Module I: Reading and Writing

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The following text is from Mark Twain’s 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tom, a child, has been told by his aunt to paint their house’s fence.
Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high.
As used in the text, what does the word "surveyed" most nearly mean?
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Mark for Review
Promoted
Organized
Transformed
Examined
Though Vasily Grossman’s novel Stalingrad is not as beloved as his later work Life and Fate, some critics commend it despite its mangling by Soviet censors: Luke Harding in The Guardian called it “one of the great novels of the twentieth century.” Several draft versions have been ______, and translators consulted those drafts when working on what they hoped would be a definitive English edition.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
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Mark for Review
assigned
hypothesized
detracted
preserved
Writer Lydia Davis observed that while ______ literary forms, such as the novel, are recognizable as such even as they evolve, there are pathbreaking “intergeneric” forms that might, for example, use elements of both fiction and essays to create something unclassifiable. The late-period pieces of James Tate arguably fit in this category, since they straddle the line between prose and poetry.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
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Mark for Review
established
ambiguous
innovative
elusive
Analysis of preserved plants cataloged in the United States Virtual Herbarium indicates that rising temperatures correlate with earlier leaf production, but such specimens represent only brief moments in plants’ overall development. ______ this research with studies involving live plants would enable a fuller understanding of how these observed changes affect plant fitness.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
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Mark for Review
Foregrounding
Complementing
Categorizing
Anticipating
One challenge faced by researchers studying global urbanization is that different countries have different definitions of what constitutes an urban settlement. Many countries define urban settlements based on the number of people living in them. However, countries do not all use the same number to define an urban settlement; for example, Iceland uses a minimum population of 200, while Mali uses 30,000. Other countries use a combination of population and other factors, like the number of buildings in the area. This variation makes it difficult for researchers to compare aspects of urbanization in different countries.
Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?
5
Mark for Review
To compare the urban populations of two different countries
To explain why researchers are interested in studying global urbanization
To illustrate a problem faced by researchers studying global urbanization
To object to a method that some countries use to classify different types of settlements
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