STAAR Grade 7 RLA — Practice Test 1

Reading Passage 1: "The Last Day of the Apricot Tree"

Read the passage. Then answer the questions that follow.

The Last Day of the Apricot Tree

The tree had been in our backyard for as long as I had been alive, and probably longer. My grandmother said her father planted it the spring after he came back from the war. By the time I was thirteen, the trunk was so wide my arms could not reach all the way around, and the branches hung low enough in summer that I could lie on my back in the grass and pick fruit without getting up.

So when my mother announced, on a Tuesday in February, that the apricot tree had to come down, I did not believe her at first. I thought it was the kind of thing adults said when they were tired and angry and wanted to be dramatic. But she showed me the letter from the city. The roots, it said, were lifting the sidewalk. A neighbor had tripped. The tree was a hazard. We had thirty days.

I spent most of those days angry — at the neighbor, at the city, at my mother for agreeing without a fight. I was the kind of angry that felt clean and righteous, the kind that did not need facts to keep itself going. My grandmother, who lived with us, watched me stomp around the kitchen and did not try to talk me out of it.

The morning the men came with the saws, I sat on the back step and refused to go to school. My mother, to my surprise, did not argue. She brought me a cup of tea and sat down beside me on the cold concrete.

"You know," she said, after a long quiet, "your great-grandfather planted that tree because he wanted something to come back from. He had been gone a long time. He needed proof that things grew."

I had not known that part. I had thought of the tree as belonging only to my own life — as the thing I climbed, the fruit I ate, the green ceiling above the picnic table. I had not pictured a tired young man pressing a pit into the dirt and praying for a harvest.

The chainsaws started up. I flinched. My grandmother came out then, in her slippers, carrying something small wrapped in a dish towel. She sat down on my other side, so that I was sandwiched between the two of them, and she opened the towel.

Inside were three apricot pits, dry and brown, saved from the last fruit of last summer.

"You can plant these," she said. "Wherever you live. They are stubborn. They like to come back."

The men were finishing now. The big trunk lay on its side in the yard, and the air smelled, of all things, like cut grass and almonds. My mother put her arm around me. I did not feel less sad. But I felt the sadness was less alone — that it was the same sadness my great-grandfather might have known, in a different shape, when he came home and found that the world had changed without his permission.

I put the three pits in my coat pocket and zipped it shut. I went to school late. The next spring, in a planter on our apartment balcony — because by then we had moved — I pressed one of those pits, gently, into a small dark cup of dirt.

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

2. The narrator of this passage is BEST described as —

3. Which of these BEST shows that the narrator is a DYNAMIC character?

4. In paragraph 3, the phrase "the kind of angry that felt clean and righteous, the kind that did not need facts to keep itself going" is an example of the author's —

5. The mother's explanation about the great-grandfather is a turning point in the passage because it —

6. The grandmother says of apricot pits, "They are stubborn. They like to come back." This statement functions in the passage MOST as —

7. In paragraph 10, the word flinched MOST NEARLY means —

Reading Passage 2: "The Quiet Engineering of Beaver Dams"

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

The Quiet Engineering of Beaver Dams

For most of the twentieth century, beavers were treated as a nuisance across much of North America. They flooded farm fields, blocked drainage culverts, and chewed down ornamental trees that homeowners had spent years growing. Trappers had reduced the continental population from somewhere around 100 million animals to fewer than 100,000 by the late 1800s, and many ranchers and road crews would have happily kept that number low. In the past two decades, however, ecologists have begun to argue that the loss of beavers, not the beavers themselves, is the bigger problem. The dams these animals build, it turns out, are doing slow, valuable work that humans cannot easily replicate.

Consider what a beaver dam actually does. A single dam slows the flow of a stream, which causes the water to spread sideways across the floodplain. The pond that forms behind the dam holds water through dry weeks. Sediment that would otherwise wash downstream settles on the pond bottom, and over years that sediment builds up into rich, wet soil. Plants such as willow and sedge move in. Frogs, fish, songbirds, and insects follow. A single small dam can transform a thin trickle of a stream into a complex wetland teeming with life — and it can do this without engineers, environmental review, or a single dollar of public money.

The cumulative effect across a watershed is striking. Studies in the western United States have shown that streams with active beaver activity recharge groundwater more reliably, run cooler in summer, and recover faster after wildfire than nearby streams without beavers. During the long droughts that have become common in the West, ranchers who once cursed beavers have begun, in some cases, to invite them back — sometimes by trapping pairs in nuisance areas and releasing them upstream of struggling pasture. There is even a small industry, now, of "beaver believers": volunteers and biologists who install fake beaver dams (called beaver dam analogs, or BDAs) to attract real beavers and jump-start the rebuilding process.

None of this means beavers are easy neighbors. They will still chew the cottonwoods you wanted to keep, and they will still flood the ditch you wanted to drain. The newer view, though, is that those costs are usually fixable — wire wrapping for trees, a flow device through the dam — while the benefits a healthy beaver population provides are difficult to manufacture any other way. A wetland built by a public works crew costs millions of dollars. A wetland built by a beaver costs the price of a few willow saplings.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the story is that the beaver itself has not changed. The animal does what its ancestors did 10,000 years ago: it chews wood, drags it into water, and packs mud against it. What has changed is the human view. We are beginning to recognize that some of the most useful work in a landscape is done quietly, by creatures we long mistook for pests, and that fixing a watershed is sometimes a matter of getting out of the way.

8. Which sentence BEST states the central idea of this passage?

9. Which text structure does the author MOST clearly use in paragraph 2?

10. What is the author's primary purpose in writing this passage?

11. According to the passage, ranchers in the West have begun to do which of the following?

12. Which sentence from the passage BEST supports the claim that beaver-built wetlands are inexpensive compared with human-built ones?

13. In paragraph 5, the line "fixing a watershed is sometimes a matter of getting out of the way" suggests that —

14. In paragraph 1, the word nuisance MOST NEARLY means —

Paired Texts: Two Arguments on School Phone Policies

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

Source 1: Why Our School Should Lock Up Phones During the Day

by Mr. Davies, eighth-grade history teacher

I have been teaching for fifteen years, and I have never seen a tool change a classroom more quickly than the smartphone. When I started, the worst distraction in my room was a folded note. Today it is a glowing rectangle that beeps, buzzes, and lights up roughly every four minutes — that is not a feeling, that is the average notification rate a recent district survey measured on student devices during the school day.

Some teachers say the answer is to teach "responsible use." I respect the goal. But responsible use of a slot machine is still difficult, even for adults, and the apps on these phones are designed by teams of engineers whose job is, frankly, to defeat self-control. Asking a thirteen-year-old to compete with that, alone, while also learning algebra, is not a fair fight.

Schools that have moved to magnetic phone pouches — locked at the start of the day, unlocked at the end — report fewer fights, higher test scores, and, surprisingly, happier students within the first year. Students themselves describe relief. The pouch is not a punishment. It is a structure that protects the kind of attention learning actually requires. We owe our students that structure.

Source 2: Don't Lock Up Our Phones — Teach Us to Use Them

by Priya Shah, ninth-grade student

I understand why teachers want to ban phones. I really do. I have sat in classrooms where half the room was watching short videos under the desk. That is real. But banning phones is the easy answer to a hard question, and easy answers in education are usually wrong.

The phones are not going away when we graduate. Every job my older sister has applied to expects her to manage email, calendars, and group chats from a phone. If school is supposed to prepare us for the world, locking phones in a pouch teaches us almost nothing about how to live with them. It just delays the lesson.

I have also seen phones used well in school. In my biology class last year, my teacher had us photograph leaves and identify them with an app. In Spanish, we recorded ourselves and listened back to fix our pronunciation. Those were some of the best lessons I had. A pouch policy would have made them impossible.

What I want — what most students I know want — is teachers who set clear rules per class, model good phone habits themselves, and trust us to learn from our own mistakes. That is harder than buying a stack of pouches. It is also closer to the actual problem.

15. Which sentence BEST states Mr. Davies's central CLAIM in Source 1?

16. Which sentence from Source 1 functions MOST clearly as evidence rather than opinion?

17. When Mr. Davies compares phones to a slot machine, the appeal he is MOST clearly making to readers is —

18. Which sentence BEST states Priya Shah's central counterclaim in Source 2?

19. Priya supports her argument MAINLY by —

20. Which point does Priya CONCEDE to the other side in Source 2?

21. The two sources DISAGREE most directly on which question?

22. A reader who finishes BOTH sources would BEST conclude that —

Vocabulary

Choose the best answer or type the correct word.

23. Read the sentence: "Despite the coach's candid assessment of the team's weaknesses, no player walked away angry — they all knew she meant it as help, not insult." What does candid MOST NEARLY mean?

24. The Latin root spect means "to look" or "to see." In which word does this root MOST clearly appear with that meaning?

25. Two reporters describe the same politician. One calls her determined; the other calls her stubborn. Which statement BEST explains the difference?

26. Read the sentence: "The novel's plot was so intricate that I had to read several chapters twice just to follow who was related to whom." Type the word from the list below that means MOST NEARLY the same as intricate in this sentence.
Choices: complex, simple, boring, brief

27. The Greek prefix bio- means "life," and the root -graphy means "writing" or "a written record." Type the word made from bio- + -graphy that names the written story of a person's life.

Revising

Read each excerpt and choose the BEST revision.

28. Read this excerpt from a student's draft:
(1) The community garden opened in May. (2) The community garden has twenty raised beds. (3) Each bed is rented by a different family. (4) The families grow their own vegetables.
Which is the BEST way to combine sentences 2, 3, and 4 into a single, smooth sentence?

29. Read this paragraph from a draft:
(1) Sea otters are important predators in kelp forests. (2) Sea otters are very important. (3) They eat sea urchins, which would otherwise overgraze the kelp. (4) Without otters, kelp forests can collapse.
Which sentence should be DELETED because it is redundant?

30. Read this excerpt:
(1) Studying with a partner can help you spot mistakes you would miss alone. (2) ____ studying alone helps you build your own way of thinking through problems. (3) The best plan is usually a mix of both.
Which transition fits BEST in the blank in sentence 2?

31. Read this draft sentence:
The cat, which had been hiding under the couch all morning, came out suddenly because of the loud noise that was very loud and scared it.
Which is the BEST revision to remove redundancy and tighten the sentence?

32. Read this excerpt from a student essay:
(1) Public libraries are sometimes called "the people's universities." (2) They lend books to anyone with a card. (3) ____, modern libraries also offer free internet access, language classes, and tutoring for students.
Which transition fits BEST in the blank at the start of sentence 3?

33. Read this draft sentence:
For her science project, Maya wanted to study local birds, to identify common species, and learning about migration patterns.
Which revision BEST corrects the parallel structure problem?

Editing

Find the BEST correction for each sentence.

34. Read this sentence:
I finished my homework early, I went outside to shoot baskets in the driveway.
Which is the BEST edit?

35. Read this sentence:
Neither the coach nor the players was happy about the rained-out game.
Which is the BEST edit?

36. Read this sentence:
Each of the runners stretched their hamstrings before the race began.
Which is the BEST edit?

37. Read this sentence:
The dogs collars were tangled together after they had wrestled in the yard.
Which is the BEST edit?

38. Read this sentence:
my uncle moved to san antonio in march, but he still roots for the houston astros.
Which is the BEST edit?

39. Read this sentence:
Although the storm knocked out the power for several hours. We managed to finish dinner by candlelight.
Which is the BEST edit?

40. Read this sentence:
The chef recieved a shipment of fresh herbs and used them in tonight's special.
Which is the BEST edit?