Craft and Structure

Chief Editor

Mar 17, 2024

Take all 3 MCQs in interactive quiz mode with timer and progress tracking

To develop a method for measuring snow depth with laser beams, NASA physicist Yongxiang Hu relied on ________; identifying broad similarities between two seemingly different phenomena, Hu used information about how ants move inside colonies to calculate how the particles of light that make up laser beams travel through snow. Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

Difficulty: Medium

a collaboration

an accessory

a contradiction

an analogy

The following text is adapted from Zora Neale Hurston's 1921 short story "John Redding Goes to Sea." John is a child who lives in a town in the woods. Perhaps ten-year-old John was puzzling to the folk there in the Florida woods for he was an imaginative child and fond of day-dreams. The St. John River flowed a scarce three hundred feet from his back door. On its banks at this point grow numerous palms, luxurian magnolias and bay trees. On the bosom of the stream float millions of delicately colored hyacinths. [John Redding] loved to wander down to the water's edge, and, casting in dry twigs, watch them sail away down stream to Jacksonville, the sea, the wide world and [he] wanted to follow them. Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?

Difficulty: Hard

It provides an extended description of a location that John likes to visit.

It reveals that some residents of John's town are confused by his behavior.

It illustrates the uniqueness of John's imagination compared to the imaginations of other children.

It suggests that John longs to experience a larger life outside the Florida woods.

The following text is adapted from Charles Dickens's 1854 novel Hard Times. Coketown is a fictional town in England. [Coketown] contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next. Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?

Difficulty: Medium

To emphasize the uniformity of both the town and the people who live there

To explain the limited work opportunities available to the town's residents

To reveal how the predictability of the town makes it easy for people lose track of time

To argue that the simplicity of life in the town makes it a pleasant place to live