Digital PSAT Reading and Writing Practie Test 20

1

When researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

■ Bonanza farms were large and incredibly profitable farms on the Great Plains in the 1800s.

■ The reapers by Cyrus McCormick and steel plows by John Deere contributed to these farms.

■ Another development that supported the development of these farms was displacement of Native Americans onto reservations, thereby opening of huge tracts of land to American settlers.

■ The laying of railroad tracks also greatly helped these farmers, as they could now easily bring supplies to their farms and ship their crops East.

■ The bonanza farm era continued until the Panic of 1873 and the Great Drought of the 1880s.

The student wants to highlight how changes to national transportation infrastructure positively impacted the development of bonanza farms. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

2

After living in a single dorm room as an undergraduate, I had found his apartment listed under the enticing entry "Looking for One Roommate, Cheap Rent for the Quiet and Introverted," and _____________ the adventure of graduate school and a roommate who preferred books to parties.

Which choice completes the text with the most appropriate word?

3

In 1862, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered the excerpt below as part of a lecture called "American Civilization" at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

At this moment in America the aspects of political society absorb attention. In every house, from Canada to the Gulf, the children ask the serious father-"What is the news of the war today? and when will there be better times?" The boys have no new clothes, no gifts, no journeys; the girls must go without new bonnets; boys and girls find their education, this year, less liberal and complete. All the little hopes that heretofore made the year pleasant are deferred. The state of the country fills us with anxiety and stern duties.

As used in the text, the word stern most nearly means

4

There are few biochemical compounds as familiar to us as hemoglobin, and as the primary transporter of oxygen in our blood, the celebrity of this curious little compound is not without just cause. Vital to almost every known vertebrate, hemoglobin appears within the very first week of embryogenesis, and while its role may not change throughout development, its molecular structure undergoes a series of significant transformations.

As used in the text, the word celebrity most nearly means

5

Each time we cause particles to collide at ever-increasing energies, new constituents are created and investigated. It is as if we continue to peel back the layers of an onion only to find more layers that invite exploration. In the modern era, the field of string theory has been posited, theorizing that the vibrations of tiny string-like mechanisms provide the building blocks of all particles. From string theory, the idea of multiple universes has been proposed and evidence of this mind-blowing idea was reported in late 2015.

Which choice best states the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?

6

The following text is from Charles Dickens's 1861 novel Great Expectations. In the novel, Pip, a poor orphan who is cared for by his sister and her husband, meets the young girl who will become the lifetime object of his affections while simultaneously becoming aware of his lowly position in the caste system.

I was very glad to get away [from Miss Havisham's house]. My coarse hands and my common boots had never troubled me before; but they troubled me now, and I determined to ask Joe why he had taught me to call those picture cards Jacks which ought to be called knaves.

The selection from the novel highlights Pip's feeling

7

For better or for worse, our culture of germophobia was hard won by its proponents. From the time it was first proposed in the sixteenth century, the germ theory of disease faced three hundred years' worth of influential naysayers, and it was not until the late 1800s that the theory began to gain the pervasive public vindication it enjoys today. However, an emerging body of research indicates that we have been perhaps overzealous in our crusade to eradicate the germs that live within us.

The text above most directly serves to

8

Text 1

I saw you from across the room, and I knew immediately. My pulse began to race; I started to sweat; I could barely breathe. From the first moment that I laid eyes on you, I was convinced that you were the one. On our first date, the chemistry was obvious. We laughed and smiled and held hands and talked for hours. I couldn't sleep or eat or even pay attention at work. I just had to be with you.

Text 2

Within one-fifth of a second, your physical appearance and body language caused an excessive release of dopamine in my brain creating feelings of excitement and happiness. We made eye contact for 8.2 seconds; your pheromones were indistinguishable from my mother's. Then, your voice triggered my brain mechanism for generating long-term attachment. Once vasopressin and oxytocin reached my receptors, I knew that I could never be without you.

The different perspectives represented by the first and second texts are generally described as what, respectively?

9

Text 1

If you have a driver's license, I expect that you are aware that this is the process by which one registers as an organ donor (at least in most states). Yet, it may surprise you that only 40 percent of American adults have registered; that's only two out of every five. This statistic is particularly jarring when it is contrasted with another: 95 percent of Americans strongly support organ donation (according to a 2005 Gallup poll). That is every nineteen out of twenty people, which is a figure that positively dwarfs the number who have registered.

Text 2

Contrary to tabloid sensationalism, no organ donor has ever been declared dead prematurely; donors are subject to more post-mortem testing than non-donors just to ensure that this scenario never occurs. Thus, you are far more likely to be buried alive as a non-donor than to be declared dead as a donor.

The argument presented in Text 2 could be best used to explain which portion of Text 1?

10

The third step of glycolysis involves the the hormonally-controlled phosphorylation of fructose-6-phosphate into fructose-1, 6-bisphosphate. When glucose is abundant, pancreatic insulin induces the forward glycolytic catalysis of this reaction, allowing the production of fructose-1, 6-bisphosphate, which in turn is cleaved into glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate and dihydroxyacetone phosphate. When glucose is scarce, pancreatic glucagon blocks glycolysis, and induces the gluconeogenic production of fructose-6-phosphate, which is subsequently isomerized into glucose-6-phosphate, and released into the blood.

According to the text, bodily regulation of glucose levels is best described as