition of "here is" in the final long sentence ("here is what I think... and here is the degree... and here is what could change") is an example of

(A) Anaphora
(B) Epistrophe
(C) Asyndeton
(D) Polysyndeton

Passage 5 (Questions 37–45)

The following is an excerpt from a fictional essay about memorization and education.

"There was a time when memorization was the foundation of education. Students recited poems, chanted multiplication tables, and committed to memory the names of kings and the dates of battles. Then progressive educators declared that memorization was rote, mechanical, and hostile to genuine understanding. Education, they argued, should develop critical thinking, not train human tape recorders. This critique had merit. Memorization without understanding is indeed a hollow exercise — a student who can recite the Gettysburg Address but cannot explain why it matters has learned words, not ideas. But the progressive critique went too far. In discarding memorization, we discarded something essential: the relationship between knowing something and holding it in your mind. There is a difference between reading a poem and knowing a poem. When you have memorized a poem, you carry it with you. It becomes part of your interior landscape, available not just when you choose to look it up but when you need it — when a line surfaces unbidden during a moment of grief or joy or confusion and connects your experience to something larger than yourself. The same is true of historical dates, mathematical formulas, and scientific principles. Memorization is not the opposite of understanding. It is a prerequisite for the kind of fluent, flexible thinking that we claim to value. You cannot think critically about a subject you do not know, and knowing — truly knowing — means holding information in your mind, not merely knowing where to find it." "We admire generosity but we do not fund it. We praise the donor who gives millions to a hospital wing but we design an economic system that rewards accumulation and penalizes distribution. The wealthy are celebrated for what they give away, never questioned about what they keep — as though charity were a substitute for justice rather than a symptom of its absence. Consider the rhetoric: we speak of 'giving back,' a phrase that implies that something was taken, that the accumulation of wealth involved a withdrawal from the common good that generosity merely repays. If wealth were distributed justly in the first place, there would be nothing to give back. I do not say this to condemn generosity. Generosity is a virtue. But it is a virtue that should be unnecessary at the scale at which we currently practice it. When a society relies on the voluntary kindness of the wealthy to fund hospitals, schools, and disaster relief, it has outsourced its obligations to the discretionary goodwill of its most privileged citizens. This arrangement flatters the wealthy — you are a benefactor, a philanthropist, a changer of lives — while obscuring the structural conditions that make their generosity necessary and their wealth possible. The hospital wing named for a donor exists because the system that produced the donor's wealth also produced the poverty that makes the hospital necessary. These are not separate stories. They are the same story."

37. The author's overall position on memorization is best summarized as

(A) Memorization should be the primary method of education.
(B) Memorization was correctly criticized by progressive educators.
(C) Memorization, while insufficient alone, is a valuable and necessary component of learning.
(D) Memorization is useful only for poetry.

38. The author's treatment of the progressive educators' critique ("This critique had merit") is an example of

(A) Concession
(B) Refutation
(C) Straw man
(D) Ad hominem

39. The antithesis "reading a poem and knowing a poem" primarily serves to

(A) Show that both activities are equally valuable
(B) Distinguish between superficial familiarity and deep, internalized understanding
(C) Argue that reading is superior to memorization
(D) Criticize people who read poetry

40. Which of the following best describes the author's reasoning?

(A) Deductive: memorization leads to knowing; knowing is necessary for critical thinking; therefore memorization is necessary for critical thinking.
(B) Inductive: the author provides many examples and draws a general conclusion.
(C) Neither inductive nor deductive.
(D) Circular reasoning: the author assumes what she is trying to prove.

41. The author uses the phrase "human tape recorders" as

(A) A neutral description of students who memorize
(B) A metaphor coined by progressive educators that the author quotes to represent their view
(C) An insult directed at students
(D) A compliment about memory capacity

42. The sentence "You cannot think critically about a subject you do not know" represents the author's

(A) Evidence
(B) Warrant
(C) Claim
(D) Rebuttal

43. The author's reference to "a line surfaces unbidden during a moment of grief or joy" primarily appeals to

(A) Logos
(B) Ethos
(C) Pathos
(D) Kairos

44. The passage uses which organizational pattern?

(A) Chronological
(B) Problem-solution (identifying an educational problem and proposing a solution)
(C) Classical argument with concession, refutation, and a new synthesis
(D) Spatial description

45. The final distinction — "holding information in your mind, not merely knowing where to find it" — uses which device?

(A) Metaphor
(B) Antithesis
(C) Chiasmus
(D) Hyperbole

Section II: Free-Response Questions

Time: 2 hours 15 minutes (including 15-minute reading period)

Question 1: Synthesis Essay (Suggested time: 55 minutes)

The Question: The United States is one of the few developed nations that does not guarantee paid family leave for new parents. Some argue that paid family leave should be a federal requirement. Others argue that leave policy should be left to individual employers or state governments.

Read the following seven sources carefully, including the introductory information for each source. Then, in an essay that synthesizes at least three of the sources, develop a position on whether the United States should establish a federal paid family leave policy.

Source A: A report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicating that only 23 percent of private-sector workers in the United States have access to paid family leave through their employers. Access is highest among high-income workers (43 percent) and lowest among low-income workers (8 percent).

Source B: An op-ed by a small business owner arguing that a federal leave mandate would impose significant costs on small businesses that cannot afford to replace employees during extended absences. The owner notes that a 12-week leave for a key employee could cost a small business thousands in temporary staffing and lost productivity.

Source C: A longitudinal study published in a medical journal finding that infants whose parents took at least 12 weeks of leave had lower rates of hospitalization in their first year, higher rates of breastfeeding, and stronger parent-child attachment as measured by standardized assessments at age two.

Source D: A report from an international economic organization comparing family leave policies across 41 countries. The report finds that countries with national paid leave programs have higher female labor force participation rates and smaller gender wage gaps than countries without such programs.

Source E: A letter from a state governor who implemented a state-level paid leave program. The governor reports that after three years, employer surveys showed that 85 percent found the program had a neutral or positive effect on their business, and employee retention rates had improved by 15 percent.

Source F: A fiscal analysis by a nonpartisan policy institute estimating that a federal paid family leave program modeled on existing state programs would cost approximately 0.2 percent of GDP, funded through a small payroll tax similar to Social Security.

Source G: An essay by a cultural commentator arguing that the debate over paid family leave reflects a deeper cultural question about whether society values caregiving as much as it values economic production, and that framing leave as a cost rather than an investment reveals misplaced priorities.

Question 2: Rhetorical Analysis (Suggested time: 40 minutes)

Read the following passage carefully. Write an essay in which you analyze how the writer uses rhetorical strategies to develop her argument about the relationship between wealth and generosity.

"We admire generosity but we do not fund it. We praise the donor who gives millions to a hospital wing but we design an economic system that rewards accumulation and penalizes distribution. The wealthy are celebrated for what they give away, never questioned about what they keep — as though charity were a substitute for justice rather than a symptom of its absence. Consider the rhetoric: we speak of 'giving back,' a phrase that implies that something was taken, that the accumulation of wealth involved a withdrawal from the common good that generosity merely repays. If wealth were distributed justly in the first place, there would be nothing to give back. I do not say this to condemn generosity. Generosity is a virtue. But it is a virtue that should be unnecessary at the scale at which we currently practice it. When a society relies on the voluntary kindness of the wealthy to fund hospitals, schools, and disaster relief, it has outsourced its obligations to the discretionary goodwill of its most privileged citizens. This arrangement flatters the wealthy — you are a benefactor, a philanthropist, a changer of lives — while obscuring the structural conditions that make their generosity necessary and their wealth possible. The hospital wing named for a donor exists because the system that produced the donor's wealth also produced the poverty that makes the hospital necessary. These are not separate stories. They are the same story."

Question 3: Argument (Suggested time: 40 minutes)

Write an essay that argues your position on the following statement:

"In a democratic society, citizens have a responsibility to be informed about public issues, even when those issues do not directly affect them personally."

Support your argument with appropriate evidence and reasoning. You may draw on your reading, knowledge, and personal experience.

End of Exam