ACCUPLACER Practice Test 3

In this passage, a woman visits the hardware store her father once owned, which is now run by new owners.

(1) The bell above the door still rang in the same flat note, and Nadia stopped on the threshold as if someone had called her name. (2) For thirty-one years her father had stood behind the counter of Ferris Hardware, and for most of her childhood she had done her homework on an overturned paint bucket beside the key-cutting machine. (3) Now the sign outside read "Ridgeline Supply," and the aisles had been widened, relabeled, and lit with a white glare that made everything look newly unwrapped. (4) She had told herself she was only there for picture hooks.

(5) A young clerk with a tablet clipped to his belt asked whether she needed help finding anything. (6) "Picture hooks," she said, and then, before she could stop herself, "They used to be in the drawer under the register." (7) He smiled politely, the way people smile at a tourist who has asked for directions to a building that was torn down years ago, and led her to aisle nine. (8) The hooks hung in sealed plastic packets of twenty-four; her father had sold them loose, by the handful, counting them into small brown envelopes and never charging for the last few.

(9) At the register she noticed that the old key-cutting machine was gone, replaced by a sleek kiosk that promised to copy any key in ninety seconds. (10) A boy of about eight was pressing its screen while his mother searched her purse. (11) When the kiosk rejected his key, he looked up, bewildered, and the clerk leaned over to show him how to turn it the other way. (12) The boy laughed, the machine hummed, and a new key dropped into the tray.

(13) Nadia paid for her hooks and found that she did not mind the glare as much as she had expected. (14) Her father, she thought, had never cared much about the machine itself; what he had loved was the moment a customer walked out holding something that worked. (15) On the sidewalk she tucked the packet into her coat, and for the first time in months she let the bell ring behind her without turning around.