MCAS Practice Test 5

Text 1: from *The Chimney Count* by Kenji Ashworth

¹Every evening in September, at a quarter past six, Mr. Ibarra carried two folding chairs out to the parking lot behind the old Lincoln School and set them facing the chimney. The school had been closed for nine years. Its windows were boarded, its playground had gone to thistle, and the town had been arguing for most of those nine years about whether to tear it down. The chimney was the only part of the building anyone still looked at, and the only person who looked at it on purpose was Mr. Ibarra.

²Lucia started joining him the week her family moved into the apartment across the street, mostly because he had asked her and partly because she had nowhere else to be. She did not know anyone in town. The other kids at the bus stop had been friends since kindergarten and had a way of standing in a circle that left no gap.

³“They'll come at dusk,” Mr. Ibarra said the first night, handing her a clicker—the metal kind ushers use to count a crowd. “Chimney swifts. Every bird that goes in, you click. Don't try to count them in your head. Your head will lie to you.”

⁴She thought he was joking about the lying. Then the swifts came.

⁵At first there were only a few, flickering high over the rooftops, so small and quick that they looked less like birds than like pieces of the dark coming loose. Then there were dozens. Then the sky above the school was full of them, a loose wheel of bodies turning and turning around the chimney, chittering, the wheel tightening as the light failed, until all at once it funneled downward and the birds poured into the chimney like smoke going backward.

⁶Lucia clicked until her thumb hurt. When the last bird dropped out of sight, the counter read 1,142.

⁷“Not bad,” Mr. Ibarra said, writing the number in a spiral notebook already crowded with numbers. “Last night was nine hundred and something. They're gathering. In a couple of weeks they'll go.”

⁸“Go where?”

⁹“South America. The Amazon. Thousands of miles, give or take.” He closed the notebook. “And in spring they come back. To this chimney, a lot of them. Same one.”

¹⁰Lucia looked at the boarded windows and the thistles. “Why would they come back here?”

¹¹Mr. Ibarra considered the question as if it were a serious one, which she would later understand was how he considered every question. “Because it's where they know how to land,” he said.

¹²She kept coming. She learned to tell the swifts' stiff, flickering wingbeats from the lazier flight of the nighthawks that sometimes passed over. She learned that Mr. Ibarra sent his numbers to a scientist in Ohio who kept track of chimneys all over the country, and that the Lincoln School chimney was, in its small way, famous. By October the counts were shrinking—six hundred, then two hundred, then forty—and one evening the sky over the school stayed empty, and the clicker sat silent in her lap.

¹³“Gone,” Mr. Ibarra said. He did not sound sad. He sounded like someone reading the date off a calendar.

¹⁴On the walk home Lucia found that she was already thinking about spring. She thought about the long miles and the return, and about the chimney standing there all winter with nothing in it, waiting. Then she thought about the meeting at town hall on Thursday, where people would argue again about tearing the school down, and she wondered whether anyone there had ever counted what came home to it.

Text 2: “Return” by Jada Lindqvist

¹Whatever the swift knows, it knows without a map:

²not the names of rivers, not the borders

³drawn in someone's careful ink,

⁴only the tilt of the light in a certain season

⁵and a pull, somewhere beneath the breastbone,

⁶that says not here, not yet, and then says now.

⁷Thousands of miles of weather. Storms

⁸that scatter the flock like thrown seed.

⁹Nights with no roof, days with no rest,

¹⁰and still, in the spring, a gray shape

¹¹stitching the air above the same brick town,

¹²circling the same dark throat of chimney

¹³as if it had only stepped out for a moment.

¹⁴I have moved four times. I have learned

¹⁵to pack a kitchen in a single afternoon,

¹⁶to say home about places I could not find

¹⁷on a map a year before. Still, some evenings,

¹⁸I feel it too—that pull beneath the ribs—

¹⁹and I would give a great deal to know

²⁰what the swift knows: where to come down.