Florida FAST Practice Questions (2026) — Free Sample Questions with Answers

Low Tide — by Miriam Sorensen

¹At the ebb my mother walks the flats

²the way she used to walk me to the bus:

³slowly, naming everything.

⁴Whelk. Moon snail. Sand dollar.

⁵The sea has stepped back a quarter mile

⁶and left its pockets turned out on the sand.

⁷She bends to a tide pool, lifts a crab

⁸the size of a button, tells it, There now,

⁹and sets it down where the water still is.

¹⁰Her hands remember this.

¹¹Her hands remember more than she does lately—

¹²the knot for the skiff, the weight of a casting net,

¹³my name, some mornings, arriving late

¹⁴like a guest who has lost the address.

¹⁵Behind us the channel markers lean

¹⁶in the mud, waiting to be useful again.

¹⁷The gulls are loud about it. I am not.

¹⁸I carry the bucket. I let her lead.

¹⁹Everyone here knows the tide comes back.

²⁰That is the first thing they teach you on this coast,

²¹the comfort they give to tourists and children:

²²nothing the sea takes out is gone for good.

²³I want to believe it. I watch the line of foam

²⁴come glittering in across the bar,

²⁵and my mother turns and lifts her hand to it

²⁶as if to a neighbor, or a ship, or someone

²⁷she is almost sure she knows.

What My Brother Does All Day

¹Everyone in our family agrees that my brother Elias used to be somebody. He ran the 800 meters in a time that got his picture in the Lakeland Courier, and Coach Delacroix said he had "the lungs of a much larger animal," which Elias had printed on a T-shirt. That was last spring. This fall he quit the team without telling anyone, and now, as far as I can tell, my brother's main activity is sleeping.

²I am not exaggerating. Elias sleeps until one in the afternoon on Saturdays. He comes home from school, eats standing up at the counter, and goes into his room, and when I knock he says, "Not now, Kit," in a voice like a door closing. Around ten at night he leaves again. Mom says he is "helping out a friend." I am thirteen, not stupid.

³Here is my evidence. One: his sneakers, which he leaves by the back door, smell like the inside of a fast-food bag. Two: on Tuesday I found a roll of bills in his jacket pocket—not a lot, but more than a person gets for helping out a friend. Three: last month, after Mom's hours at the clinic were cut, a pink notice from the electric company sat on the refrigerator under the pineapple magnet for nine days. Then it disappeared, and Mom stopped sighing at the mailbox, and Elias started drinking his coffee black, the way Dad used to, even though he hates it.

⁴I laid all of this evidence out for my friend Hollis on the bus, and Hollis was incredulous that I had not figured it out already. "He's selling something," he said. "Obviously." I said I didn't think so, but I also couldn't think of anything better.

⁵On Friday I decided to stay awake until Elias came home. I sat on the stairs in the dark with a flashlight I didn't turn on, practicing what I would say. At 2:14 a.m. the back door opened. Elias came in slowly, the way old men climb out of cars. He was wearing a paper hat. He took it off, looked at it as if it had said something rude to him, and dropped it in the trash.

⁶Then he saw me.

⁷I expected him to yell. Instead he sat down on the bottom step, two below me, and for a while neither of us said anything. He smelled like the sneakers.

⁸"You're supposed to be asleep," he said finally.

⁹"So are you," I said. "That's what you do. You sleep."

¹⁰He laughed—one short breath through his nose—and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. "Yeah," he said. "That's what I do." He stood up, put his hand on top of my head for a second, the way he did when I was little, and went upstairs.

¹¹I still don't know exactly where he goes. But I have decided to stop telling Hollis about it, and on Saturday, when Elias slept until one, I made sure the television stayed off.

A Plea for the Children's Commons — by Silas Underwood

¹There is in every great American city a class of citizens who own no property, cast no votes, and hold no office, and who are nevertheless the city's most important inhabitants. I mean the children. Walk any evening through the crowded wards along our river, and you will find them by the hundreds—playing ball between the wheels of carts, chalking games upon the paving stones, perched on fire escapes four stories above the street. They play there not because they are reckless but because there is nowhere else for them to play.

²It will be said that the city has parks. It has, and fine ones: broad lawns, shaded drives, and ponds where swans glide for the pleasure of those who can afford a carriage to reach them. But the nearest of these lies two miles from the tenement districts, and a child of eight does not walk two miles to play, nor can a working mother spare the carfare to send him. A park that the poor cannot reach is, for the poor, no park at all.

³What I propose is modest in cost and great in consequence. Let the city buy, in every crowded ward, a single block of ground—even a vacant lot—and fence it, level it, and fill it with sand, swings, and open space. Let it hire a sensible man or woman to keep order there in the afternoons. Such places have been tried in other cities, and where they have been tried, the reports agree: fewer children are struck in the streets, fewer boys are hauled before the magistrate for petty mischief, and the neighborhoods themselves grow quieter and more neighborly.

⁴Some will object that the taxpayer has burdens enough already. I answer that he is paying now, and paying more. He pays for the hospital ward that mends the child run down by a wagon; he pays for the police court and the reform school that receive the boy whose trouble began as idleness. The city will spend its money on these children in any case. It may spend it on playgrounds, or it may spend it on prisons.

⁵Nor is the matter one of dollars alone. A republic depends upon citizens who have learned to take turns, to keep rules they did not write, and to win and lose with grace. Where do children learn these things, if not at play? The child who has never had a fair game has never had a lesson in fairness. Give him a playground, and you give the republic a citizen; deny it to him, and you should not be surprised by the man he becomes.

⁶The children of the river wards cannot petition the council; they cannot write to the newspapers. Someone must speak for them. Let it be us, and let it be soon.

Passage 1: Mercer Street Has Already Answered the Question — by Yolanda Pruitt

¹A year ago this month, the city placed planters across both ends of Mercer Street and handed the four blocks between them to people on foot. Critics predicted an empty, dying corridor. Last week the city's transportation office released its twelve-month report on the pilot, and the numbers tell a different story. The council should vote on June 9 to make the closure permanent.

²Start with the people. Weekday pedestrian counts on Mercer rose 31 percent over the year before the pilot. Anyone who walks the street at noon has seen the change: office workers eating on the benches, students sketching the old bank building, strollers where delivery vans once double-parked. Parents let children ride bicycles there now, and retirees who once avoided the narrow sidewalks walk it every morning. A street is a public room, and for the first time in decades this one is full.

³Those visitors are spending money. Sales-tax receipts from Mercer Street businesses climbed 6 percent compared with the previous year. Three new businesses opened on the street during the pilot, among them a bakery and a bicycle repair shop that had been searching for a storefront for two years. Yes, two older businesses closed. But shops open and close on every commercial street in America, with or without cars; what matters is that more businesses arrived than left.

⁴The safety record alone should settle the matter. In the year before the pilot, Mercer Street saw four crashes that injured someone. During the pilot it saw one, and that involved a cyclist and a delivery cart. Is a parking space worth more than a child's safety? Every parent who has crossed Mercer with a toddler knows the answer.

⁵Opponents point to heavier traffic on Orchard Avenue, which rose 12 percent at the evening rush. That is a real cost, and the city should address it by retiming the signals on Orchard and adding the bus service it has long promised. But a few extra minutes in a car at five o'clock is a modest price for a street where people can actually linger. Traffic, like water, finds its level; drivers will adjust as they have in every city that has tried this.

⁶Finally, the residents have spoken. In the city's survey, 62 percent of the 1,200 respondents favored keeping Mercer closed to cars. The council asked the public what it wanted, and the public answered. Mercer Street has given us a year of evidence. Now the council needs only the courage to read it.

Passage 2: The Mercer Street Numbers Deserve a Closer Look — by Martin Okafor

¹Supporters of the Mercer Street closure have a new favorite document: the city's twelve-month report on the pilot. I have read it too, more than once, at the counter of the hardware store my parents opened on Mercer in 1974. I do not doubt the numbers. I doubt the conclusions being drawn from them.

²Consider the headline figure, the 6 percent increase in sales-tax receipts. It sounds impressive until you turn to page 14, where the same report notes that receipts across the entire city rose 5 percent over the same period. In other words, Mercer Street did almost exactly what every other street did. The closure did not create a boom; at best, it rode a wave that lifted everyone.

³The pedestrian count is similarly incomplete. The 31 percent rise was measured on weekdays between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., the lunch hours when cafés are busiest. No one counted the evening and Saturday shoppers who once drove in for a gallon of paint or a set of hinges, because many of them no longer come. The street is fuller at lunchtime; it is not necessarily fuller of customers.

⁴Then there are the two closures, which the report mentions in a single sentence. One was a shoe-repair shop that had served this city for forty-one years; the other was a pharmacy whose older customers could no longer park near the door. Both spaces now hold businesses that sell coffee and pastries. I wish the new owners well. But a street where you can buy a latte and not a prescription has not been improved for everyone.

⁵The safety data deserve the same care. Injury crashes on Mercer fell from four to one, and I am grateful for that. Yet the report also shows that injury crashes on Orchard Avenue, where the diverted traffic now goes, rose from three to five. The danger was not removed; it was relocated two blocks east. As for the survey, it was conducted online and open to anyone who found the link, including visitors from neighboring towns. Sixty-two percent of a self-selected group is an opinion, not a mandate.

⁶None of this means Mercer Street should return to the way it was. A compromise is available: close the street to cars on evenings and weekends, when foot traffic is heaviest, and reopen it on weekday mornings for deliveries and short-term parking. Customers who need to load lumber or a lawn mower could park again, and families could still stroll on Saturday afternoons. The council should vote no on June 9 and ask the transportation office to test that design for another year. Good policy reads the whole report, not just the first page.

The Last Pine (1906)

¹In the courthouse square of Bracken County there stands a white pine that the oldest residents call the Last Pine. It is not, strictly speaking, the last; but it is the last of the great ones, and the county has grown fond of it in the way a man grows fond of the one tooth he has left.

²Sixty years ago the whole county was such pines. A squirrel, the old men say, could go from the river to the state line without touching the ground. Then came the mills, and the mills did what mills do. In thirty years the forest became lumber, and the lumber became houses in Chicago and fortunes in Bracken, and the hills became stumps, and the stumps became, in time, the gullied pasture that the spring rains now carry, a foot a year, into the river.

³I do not blame the men who cut the pines. They were not villains; they were farmers and laborers who needed money, and the trees seemed as endless as the sky. No one in 1850 could imagine that a forest might run out. The fault was not in their axes but in their arithmetic.

⁴We have no such excuse. We have the census, the survey, and the report of the state forester, who tells us that at the present rate of cutting the remaining timber of this state will be gone within twenty-five years. We know what our grandfathers did not. And knowledge, once we have it, turns innocence into choice.

⁵The remedy is neither mysterious nor cruel. Cut no more than grows. Replant what is cut. Set aside the steep slopes, where the soil holds only as long as the roots do. Other nations have done these things for a century, and their forests stand.

⁶Every Fourth of July, the county gathers beneath the Last Pine for speeches and lemonade. We praise our forefathers. We praise our flag. We do not praise the tree, which stands above us all afternoon, saying nothing, a monument to what we had and a warning of what we may yet lose. I should like, some Fourth of July, to hear one speech in its honor. I should like it even more to be unnecessary.

Address to the Committee on Suffrage (1894)

¹Gentlemen of the Committee: I come before you not as a stranger to this Capitol, but as one who has climbed its steps for eleven winters, carrying the same petition and receiving the same courteous reply. You have been kind to us. You have offered us chairs and lemonade and the assurance that our cause will be "taken under advisement." I have begun to suspect that advisement is a large building with no doors.

²I ask today for something narrower than you may fear. I do not ask that the women of this state be given the vote in every election. I ask only that they be permitted to vote for the members of the school boards that govern the education of their own children.

³Consider who now holds that power. In the town of Elmira Springs, the school board consists of a banker, a lumber merchant, and a gentleman who, I am told, has not set foot in a schoolhouse since he left one at the age of twelve. Each is an honorable man. Not one of them has ever sat up through the night with a child who could not learn to read, or walked a daughter to a school whose stove had gone cold. The mothers of Elmira Springs have done these things a thousand times. Yet the law counts their knowledge as nothing and the banker's as everything.

⁴It is said that women do not need the vote because their husbands vote for them. I have heard this argument for eleven years, and I grant that it has a certain charm. But a vote cast for me is not my vote, any more than a meal eaten for me is my dinner. And what of the widow? What of the woman whose husband is at sea, or in the mines, or in his grave? Does her child deserve a voice less than her neighbor's?

⁵It is said, too, that politics would coarsen women—that the polling place is no fit room for a lady. Gentlemen, I have seen the polling place. It is a school. In half the districts of this state, men cast their ballots in the very rooms where women teach their children six days a week. If the room is fit for a woman to teach in, it is fit for a woman to vote in.

⁶I would remind you that in Kansas and in many other states, women already vote in school elections, and the republic has not fallen. The schools have not closed. The husbands of Kansas, so far as I can learn, still eat their suppers. What has changed is that the mothers who know most about the schools now have a say in how they are run.

⁷Some of you will tell me that the time is not yet. When, then? Shall we wait until every child now in school has grown and gone? The child who is eight years old this winter will not be eight again. Her one chance at a good teacher, a warm room, a book that is not falling apart, comes now, in these years, and it will not come back for any vote you cast later.

⁸I am not here to shame you. You did not write the law that silences us; you inherited it, as we did. But you can mend it. That is the difference between you and your fathers: they did not know better, and you do.

⁹Gentlemen, the school belongs to the people who sustain it, and no one sustains it more than the mothers of this state. We wash the clothes the children wear to it. We hear the lessons recited at our tables. We nurse the children when the fever comes through a crowded classroom. We ask now only to have a voice in the place that has always had our hearts.

¹⁰Give us that voice, and you will find us not your rivals but your partners. Deny it, and you will find us here again next winter, and the winter after that—for we have learned patience in a hard school, and we are very good students.