All practice questions

Early Mesoamerican civilizations, such as the Maya and the Aztecs, consumed chocolate primarily as a bitter, frothy beverage mixed with chili peppers. They valued cacao seeds so highly that they used them as currency, reserving the drink for sacred rituals and nobility.

[1]

In 1828, Dutch chemist Coenraad van Houten patented a press that removed the fat from cacao beans, paving the way for the creation of the first solid chocolate bars.

Which choice provides the most effective transition from the preceding paragraph to the paragraph that follows?

The following passage is an excerpt from an essay about ancient manuscripts.

In 1906, Danish philologist Johan Ludvig Heiberg examined a medieval prayer book in Istanbul and made a startling discovery: underneath the thirteenth-century religious texts lay much older, partially erased mathematical treatises by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. This unique manuscript, known as the Archimedes Palimpsest, contained the only surviving copy of *The Method of Mechanical Theorems*, in which Archimedes anticipated modern calculus by using infinitesimals to calculate areas and volumes.

To read the faint, overwritten script, modern conservators utilized multispectral imaging, a technology that captures images under various wavelengths of light to expose the chemical differences between the two layers of ink. This non-invasive method successfully revealed lost pages of Archimedes's works alongside commentaries on Aristotle. [Underlined: Fortunately, the book was preserved through the centuries despite its poor condition.]

The writer wants to conclude the passage with a sentence that emphasizes the significance of the recovery of the Archimedes Palimpsest and summarizes the main themes of the passage. Which choice best accomplishes this goal?

In the passage below, a punctuation mark is missing. Fill in the blank with the correct punctuation mark (such as a comma, semicolon, colon, or dash) that should be placed in the sentence to ensure it is grammatically correct and internally consistent.

Passage:
In the 1840s, British botanist Anna Atkins pioneered the use of photography for scientific illustration. Seeking a more accurate way to document botanical specimens than hand-drawn illustrations, Atkins turned to the newly invented cyanotype process. This method involved placing specimens directly onto chemically treated paper and exposing them to sunlight. The resulting images were highly detailed, [offering a level of precision that traditional drawings could not match].

Question:
The writer wants to revise the underlined portion (bracketed in bold above) to provide the most specific, concrete visual details that illustrate the appearance of the cyanotype images. Which choice best accomplishes this goal?

The following passage is an excerpt from an essay about digital audio preservation.

In the late 1990s, physicist Carl Haber attended a lecture detailing the inevitable decay of historical audio media. Intrigued by the challenge of preserving fragile wax cylinders and shellac discs, Haber realized that the same optical scanning techniques used in subatomic particle physics could be applied to sound. This insight led to the development of IRENE, a non-contact system that uses high-resolution cameras to capture 3D digital images of a record's physical grooves. Specialized software then translates these visual maps back into audio files, completely bypassing the need for a physical needle. By avoiding physical contact with the fragile media, researchers have successfully reconstructed audio from severely damaged cylinders that were once considered unplayable.

The writer wants to conclude the paragraph with a sentence that emphasizes how IRENE's optical technology has rescued historical recordings that were previously thought to be permanently lost. Which choice best accomplishes this goal?

Read the passage below. Which punctuation mark must be placed in the blank to correctly terminate the first sentence?

In 1938, Ruth Wakefield, co-owner of the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts, made a culinary discovery that would change American dessert history. While preparing a batch of chocolate desserts, she chopped up a bar of semi-sweet chocolate and added the pieces to her cookie dough, expecting them to melt and create chocolate cookies. Instead, the chocolate bits retained their shape, resulting in the very first chocolate chip cookies.

The writer wants to add a concluding sentence to the paragraph that wraps up the main point of the passage and emphasizes the lasting impact of Wakefield's accidental invention. Which of the following sentences best accomplishes this goal?

The following passage is an essay about early sound recording technology.

[1]
In 1857, French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patented the phonautograph, a device designed to visually record sound waves onto paper blackened by the soot of a plasterer’s lamp. As a speaker sang or spoke into a horn, a membrane vibrated, causing a stylus to etch wavy lines onto the rotating paper cylinder. Unlike Thomas Edison’s phonograph, which would emerge two decades later, Scott’s invention was not designed to play sound back. Instead, Scott believed that humans could learn to "read" the visual squiggles of the phonautograms just as one reads text. Consequently, these earliest recordings of the human voice remained silent, locked in archival sheets for over a century.

[2]
The silence was finally broken in 2008 when an international team of scientists and historians collaborated to play back Scott's recordings. Using high-resolution digital scans of the paper phonautograms, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory employed a virtual stylus to trace the etched lines. By converting these physical undulations into digital audio, they successfully reconstructed the sound of a human voice singing a snippet of the French folk song "Au Clair de la Lune." The recording, dated April 9, 1860, is widely recognized as the oldest known recording of a human voice, predating Edison’s first acoustic playback by seventeen years.

[3]
Beyond their historical novelty, these restored phonautograms have fundamentally altered our understanding of early acoustic technology. They demonstrate that the desire to capture sound existed long before the technology to play it back was developed. Furthermore, the recovery process highlighted the power of modern optical imaging to preserve fragile historical media. Today, archivists continue to apply these digital techniques to retrieve lost sounds from wax cylinders and shellac discs, ensuring that the ephemeral voices of the past can be heard by future generations.

Suppose the writer’s goal had been to write an essay demonstrating that Thomas Edison's phonograph was directly inspired by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograph. Is the statement that the essay successfully achieves this goal true or false?

Hilma af Klint

[1] __________________________________________________ Long before Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich were credited with pioneering abstract art, the Swedish artist had quietly created a massive body of non-representational paintings. Influenced by spiritualism and the natural world, af Klint believed the world was not ready for her visionary art, which featured vibrant geometric shapes and biomorphic forms. Consequently, she stipulated in her will that her paintings must not be displayed to the public until twenty years after her death.

Which choice most effectively introduces the paragraph and establishes the central subject of the passage?

[1] The Eiffel Tower, constructed for the 1889 World's Fair in Paris, was originally intended to be a temporary structure dismantled after twenty years. [2] Many Parisians initially disliked the tower's bold iron lattice structure, calling it an eyesore. [3] Gustave Eiffel, the chief engineer, had previously designed the internal framework for the Statue of Liberty. [4] However, the tower was saved from demolition when its tall antenna proved to be highly valuable for wireless telegraphy.

The writer is considering deleting Sentence 3 from the paragraph. Should this sentence be deleted?

Passage Excerpt:
Constructed in 1932, the Harlem YMCA on 135th Street was more than a residential facility; it was a sanctuary for African American artists and intellectuals who were barred from segregated hotels. [Sentence X] Local residents frequented its library and exhibition spaces, fostering a vibrant intellectual community.

The writer wants to add a sentence at the position of [Sentence X] that provides a vivid description of the building's physical appearance and emphasizes its visual contrast with the surrounding neighborhood. Given that all the choices are true, which choice best accomplishes this goal?

Which word from the pair 'mitigate' and 'militate' correctly fills each blank in the sentence below?

The following sentences are from a draft of an essay about forest ecology. To ensure that the paragraph logically builds its claim that mycorrhizal networks facilitate active cooperation among trees, in what order should the sentences be arranged?

In the English language, modifier placement is crucial for clarity. In the sentence below, a choice must be made between two parenthetical options to avoid a dangling modifier. Which of the two phrases ('the annual journey of these insects became clear to Dr. Patel.' or 'Dr. Patel finally understood the annual journey of these insects.') is grammatically correct and logically completes the sentence?

In 1968, Dr. Spencer Silver, a chemist at 3M, developed a "low-tack" adhesive that stuck lightly to surfaces and could be easily removed without leaving residue. For years, Silver promoted his invention within the company, but no one could find a practical use for it. The breakthrough came in 1974 when colleague Art Fry used the adhesive to keep bookmarks from falling out of his hymnal during choir practice. Fry realized that the sticky paper was perfect for leaving temporary notes on documents. [1]

The writer wants to conclude the paragraph at point [1] with a sentence that highlights the subsequent commercial success and global popularity of the invention. Which option best achieves this goal?

Marie Clark Taylor, a pioneering botanist in the late 1940s, investigated how plants respond to changes in light exposure. At the time, scientific understanding of photoperiodism was limited, and many researchers struggled to cultivate specimens under controlled indoor environments. [1] Taylor, however, successfully developed new methods for growing plants under artificial light, which allowed her to study their development with unprecedented precision.

The writer wants to add a detail at point [1] that highlights the specific challenges and limitations of the laboratory equipment available to researchers during this period. Which choice best fulfills this goal?

For the complex number $z = \frac{3 + 5i}{2 - i}$, where $i = \sqrt{-1}$, what is the real part of $z$?

For the imaginary unit $i$, what is the simplified form of the expression $(2 + 3i)(1 - 2i)$?

The quadratic expression $x^2 - 5x - 14$ can be factored completely into $(x + a)(x + b)$, where $a$ and $b$ are integers and $a > b$. What is the value of $a$?

Match each of the following quadratic equations to its correct set of real solutions.