Take this Exam: PSAT Reading — what a sentence does, and what two writers are arguing about | Zestly

Question 1

"Two towns on the same line closed their stations in the same year. Aldenmoor, ten miles from the nearest surviving stop, lost a fifth of its population within a decade. Castlebay, four miles from one, lost almost none, and its shops kept the trade of the villages beyond it. What separated them was not the closure but the distance to the next platform." Which choice best describes the overall structure of the writer's paragraph?

Accepted Answer

Two cases are set against each other on the single measure that distinguishes them.

Answer

A widely held view is reported and then left undecided.

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A general rule is stated and then illustrated with one example.

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A process is set out in order and its last step explained.

Question 2

"The archive's nitrate film cannot be kept with the rest of the collection: it decays, and what it gives off attacks the paper around it. A cold room was built for it in 2009, which has slowed the decay to a crawl. The room holds about a third of the reels. The others are still on the open shelves, waiting for a second room that has been costed twice and built neither time." Which choice best describes the overall structure of the writer's paragraph?

Accepted Answer

A problem is described and a remedy given that reaches part of it.

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A problem is described and a remedy given that resolves it.

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Two ways of storing film are compared on what they cost.

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An experiment is described and its result reported.

Question 3

Text 1: "Ilse Marek argues that the Ravenna workshop taught by copying. Nine of the eleven surviving panels from the shop repeat one composition, down to the fall of the drapery, and Marek reads that repetition as pupils working from a master's model until they had it by heart." Text 2: "Pieter Halvorsen accepts the count of nine. But the shop's buyer was a confraternity that ordered the same subject year upon year, and a shop filling a standing order will repeat a composition whether or not anyone in it is learning anything." Which choice best describes how Halvorsen would most likely respond to Marek's reading of the nine repeated panels?

Accepted Answer

He would accept the repetition and deny that it shows how the pupils were trained.

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He would agree that copying was the workshop's chief method of teaching.

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He would note that the confraternity's records have survived in unusual detail.

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He would argue that the count of nine panels is mistaken.

Question 4

Text 1: "Nadia Frost finds that towns which built a public library between 1890 and 1910 show higher literacy a generation later than towns which built none, and she concludes that the libraries did the work." Text 2: "Owen Baye works from Frost's own figures. He observes that a town had to raise a public subscription before it could build at all, and that the towns able to raise one were already the towns with schoolmasters, newspapers and reading clubs." On which of these would Frost and Baye agree?

Answer

That building a library was the cause of the later literacy.

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That the towns which built libraries were otherwise like those which did not.

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That reading clubs taught more people to read than libraries did.

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That towns which built libraries show higher literacy a generation later.

Question 5

Text 1: "Ruth Anselm dates the earthwork at Beacon Down to the tenth century. A coin of that date was recovered from the bank itself, and a bank cannot be older than what is buried in it." Text 2: "Jonas Vey puts the earthwork two hundred years later. The coin, he notes, came from the stretch where a much later ditch cuts clean through the bank, and a coin lying in ground that has been dug over dates the digging, not the bank." Which choice best describes how Vey would most likely respond to Anselm's use of the coin?

Answer

He would hold that coins can never be used to date an earthwork.

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He would argue that where the coin lay makes it evidence for the ditch rather than the bank.

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He would argue that the coin has been misidentified and is not of the tenth century.

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He would accept the tenth-century date and dispute instead the width of the bank.

Question 6

Text 1: "Mira Oduya reports that fishers on the Kesh estuary who joined the voluntary quota scheme landed a fifth less in its first year than those who stayed out, and she treats that gap as the price the joiners paid for restraint." Text 2: "Dale Hoburn does not dispute the figure. He observes that the boats which joined were on average twelve years older and slower than those which did not, and that the gap between the two groups was almost as wide in each of the three years before the scheme existed." Which choice best describes how Hoburn would most likely respond to Oduya's treatment of the gap?

Answer

He would agree that joining the scheme cost those fishers a fifth of their landings.

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He would note that an older boat costs more to keep at sea than a newer one.

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He would argue that most of the gap predates the scheme and so cannot be the price of joining it.

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He would argue that the one-fifth figure is too high.