NJGPA Practice Test 8
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: Literary TextsPassage 1: The Night of Lamps — a folktale by Amara Lindqvist
1In the high valley where the river is born, the people kept a custom on the Longest Night of the year. From sundown to sunrise, every house had to keep one lamp burning in its window. The old people said that on that night the Dark came down from the mountains looking for an unlit window, and wherever it found one, it moved in and stayed until spring.
2There was a farmer in the valley named Casimir, who owned the finest walnut trees and pressed the most oil. His jars stood in rows along his cellar wall, and every autumn he counted them twice. Next door lived the widow Benedetta and her small son, whose trees were young and whose single jar was never full.
3In the year of this story, the frost came early and Benedetta's walnuts fell green. On the morning of the Longest Night she came to Casimir's door with her empty jar. "Neighbor," she said, "lend me oil for one lamp, for one night, and I will repay you twice over at the next harvest."
4Casimir looked at his rows of jars, and he looked at her empty one. "If I fill every jar that comes to my door," he said, "soon I will be the one knocking." And he shut the door—not roughly, for he was not a cruel man, only a careful one.
5That night Casimir set his lamp in the window and sat beside it to watch the Dark come down. Near midnight a wind came off the mountain, the kind that finds every crack in a shutter, and it pinched out his flame as easily as a child blows out a candle. Casimir struck at his flint, but his hands were cold and the tinder was damp, and spark after spark died.
6Then there was a knock. On the step stood Benedetta's son, holding a stub of candle in his cupped hands. "My mother saved this from the summer," the boy said. "She saw your window go dark." He held out the candle, Casimir touched his lamp's wick to it, and the lamp bloomed with light.
7Casimir stared at the little candle, still burning, no smaller than before. "You gave me your fire," he said, "and you still have it."
8"That is how fire works," said the boy, as if everyone knew this.
9In the morning Casimir carried three jars of oil across the yard and would not hear of repayment. And from that year on, the people of the valley added a new custom to the old one: on the Longest Night, each household carries a flame to a neighbor's door before lighting its own window. They say a flame given is never a flame lost. The children of the valley say it more simply: that is how fire works.
Passage 2: The Jar on the Top Shelf — a story by Joaquín Esposito
1The starter was older than Deja's mother. It lived in a glass jar in the cooler of Calderón's Bakery, a bubbling paste of flour and water that Deja's great-grandfather had carried from Puebla in 1962, wrapped in a dish towel, and every loaf the bakery had sold since then had risen because of it. Deja fed it every afternoon: a cup of flour, a cup of water, a stir. It was a colony of wild yeast and bacteria, and as long as someone kept feeding it, it would keep growing.
2In March, a young baker named Gideon Ashby opened a tiny shop across Laurel Avenue. On his third day he came over and asked, very politely, whether he could buy a spoonful of the Calderón starter. "Mine keeps dying," he admitted. "Yours makes the best bread on this street."
3Deja was alone behind the counter. She thought about the jar, and the dish towel, and a line of customers at Gideon's door instead of theirs. "It's not for sale," she said. "Sorry. It's a family thing." Gideon said that was fair, bought two rolls, and left, and Deja felt like the worst person on Laurel Avenue.
4Her grandmother used to tell a story about this, more or less: a valley, a winter night, a man with a cellar full of oil, and a boy who brought him a candle. That is how fire works, the boy says, because your flame is no smaller for lighting someone else's lamp. Deja had loved that story at six. At sixteen, she found herself arguing with it. A spoonful wouldn't make our starter any smaller, she thought, but it would make it less ours. The story doesn't say anything about that.
5Two weeks later, the cooler failed over a hot weekend. By Monday the jar held a sour gray ruin with a pink film on top, and Deja's mother stood in the cooler doorway without a word. Sixty years. Only her grandmother did not panic. She put on her coat and walked straight toward Gideon's shop, and Deja, mortified, followed.
6"You never gave him any," Deja whispered. "He doesn't have it."
7"No," said her grandmother. "But Señora Bautista does. I gave her a cup in 1994, when she opened her restaurant on Fourth Street, and she has fed it every day since. I only came to ask this young man for a ride."
8Gideon drove them. Señora Bautista, ninety and delighted to be needed, filled a jar from her own. That evening Deja fed the new starter and watched it begin, slowly, to rise. Then she spooned some into a second jar and carried it out the door before she could change her mind.
9She thought about her grandmother's story all the way across the street. It had been right about the fire after all, though not in the way she had once believed. At six, she had thought the lesson was about generosity, about being kind to a neighbor in need. Now it seemed to her that the story was about something closer to survival: a flame you keep to yourself can go out, but one you have given away keeps burning somewhere, waiting to be carried home. Gideon's lights were still on.
How does the author of Passage 2 transform the moral of Passage 1?