STAAR EOC English I — Practice Test 1

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Reading Passage 1: "The Last Shift at Halverson's"

Read the passage. Then answer the questions that follow.

The Last Shift at Halverson's

(1) The OPEN sign in the bakery window had a short in it. It buzzed when the temperature dropped and went dim around the letter P, so for most of the winter the place looked, from the street, like it was advertising itself as O EN. Mira had asked Mr. Halverson three times if she could replace the bulb. Each time he had waved her off the way he waved off most suggestions — with a flick of flour-dusted fingers and a sentence that started, "When my grandfather opened this place in 1947 —" and ended somewhere she had stopped listening.

(2) Tonight was the last night. The sale of the building had cleared in October. The new owners, who were turning the storefront into something called a "micro-fitness studio," wanted the keys by Monday. Mira was seventeen, and Halverson's was the only job she had ever held. She had started at fourteen, sweeping the back room on Saturdays for cash that came folded in an envelope, and over three years she had learned to fold croissants without thinking, to time the rye loaves to the minute, and to read the door chime the way other people read the weather — that's a walk-in, that's a regular, that's someone who's going to ask if we have gluten-free.

(3) She had thought, all week, that she would be sad tonight. She had even practiced being sad in the mirror, on the theory that her face sometimes needed a head start. What she felt instead, an hour into closing, was a kind of irritated tenderness, like her chest was a sweater that had been washed wrong and didn't fit. Mr. Halverson was in the back, wrapping the last of the equipment in butcher paper. He had not said anything sentimental. He had not said anything at all, in fact, since seven o'clock.

(4) Mira swept under the cooling racks. She wiped down the case. She ran the till and counted out the float. Outside the window, the OPEN sign buzzed and went O EN, buzzed and went O EN. A man in a parka tried the door at 8:55, saw the dark bakery behind her, and waved an apology before walking on.

(5) At 9:02 Mr. Halverson came out of the back carrying a small paper bag. He set it on the counter between them. He still did not look at her.

(6) "That's the recipe book," he said. "My grandfather's. The one I keep telling you about."

(7) Mira looked at the bag. Then at him. Then at the bag again. "You're giving it to me?"

(8) "I'm not giving it to you," he said. "I'm asking you to keep it." He cleared his throat in the small, aggressive way he had when he was about to say something he had rehearsed. "I'm not going to open another bakery. My knees are gone. But somebody who started at fourteen sweeping the back room ought to know how the rye is supposed to taste in twenty years, in case anybody asks."

(9) He pushed the bag toward her. The paper rustled in a way that struck her, suddenly, as enormous.

(10) Mira had been ready, all week, to lose this place. She had not been ready to be handed a piece of it, in a paper bag, on her way out. She did not know yet what she would do with the book — whether she would open a kitchen of her own someday, whether she would simply keep it on a shelf and read it the way other people read poems they had loved as teenagers. The choice felt too big to make at 9:02 on a Sunday in February, in the dim half-light of a sign that could no longer spell its own name.

(11) She picked up the bag. It was lighter than she had expected, and somehow, because of that, harder to carry.

1. Which sentence BEST states a theme that develops over the course of the passage?

2. Which statement BEST describes Mira's MOTIVATION in the closing paragraphs?

3. Which BEST describes the central CONFLICT of the passage?

4. In paragraph 3, the comparison "like her chest was a sweater that had been washed wrong and didn't fit" is an example of —

5. Which sentence BEST describes the OVERALL TONE of the passage?

6. The repeated detail of the OPEN sign that reads "O EN" functions in the passage MOST as —

7. The structure of the passage MOST clearly moves from —

8. In paragraph 3, the word tenderness MOST NEARLY means —

Reading Passage 2: "What the New Town Doesn't Know About Me"

Read the poem. Then answer the questions that follow.

What the New Town Doesn't Know About Me

1  The new town is a sweater I have not yet stretched.
2  Its sleeves catch on my wrists in the cafeteria line,
3  its collar rides too high in second-period math.
4  In the old town I had a shape this town does not know.

5  I had a corner booth at a diner that closed at ten,
6  a bus driver who called me Coach because of my last name,
7  a dog that waited at the kitchen window like a clock
8  and a best friend who could finish my sentences in three languages,
9  though only one of them was English.

10  Here, the streets are arranged like a sentence I have not learned to read.
11  The traffic lights blink yellow at intersections I do not yet trust.
12  The school's hallways smell like a different brand of floor wax,
13  and even the rain falls in a slightly different rhythm on the roof of the bus.

14  But this morning, walking past the post office,
15  an old man tipped his hat at me as if he had known my grandfather,
16  and a girl on the corner held the door of the coffee shop
17  an extra second longer than strangers usually do.

18  Maybe the new town is not a sweater after all.
19  Maybe it is a room with the lights still off,
20  and someone, somewhere down the hall,
21  is already feeling along the wall for the switch.

9. Which sentence BEST states a central THEME of the poem?

10. The SPEAKER of the poem is BEST described as —

11. In line 1, "The new town is a sweater I have not yet stretched" is BEST identified as —

12. In line 7, "a dog that waited at the kitchen window like a clock" is an example of —

13. The STRUCTURE of the poem moves MOST clearly from —

14. The TONE shifts MOST clearly between —

Reading Passage 3: "Why You Forget Names (and What That Says About Memory)"

Read the informational article. Then answer the questions that follow.

Why You Forget Names (and What That Says About Memory)

(1) You meet someone at a party. They tell you their name. Forty seconds later, deep in the small talk, you realize you have already lost it. You smile, you nod, you stall — and the next time you need the name, you reach for it and find an empty pocket. Almost everyone has had this experience, and almost everyone secretly worries it means something is wrong with them. According to memory researchers, it does not. The reason names slip away so easily reveals something genuinely interesting about how human memory was built.

(2) The first thing to know is that not all information is stored the same way. Researchers at the University of Oregon, working in a line of studies that goes back to the 1980s, have shown that the brain treats meaningful information very differently from arbitrary labels. A face has structure: a nose, a jaw, eyes that look like someone you have already met. Even an occupation has structure — "she is a nurse" connects to a web of things you already know about hospitals, scrubs, long shifts. A name like "Tomás" or "Reyna," attached to a stranger, has none of that structure. It is, from the brain's point of view, a string of sounds with no useful associations. The brain treats it the way it treats a phone number you only need for one afternoon.

(3) The second thing to know is that human memory was not designed for the modern world. Our deep memory systems evolved when most of the people we encountered in a lifetime were familiar — relatives, neighbors, members of a small community. We did not need to keep filing new names every weekend, and the brain still does not particularly want to. By contrast, the modern social environment — schools, cities, networking events, social media — pushes us through hundreds of new names a year, almost all of them attached to people we will never see again. The system is being asked to do something it was never optimized for.

(4) The third thing — and this is where the science becomes practical — is that memory researchers have found a small bag of techniques that genuinely improve name recall. The most reliable is association: as soon as someone tells you a name, attach it to something already in your mind. "Marcus, like the philosopher." "Linh, with three letters, like my niece's." The point is not the cleverness of the link; the point is that a name with no anchors floats away, and a name with even a weak anchor stays. A second technique is repetition during the conversation itself — using the name once or twice while you are still talking. A third is writing the name down within a few minutes, which forces the brain to encode it a second time. None of these tricks make memory "perfect." They simply give an arbitrary label something to attach to.

(5) None of this means a name slip is a failure of character. It is, in most cases, a system mismatch — a brain built for a small village being asked to operate at the scale of a city. Critics sometimes argue that the rise of digital contact lists has made the problem worse, since we no longer need to remember anything we can look up. There is probably some truth to that. But the deeper point is that forgetting names is not a sign of laziness, age, or rudeness. It is the predictable result of asking a meaning-hungry memory system to swallow meaningless strings of sound, on demand, hundreds of times a year.

(6) The next time it happens to you, you can stop apologizing as if you had committed a moral failure. You can simply ask again. Most people, it turns out, are also relieved to be reminded.

15. Which sentence BEST states the central idea of the article?

16. Which detail BEST supports the author's claim that names are uniquely hard to remember?

17. What is the author's PRIMARY PURPOSE in this article?

18. The author organizes paragraphs 2, 3, and 4 MOST clearly using which structure?

19. In paragraph 5, the author acknowledges and partly accepts a counter-claim. Which statement BEST describes that counter-claim?

20. In paragraph 3, the word optimized MOST NEARLY means —

21. The metaphor in paragraph 5 — "a brain built for a small village being asked to operate at the scale of a city" — functions MOST as —

22. Which sentence from the passage BEST captures the author's TONE toward readers who forget names?

Paired Texts: "The Museum I Couldn't Leave" + "How Museums Decide What You'll Look At"

Read both texts. Then answer the questions that follow. Some questions ask about Text 1, some about Text 2, and some ask you to compare both.

Text 1: "The Museum I Couldn't Leave" (personal essay)

(1) The first time I went to the Art Institute on a school trip, I was eleven, and I was bored before we got off the bus. Field trips, in my experience, were a way for adults to look interested at things while children counted ceiling tiles. I had brought gum and a book and exactly zero expectations.

(2) Then I turned a corner on the second floor, and there she was: a small painting of a woman holding a letter. She was looking at the letter the way you look at something that has just changed your week. The light fell on her wrist. Her mouth was slightly open. The room behind her was almost too dim to see, which is, I think now, the point. The whole world had narrowed to that piece of paper in her hand.

(3) I do not remember the artist. I do not remember the painting's title. I do remember standing there long enough that my class moved on without me, and a museum guard, kindly, came over and asked if I had lost the group. I had not, exactly. I had simply found something I had not known existed: the experience of being held in place by a stranger's face that had been still for two hundred years.

(4) I went back to that museum eleven more times before I graduated high school, mostly alone. I was not the kid who became an artist. I did not even take an art class until college. But that one painting did something to me that nothing in my regular life had: it asked me to slow down without asking. The other things competing for my attention at eleven — phones, group chats, ten-second videos — were all built to keep me moving. The painting was built to make me stop. I think now I needed both, but I had only been getting the first one.

(5) I still go back when I can. I do not always look for that painting. Sometimes I just walk through the rooms and remind myself that there are things in the world worth standing in front of for longer than the algorithm wants me to.

Text 2: "How Museums Decide What You'll Look At" (informational article)

(1) Visitors who walk through a major art museum tend to assume the experience is essentially neutral — that the paintings are simply hanging there, and what catches your eye is up to you. In fact, almost every choice you make inside a museum has been quietly anticipated by someone whose job is to design how you move.

(2) Curators and exhibit designers begin from a basic, well-studied fact: average visitors spend less time at each artwork than they think. Studies dating back to the 1990s, repeated more recently with eye-tracking technology, suggest that the typical museum-goer spends between fifteen and thirty seconds at most paintings, and significantly less than that at items they have to read placards for. A museum that wants visitors to engage more deeply has to design against this baseline.

(3) The first design choice is sight lines. When you enter a gallery, the first painting you see — the one framed by the doorway, lit slightly more brightly, mounted at eye level for the average adult — is almost never accidental. Curators call this the "anchor work." It is chosen to slow visitors down at the entrance, on the theory that a visitor who slows down once will slow down again.

(4) The second is grouping. Paintings are rarely arranged by date alone. They are clustered to create what museum researchers call "conversations" — a portrait of a young woman next to a still life with a letter on the table, or a landscape from one century beside a similar landscape from two centuries later. The goal is to give a visitor's eye somewhere to go after the first painting, so the second viewing is informed by the first.

(5) The third, and least visible, is bench placement. Where a museum decides to install a seat is, in effect, a decision about which paintings are worth a five-minute look. Visitors offered a bench in front of a work tend to stay much longer than visitors who would have to stand. Some museums have begun publishing internal data confirming this; one major institution found visitors at benched works lingered, on average, four to seven times longer than at unbenched works in the same gallery.

(6) None of this is manipulation, exactly. It is closer to hospitality. The museum is making a guess about how to spend your attention well, on the assumption that, left entirely to your own habits, you might spend it less well than you would like.

23. In Text 1, which sentence BEST captures the author's central CLAIM about what the painting did for her?

24. The TONE of Text 1 is BEST described as —

25. Which detail in Text 1 MOST clearly contrasts the painting with the author's everyday distractions?

26. Which sentence BEST states the central idea of Text 2?

27. In Text 2 paragraph 3, the term anchor work MOST NEARLY refers to —

28. Which kind of EVIDENCE does Text 2 rely on MOST heavily?

29. Compared with Text 1, the STRUCTURE of Text 2 is BEST described as —

30. Which statement BEST describes how the two texts treat the same SUBJECT — the experience of standing in a museum?

31. A reader who finishes BOTH texts would BEST conclude that —

32. Which statement BEST contrasts the AUDIENCE the two authors most clearly seem to address?

Revising & Editing — Student Draft: "Why Our School Should Keep the Library Open Late"

A student wrote the following draft for the school newspaper. Read the draft. Then choose the BEST revision for each numbered item.

Student Draft: "Why Our School Should Keep the Library Open Late"

(1) Last semester, our school library closed at 4:30 every afternoon. (2) A lot of students didn't like this, it made it hard to study after sports practice. (3) Now the principal is considering keeping the library open until 7:00 on weeknights. (4) This change would be really, really good for students. (5) The library is the only place on campus that is quiet, has reliable Wi-Fi, and where teachers sometimes stop in to help.

(6) Some people argue that students could just study at home. (7) However, not every student has a quiet place to study at home. (8) Some students share rooms with younger siblings. (9) Some students don't have reliable internet. (10) They are the ones who need the library most. (11) A later closing time would help these students the most of all.

(12) Keeping the library open later does cost money, you have to pay a librarian to stay. (13) But last year the school spent over $40,000 on new turf for the football field. (14) Spending a fraction of that to keep the library open until 7:00 seems like a fair trade. (15) If we are serious about helping every student succeed, we should give every student a place to do their work.

33. Sentence (2) reads: "A lot of students didn't like this, it made it hard to study after sports practice." Which is the BEST revision?

34. Sentence (4) reads: "This change would be really, really good for students." Which is the BEST revision for tone and precision in a school newspaper article?

35. Which is the BEST way to combine sentences (8) and (9) for clarity and flow?

36. Sentence (10) reads: "They are the ones who need the library most." The pronoun they is unclear. Which revision BEST fixes the pronoun-clarity problem?

37. Sentence (11) currently ends with the phrase "the most of all," which repeats the idea already expressed in sentence (10). What is the BEST revision?

38. Sentence (12) reads: "Keeping the library open later does cost money, you have to pay a librarian to stay." Which is the BEST way to fix the comma splice?

39. The writer wants to add the following sentence to make the argument stronger: "Roughly one in three students at our school report that they do not have a quiet place to do homework after dinner." Where would this new sentence fit BEST?

40. The writer wants a transition word at the beginning of sentence (13) to signal that the writer is anticipating an objection and answering it. Which transition fits BEST?

41. In sentence (14), the word fair is somewhat vague. Which precise word would BEST replace fair while keeping the writer's meaning?

42. Sentence (15) reads: "If we are serious about helping every student succeed, we should give every student a place to do their work." Which is the BEST edit for pronoun-antecedent agreement?

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