NJGPA Practice Test 15
10 free NJGPA practice questions in the real exam format, covering the official content areas, with an explanation for every answer.
Question 1 of 10
Reading: Informational TextsPassage 1 is an original work written in the style of an 1816 farm journal. Abel Hutchins is a fictional farmer; the weather he describes follows historical accounts of that year in New England.
Passage 1: From the Journal of Abel Hutchins, Vermont, 1816
1May 20th. Planted the lower field to corn, though the ground is cold to the hand an inch down. Father always said to plant when the oak leaves are the size of a squirrel's ear, but the oaks are sullen this year and will not leaf. A dry, hard spring. The sun rises red and looks weak, as through smoked glass.
2June 7th. Snow. I write it plainly so that I will believe it later. Snow in June, four inches on the meeting-house steps, and the sheep, which we sheared last week, standing pressed against the barn wall for warmth. Lydia brought the lambs into the kitchen. The children went sledding on the hill behind the meeting-house, and I had not the heart to stop them, though it seemed a kind of mockery. The corn that was up is black.
3June 12th. Replanted the lower field. Lydia says we are fools to do it, and she is right, but a man must do something with his hands.
4July 9th. Frost again in the low ground. The Reverend says the cold is a judgment upon us; Deacon Ferris says it is the spots upon the sun, which he has seen through a smoked glass and which he claims are large enough to swallow the earth. I do not know which to believe. I know only that the corn does not care for either explanation. The swallows have left the barn early, and the brook runs as cold as I have known it in October.
5August 22nd. A hard frost in the night, and the corn is ruined past saving. We will buy what hay we can for the winter, though the price is already twice what it was. Lydia counts the potatoes in the cellar each evening, as if counting could make more of them. Neighbor Kimball is selling his farm and going west to Ohio, where he says the winters are kinder.
6September 30th. The harvest, such as it is, is in. Lydia says perhaps the weather has always been this cruel somewhere in the world, and we have only been lucky until now. I think often of the red sun in May. Something has come between us and the sun, I am sure of it, though I cannot say what. I suppose no one will ever know.
Passage 2: The Volcano Behind the Year Without a Summer — by Isadora Grantham
1In April 1815, Mount Tambora, a volcano on the island of Sumbawa in what is now Indonesia, produced the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. Its explosions were heard more than a thousand miles away, and its ash buried farms and villages across the island and its neighbors.
2But Tambora's most far-reaching effect was invisible. Along with ash and rock, the eruption blasted enormous amounts of sulfur dioxide gas into the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere that begins roughly six to ten miles above the ground. There, the gas reacted with water to form a fine haze of tiny sulfate droplets, called aerosols. Because the stratosphere has no rain to wash them out, such droplets can linger for a year or more, spreading around the globe on high-altitude winds. They reflect part of the incoming sunlight back into space, and less sunlight reaching the surface means a cooler planet.
3The result was 1816, remembered in New England as "the year without a summer." Snow fell in parts of New England in early June. Frosts struck in July and August, killing crops across the region. In western Europe, cold rains ruined harvests, and food prices soared. In New England, some families gave up their farms altogether and moved west, hoping for better land and kinder weather. Scientists estimate that average global temperatures fell by less than one degree Celsius. That may sound small, but a global average hides large regional swings, and a single killing frost in the growing season can destroy a crop that months of mild weather cannot save.
4People at the time had no way to connect their ruined crops to a volcano on the other side of the world. News traveled slowly, and the science of the atmosphere was in its infancy. Even careful observers could record only what they saw. Some blamed sunspots, which happened to be visible to the naked eye that year; others saw the cold as a religious sign. It was not until the twentieth century that scientists firmly linked major eruptions to periods of global cooling.
5Today the evidence comes from several directions. Ice cores drilled from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets contain layers of sulfate that settled out of the atmosphere after major eruptions, and the layer from Tambora is among the largest of the past several centuries. Tree rings from the period show stunted growth. Old weather diaries, kept by farmers, ship captains and clergy, record the cold day by day and help scientists reconstruct where and when it struck. Together, these independent lines of evidence point to the same conclusion.
6In 1991, scientists were able to watch the process happen. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, satellites tracked its sulfur cloud as it spread around the globe. Over the following year or so, average global temperatures dropped by about half a degree Celsius, close to what researchers had predicted. Pinatubo's eruption was smaller than Tambora's, but it confirmed the basic mechanism: what goes up into the stratosphere can, for a time, turn down the sun. Researchers now use such events to test the computer models that simulate Earth's climate.
How does Passage 2 help explain the observation in paragraph 1 of Passage 1 that the sun "looks weak, as through smoked glass"?