Florida FAST Practice Test 8
10 free Florida FAST practice questions in the real exam format, covering the official content areas, with an explanation for every answer.
Question 1 of 10
Reading Informational TextRead the passages "Mercer Street Has Already Answered the Question" and "The Mercer Street Numbers Deserve a Closer Look." Both opinion articles respond to the same city report on a one-year pilot program that closed four blocks of Mercer Street to cars. Then answer the questions that follow.
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.
Yolanda Pruitt teaches history at a local high school and lives two blocks from Mercer Street.
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.
Martin Okafor owns a hardware store on Mercer Street. Both passages are original texts written for this practice set; the authors, city and report are fictional.
How do the authors of the two passages use the 6 percent rise in sales-tax receipts differently?