AP English Language and Composition Medium practice

Passage 3 (excerpt from an open letter by a city's outgoing public-works director, published in a local paper).

Friends — and even adversaries — I leave this office at the end of the month after eleven years. I want to say one thing before I go. The work we do is invisible. It is invisible when it works, which is most of the time. The water comes on. The street gets plowed. The drain stops flooding. No one writes a thank-you note. And then occasionally — say, one winter morning every three or four years — something fails. A pipe bursts in a neighborhood and the calls flood the office, and the question is always the same: how could we have let this happen? My request to the city, after eleven years of answering that question, is this: be a little quicker to credit the boring days. The people in this office will keep the city running with or without your praise. But we will keep it running longer, and with sharper minds, if you remember that invisibility is the most reliable evidence that the system is working.

Based on Passage 3, why does the writer specifically address 'Friends — and even adversaries'?

Passage 3 (excerpt from an essay on social media).

The argument that social media platforms are 'just neutral conduits' has a serious version and a foolish one. The foolish version says that platforms are like the phone company: they pass traffic, they don't shape it. This is obviously wrong — what shows up in your feed is a sorted, ranked, filtered selection determined by code the platform owns. The serious version concedes the sorting and says that platforms should be neutral about the CONTENT of what they sort, even if they cannot be neutral about the FACT of sorting. I do not agree with the serious version either, but I want to be honest about the trade-off. The price of demanding platforms intervene in content is that we will be governed, in our daily reading, by the values of whoever owns the platform. That price is real, and dismissing it is the cheap move. The expensive move is to argue that we should accept the cost anyway. That argument is what this essay tries to make.

Based on Passage 3, the phrase 'the cheap move' refers to:

An essay writer wants to use both Sources A and B to argue that 'safety improvements should be implemented but designed with business impact in mind.' Which combination of evidence from the sources best supports this synthesis?

Passage 1 (excerpt from an essay on remote work).

Defenders of remote work often argue that it makes workers more productive. The data, on average, supports them. But to stop there is to misread the argument. The serious case against remote work was never that individual workers produce less. It was that organizations as a whole — the mentorship of juniors, the slow accumulation of shared judgment, the unforced encounters that produce ideas no one was tasked with producing — slowly degrade in ways that aggregate productivity numbers do not capture. The aggregate is doing the work of obscuring a question we have not yet answered: what happens to an institution when the next generation has never been in the room?

Based on Passage 1, the rhetorical question at the end serves to:

Based on Sources A and B, which point do BOTH sources implicitly accept?

Passage 1 (excerpt from an essay on remote work).

Defenders of remote work often argue that it makes workers more productive. The data, on average, supports them. But to stop there is to misread the argument. The serious case against remote work was never that individual workers produce less. It was that organizations as a whole — the mentorship of juniors, the slow accumulation of shared judgment, the unforced encounters that produce ideas no one was tasked with producing — slowly degrade in ways that aggregate productivity numbers do not capture. The aggregate is doing the work of obscuring a question we have not yet answered: what happens to an institution when the next generation has never been in the room?

The author's argument is best characterized as:

Passage 1 (excerpt from an original essay on public libraries).

Public libraries are often described as quiet cathedrals of self-improvement, places where one ascends, book by book, toward a fuller life. That image is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The most important work libraries do today happens at the help desk and around the children's tables, not in the silent stacks. A librarian who shows an out-of-work adult how to fill out an online job application has done more for that person's mobility than a shelf of self-help books. A toddler who hears a story read aloud in a public space is acquiring something her parents could not buy at any price: the social experience of being part of a community of readers. We undervalue libraries when we measure them only by the books they hold. Their truer measure is the doors they open into civic life.

Based on Passage 1, why does the author include the example of the toddler hearing a story?

Passage 3 (excerpt from an original editorial on grade inflation).

When more than half of all college grades are A's, we have to admit that 'excellence' has lost its meaning. The defenders of grade inflation argue that today's students work harder than ever and that high grades reflect that work. The argument is appealing but flawed. The point of a grading scale is not to reward effort; it is to distinguish levels of mastery. A pole vaulter who bends but does not break the bar does not win the meet because she tried hard. To pretend otherwise is to confuse the metric with the encouragement we wrap around it. If the grading scale cannot tell us who has mastered the material best, we will need a new scale — and the students relying on the old one to communicate their achievements to graduate schools and employers will be the ones paying the price.

In Passage 3, the pole-vaulter analogy is best understood as:

Passage 1 (excerpt from a letter to a school board, written by a parent).

To the members of the Glenmoor School Board,

My daughter is in fifth grade at Eastside Elementary. I'm writing not to complain about the new math curriculum — I know other parents have already done that — but to ask the Board to do one small thing the curriculum vote did not require. The textbooks have arrived. The teachers have been trained. What hasn't happened, as far as I can tell, is a clear explanation to families of how the new approach actually differs from the old one. Without that, parents like me are reduced to guessing whether the homework our children bring home is on track or off the rails. I'd like to ask, on behalf of everyone in the same position, that the Board organize one evening session, open to families, with a teacher walking through a typical unit. That's it. No reversal, no debate — just a thirty-minute window to see what our kids are seeing. Thank you for considering it.

Based on Passage 1, what EXIGENCE (specific occasion or need) prompted the writer to send this letter?

Based on Sources C and D, an essayist arguing for school-day phone bans would MOST effectively cite which combination?

Passage 2 (excerpt from a fictional city-council address by a local resident).

Mr. Chair, the proposal to widen Main Street from four lanes to six is being sold to us as progress. Let me suggest a different word: surrender. Surrender to the assumption that a city's job is to move cars through it as fast as possible. Every block we widen will displace a row of shopfronts. Every shopfront lost is a small business closed, a face removed from the daily life of the street. The drivers we are widening the road for will not stop here. They are passing through to somewhere else. The neighborhood we tear up will not be theirs to miss. I urge the Council to vote no — not because we cannot build for the future, but because the future we are building tonight is one in which Main Street is no longer a street, only a way to leave.

In Passage 2, the speaker chooses the word 'surrender' instead of 'progress' primarily to:

Passage 2 (excerpt from a college admissions blog post by an associate dean).

Every fall I get asked the same question, usually three times a day, by anxious juniors and their parents: "What does your committee really look for?" I always pause before answering — not because the answer is a secret, but because the question, framed that way, sets up a misunderstanding. We are not detectives looking for a hidden quality. We are readers, trying to assemble a class of seven hundred students who will help one another grow over four years. So my honest answer is rarely helpful in the way the asker hopes. We look for people whose writing makes us curious to spend an hour with them. We look for evidence that someone has cared deeply about at least one thing. We look — and this is the part most parents don't want to hear — for the small detail in an essay that lets us picture an actual human being, not a polished candidate. Everything else is implementation.

The PERSONA the dean adopts in Passage 2 is best described as:

Passage 2 (excerpt from a fictional city-council address by a local resident).

Mr. Chair, the proposal to widen Main Street from four lanes to six is being sold to us as progress. Let me suggest a different word: surrender. Surrender to the assumption that a city's job is to move cars through it as fast as possible. Every block we widen will displace a row of shopfronts. Every shopfront lost is a small business closed, a face removed from the daily life of the street. The drivers we are widening the road for will not stop here. They are passing through to somewhere else. The neighborhood we tear up will not be theirs to miss. I urge the Council to vote no — not because we cannot build for the future, but because the future we are building tonight is one in which Main Street is no longer a street, only a way to leave.

In Passage 2, the speaker's argument relies most centrally on the claim that:

Source C (excerpt from a researcher's testimony on screen time and adolescent sleep).

Across the studies we have reviewed, adolescents who report using screens within an hour of bedtime sleep on average $34$ minutes less per night than peers who do not. This difference is large by sleep-research standards. Two mechanisms appear most likely: (a) the light from devices delays the body's natural release of melatonin, and (b) the content itself is arousing in a way that books and television are not.

Source D (excerpt from an op-ed by a high-school principal).

The push to ban student smartphones at home is well-meaning but largely unrealistic. Even families that succeed in removing devices from the bedroom often find their children migrate to a sibling's phone or sneak the device back at $\text{2 AM}$. We've found that schools have a tool families don't: we can ban phones during the school day, and we can use sleep-friendly assignment policies. Rather than spending political capital on a home-life intervention parents cannot consistently enforce, we should focus the conversation on school-day policies, which are within our actual control.

Which choice best describes the relationship between Sources C and D?

Passage 2 (excerpt from a college admissions blog post by an associate dean).

Every fall I get asked the same question, usually three times a day, by anxious juniors and their parents: "What does your committee really look for?" I always pause before answering — not because the answer is a secret, but because the question, framed that way, sets up a misunderstanding. We are not detectives looking for a hidden quality. We are readers, trying to assemble a class of seven hundred students who will help one another grow over four years. So my honest answer is rarely helpful in the way the asker hopes. We look for people whose writing makes us curious to spend an hour with them. We look for evidence that someone has cared deeply about at least one thing. We look — and this is the part most parents don't want to hear — for the small detail in an essay that lets us picture an actual human being, not a polished candidate. Everything else is implementation.

Based on Passage 2, the dean's CONTEXT (writing on the college's admissions blog) affects the rhetorical situation by: