ACCUPLACER Practice Test 8
10 free ACCUPLACER practice questions in the real exam format, covering the official content areas, with an explanation for every answer.
Question 1 of 10
WritingMail Comes to the Farm
1Read the following early draft of an essay and then choose the best answer to the question or the best completion of the statement.
2(1) In the early 1890s, most Americans still lived on farms or in small rural communities, far from the nearest town. (2) City residents had their mail delivered to their doors, but farm families had to travel to the nearest post office to collect theirs, sometimes a trip of several miles. (3) In bad weather or during the busy harvest season, when no one could spare the time for a long ride into town, letters and newspapers could sit unclaimed for a week or more.
3(4) That situation began to change in 1896, when the Post Office Department tested a new service called Rural Free Delivery, often shortened to RFD. (5) On October 1 of that year, carriers on horseback and in buggies set out on the first routes in Jefferson County, West Virginia. (6) The carriers brought letters, newspapers, and seed catalogs, directly to the farms along their routes. (7) The experiment proved so popular that farmers across the country soon petitioned their representatives for routes of their own. (8) As a result, Congress made Rural Free Delivery a permanent service in 1902.
4(9) The new service changed rural life in ways that went well beyond the mail itself. (10) Some farmers were happy about it. (11) Mail-order companies such as Sears, Roebuck and Co. also reached many new customers in the countryside, who could now order clothing, tools, and household goods from catalogs. (12) Because postal officials would not approve a route unless its roads were passable, farmers who wanted service often appealed to local governments, and they frequently agreed to improve the roads.
5(13) In this way, a program designed simply to deliver letters ended up, in the end, eventually helping improve country roads across the nation. (14) It also drew rural Americans more closely into the life of a rapidly changing country, ending much of the isolation that farm families had long accepted.
Which is the best version of the underlined portion of sentence 6 (reproduced below)?
The carriers brought letters, newspapers, and seed catalogs, directly to the farms along their routes.