STAAR Grade 8 RLA — Practice Test 1

Reading Passage 1: "The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter"

Read the passage. Then answer the questions that follow.

The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter

Iris had spent her whole life on the rock. The lighthouse stood at the eastern edge of it, painted white with a red band that the Coast Guard repainted every other spring, and the keeper's cottage sat behind the lighthouse, sheltered from the worst of the wind by a low stone wall her father had built before she was born. The mainland was a smudge on the horizon — visible on clear days, gone in fog — and to Iris, at fourteen, the smudge had begun to feel less like home and more like a destination.

Her father did not see it that way. To him, the rock was the only honest place on earth. "People on the mainland forget how to listen," he liked to say, usually while doing something competent with his hands — splicing a rope, cleaning the lens, sharpening a knife. "Out here, the weather tells you the truth before it ruins your day. Out here, you cannot lie to the sea."

Iris had heard this speech, or close variations of it, perhaps four hundred times. For most of her childhood she had nodded along, because her father was rarely wrong about practical things and because she had nothing to compare the rock against. Lately, though, she had begun to notice what the speech left out. Her father did not mention that the supply boat came only twice a month. He did not mention that the only other person she ever spoke to in person was her father. He did not mention that she had read every book in the cottage three times, and that the radio caught only one station, which played hymns on Sundays and farm reports the rest of the week.

The letter came on a Tuesday in October, in the regular mail pouch. It was addressed to her — her own name, in careful black ink — from a school on the mainland that her mother, before she died, had once attended. The letter said Iris had been accepted on a partial scholarship. It said the term began in January. It did not, Iris noticed, say anything about her father.

She read the letter twice in the kitchen and then folded it carefully and put it in the pocket of her sweater. She did not show it to her father at supper. She did not show it to him after supper, when he climbed the stairs to start the night watch. She sat in the kitchen alone for a long time, listening to the wind work the loose shingles on the boathouse, and she thought about what it would mean to leave.

It would mean betraying him, she decided. Not in any grand way — he would not call it betrayal. He would, in fact, probably congratulate her. He would shake her hand, and pack her trunk, and walk her down to the supply boat without complaint. And then he would come back to the cottage, alone, and the only voice in this place would be his own, and she did not know if his voice, by itself, was enough to fill the rooms.

For the first time in her life, Iris understood that the cost of growing up was not always paid by the person growing. Sometimes the bill arrived at someone else's door.

She took the letter out of her pocket and read it a third time. Then she went to the door at the bottom of the lighthouse stairs and called up to her father, and her voice, when it came out, surprised her by being steady.

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

2. Which of the following BEST describes Iris as a DYNAMIC character?

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

4. In paragraph 1, the description of the mainland as "a smudge on the horizon" that has "begun to feel less like home and more like a destination" functions MOST as —

5. The repeated structure in paragraph 3 — "He did not mention that... He did not mention that... He did not mention that..." — MOST clearly creates which effect?

6. Which sentence from the passage BEST signals the central internal conflict Iris faces?

7. In paragraph 2, the word competent MOST NEARLY means —

Reading Passage 2: "The Surprising Science of Sourdough"

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

The Surprising Science of Sourdough

Walk into almost any modern bakery and you will find, somewhere near the back, a glass jar of pale, bubbling paste. The baker may call it a starter, a mother, a levain, or simply by a name — Bernice, perhaps, or Doug. Whatever the name, the contents are the same: flour, water, and a complicated, living community of microorganisms that have been kept alive, in some cases, for decades. This jar is the heart of every loaf of sourdough bread the bakery produces, and the science of what is happening inside it is far stranger than most home bakers realize.

Sourdough rises without commercial yeast. Instead, it relies on a partnership between two very different kinds of microbes: wild yeasts and lactic-acid bacteria. The yeasts produce carbon dioxide, which inflates the dough into the open, airy crumb a good loaf is famous for. The bacteria, meanwhile, produce two acids — lactic acid and acetic acid — which give sourdough its characteristic tang and, less obviously, help preserve the bread for days longer than ordinary store-bought loaves. Neither microbe could make the bread alone. The yeasts cannot create the acid. The bacteria cannot create the lift. Together, they make a loaf neither could produce on its own.

What is even stranger is where these microbes come from. For most of human history, bakers assumed that the wild yeasts in a starter floated in from the air. This is partly true — some do. But more recent studies, including a large international project that sequenced the microbes from over 500 starters around the world, found that the dominant influence is actually the flour itself, and, surprisingly, the baker's own hands. Two bakeries on opposite sides of the same city can develop genetically distinct starters, even when they use the same flour, because the microbial community on each baker's skin subtly tilts the population in their jar.

This explains a long-standing mystery in baking culture. Old San Francisco sourdough is famous for a particular sharp tang, and bakers there have argued for a century about why. Some said it was the city's cool fog. Others said it was the local water. The microbe study suggests a humbler answer: the dominant lactic-acid bacterium in San Francisco starters, now formally named Fructilactobacillus sanfranciscensis, simply happens to thrive in the conditions that local bakers have, by accident and tradition, kept stable for generations. Move that bacterium to a different climate, feed it different flour, and it gradually loses its dominance. The flavor follows the conditions, not the city.

For a beginning home baker, the practical takeaway is hopeful. A sourdough starter is not a magical inheritance you must obtain from a famous bakery. It is, in fact, almost embarrassingly easy to grow your own: combine flour and water, leave it on the counter, feed it daily for about a week, and a wild population will establish itself, drawn from your flour and your kitchen and, yes, your hands. Within a month, that starter will be uniquely yours — different in its exact microbial mix from any other starter on earth, and capable, with patience, of producing bread.

Sourdough, then, is less a recipe than a relationship. The baker is not really controlling the microbes. The baker is feeding them, listening to them, and sometimes, when a starter goes sluggish or sour or strange, troubleshooting them. The bread that results is the visible record of an invisible community — one that lived in the flour, jumped to the jar, and now, with luck, will outlast the baker who started it.

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

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

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

11. According to the passage, what did the international study of more than 500 starters MOST surprisingly reveal?

12. The author uses the San Francisco sourdough example in paragraph 4 MAINLY to —

13. Which sentence from the passage BEST supports the idea that a home baker can grow a usable starter without expert help?

14. In paragraph 2, the word characteristic MOST NEARLY means —

Paired Texts: Two Arguments on School Start Times

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 Middle Schools Should Push Their Start Times Later

by Dr. Hannah Reyes, pediatric sleep researcher

I have spent the past twelve years in a hospital sleep lab, watching what happens to the bodies of adolescents under different schedules, and I want to be direct with parents and school boards: a 7:15 a.m. middle-school start time is not a tradition, it is a public-health problem.

The biology here is unusually clear. Around the onset of puberty, the human circadian rhythm shifts later by roughly two hours. The hormone melatonin, which signals the brain to begin sleep, is released later in adolescents than in younger children or in adults. A thirteen-year-old asked to fall asleep at 9:00 p.m. is biologically in roughly the position an adult would be in if asked to fall asleep at 7:00 p.m. — possible, perhaps, but not at all natural. When that same student must wake at 5:45 a.m. to catch the bus, the result is chronic sleep deprivation. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Centers for Disease Control, and the American Medical Association have all formally recommended middle and high school start times no earlier than 8:30 a.m.

Districts that have actually moved their start times later — there are now dozens, in states from California to Minnesota — have reported measurable improvements within a single academic year: better attendance, fewer car crashes among young drivers, fewer reported symptoms of depression, and, in some districts, modest gains in math and reading scores. The criticisms of the change usually come down to logistics: bus routes, sports schedules, after-school jobs. Those are real problems. They are not, however, biological problems, and biological problems do not negotiate. We can rebuild a bus route. We cannot rebuild adolescent brains that we have systematically deprived of sleep.

Source 2: Later Start Times Sound Good — Until You Look at the Trade-Offs

by Marcus Whitfield, school district transportation director

I do not disagree with the science. Adolescents do need more sleep than they get. I have a thirteen-year-old at home, and I have watched her drag herself out of bed at 6:00 a.m. for seven years. As a parent, I would love a later bell. As the person responsible for moving 14,000 students across this district every morning on 92 buses, I have to point out what most of the optimistic studies leave out.

Our bus fleet runs three tiers — high school, then middle school, then elementary — because we cannot afford to triple the fleet. If we move middle school to 8:30, we have to move elementary earlier, which means six- and seven-year-olds standing at dark bus stops in January at 6:30 a.m. The pediatric sleep guidelines are silent on whether that is acceptable, but the parents in my district are not. After our last public meeting on this, more than two hundred elementary parents wrote in opposed.

There is also the question of what happens after school. A 9:00 a.m. start time pushes dismissal to 4:00 p.m. or later. Athletic practices that already run until 6:00 p.m. would push to 7:00 p.m. Students who work — and in our district, more than a third of high schoolers do — would lose the early-evening shift hours that small businesses actually need filled. None of this means the change cannot be made. It does mean the change is more than a clock adjustment, and districts that pretend otherwise tend to reverse course within two or three years.

Before any district shifts start times, I would ask three questions: Who pays for additional buses if the tiered system breaks? Who supervises elementary kids waiting in the dark? Who talks to the families whose evening lives get scrambled? If those questions have honest answers, move the bell. If they do not, slow down.

15. Which sentence BEST states Dr. Reyes's central CLAIM in Source 1?

16. When Dr. Reyes lists endorsements from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the CDC, and the American Medical Association, she is MOST clearly using which rhetorical appeal?

17. The line "biological problems do not negotiate" functions in Source 1 MOST as —

18. Which sentence BEST states Marcus Whitfield's central counterclaim in Source 2?

19. Whitfield supports his counterclaim MAINLY by —

20. Which point does Whitfield CONCEDE to the other side?

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: "The senator's ambivalent response — neither a clear yes nor a clear no — frustrated reporters who had hoped for a usable headline." What does ambivalent MOST NEARLY mean?

24. The Latin root cred means "to believe." In which word does this root MOST clearly carry that meaning?

25. Two journalists describe the same political leader. One calls him thrifty; the other calls him cheap. Which statement BEST explains the difference between the two word choices?

26. Read the sentence: "After hours of negotiation, the two sides finally reached a tentative agreement that still had to be approved by their boards." Type the word from the list below that means MOST NEARLY the same as tentative in this sentence.
Choices: provisional, permanent, hostile, secret

27. The Greek prefix mono- means "one," and the root -logue means "speech" or "talk." Type the word made from mono- + -logue that names a long speech given by a single person.

Revising

Read each excerpt and choose the BEST revision.

28. Read this excerpt from a student's draft:
(1) The river runs along the eastern edge of town. (2) The river is shallow in summer. (3) The river is dangerously high in spring. (4) The river never freezes completely.
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) Honeybees pollinate roughly one-third of the food crops eaten in the United States. (2) Honeybees are very, very important to agriculture. (3) Without honeybee pollination, fruits like almonds and apples would be far harder to grow at scale. (4) Beekeepers across the country have warned that hive losses are climbing.
Which sentence should be DELETED because it is redundant?

30. Read this excerpt:
(1) Most studies of human memory show that students who write notes by hand recall lectures more accurately one week later. (2) ____, students who type their notes generally take more notes overall. (3) The two formats trade off depth for breadth.
Which transition fits BEST in the blank in sentence 2?

31. Read this draft sentence:
The conductor, who was very tall and who was wearing a long coat that was very long, stepped onto the platform that had a wooden surface and raised her baton to begin.
Which is the BEST revision to remove redundancy and tighten the sentence?

32. Read this draft sentence:
For the science fair, Andre wanted to design an experiment, to test his hypothesis carefully, and writing a clear conclusion.
Which revision BEST corrects the parallel-structure problem?

33. Read this excerpt from a student essay aimed at a younger audience:
The municipal authorities have promulgated a new ordinance that obliges all juvenile residents to don reflective garments after sundown.
Which revision BEST adjusts the sentence for an audience of elementary-school readers without changing the meaning?

Editing

Find the BEST correction for each sentence.

34. Read this sentence:
The bus left the station early, we missed our connection in Dallas.
Which is the BEST edit?

35. Read this sentence:
Neither the principal nor the teachers was prepared for the sudden assembly.
Which is the BEST edit?

36. Read this sentence:
The students backpacks were piled in the hallway after the fire drill ended.
Which is the BEST edit?

37. Read this sentence:
my cousin moved to el paso last august, but she still cheers for the dallas mavericks.
Which is the BEST edit?

38. Read this sentence:
Although the lights flickered for almost an hour during the storm. We were able to finish our homework by flashlight.
Which is the BEST edit?

39. Read this sentence:
The author who won the award last year is visiting our school next week.
The clause "who won the award last year" in this sentence is BEST described as —

40. Read this sentence:
The committee recieved more than two hundred applications for the summer internship program.
Which is the BEST edit?