NJSLA Practice Questions (2026) — Free Sample Questions with Answers

Scales

¹Every evening at seven, through the wall, my cousin Eamon saws at his cello like someone cutting firewood in the dark— the same eight notes climbing the stairs and tumbling back down, one of them always a little sour, the way milk tastes the day before you pour it out.

²I put my pillow over my head. I turn my own music up. I tell my aunt it sounds like a goose arguing with the moon, and she laughs, but she doesn’t knock on his door, and she doesn’t tell him to stop. I write a note in my head that I will never slide under his door: Please. Anything but scales.

³“He’s building something,” she says, folding towels into careful squares. She sets each finished towel on the pile and smooths it flat with her palm. “Nobody sees the house while the floor is still being poured.” I tell her that a house would be quieter.

⁴All through September the eight notes march up and down, up and down, stubborn as rain on a window, and every night, right on time, the sour one shows up like a guest who never learned he wasn’t invited.

⁵In October the sour note disappears. I don’t notice when. I only notice one night that I am waiting for it, the way you wait for a step that isn’t there and your foot comes down hard on nothing.

⁶By December the eight notes have friends— a slow song that wanders down the hallway and stops outside my door as if it wants to come in. I take the pillow off my head. I turn my music down.

⁷At the winter concert, Eamon sits in the third row of cellos, his bow moving with the others like grass in one wind. Nobody in the audience knows about the goose, or the firewood, or the milk. The music rises over the folding chairs and settles on us like a blanket. They only hear the song.

⁸But I know. I know the song was built one sour evening at a time, the way my aunt folds a towel— corner to corner, square on square— until a tangled pile becomes something you can stack.

The Silver Bridge

¹The night before Engineering Night, my bridge sat on the kitchen table like a trophy nobody had awarded yet. Two hundred craft sticks and nine evenings of work stretched between two stacks of cookbooks. I had even painted the railings silver. Ms. Adebayo had reminded our class that the judges at the library would care about only one thing—how much weight each bridge could hold before it cracked—but I figured a little shine could not hurt.

²“Looks great, Ines,” my brother Gabe said, leaning over it with a bowl of cereal. “Is it supposed to dip in the middle like that?”

³“It doesn’t dip,” I said. “That’s just the light.”

⁴Gabe shrugged and carried his cereal to the living room, but his question followed me around the kitchen like a fly. Two weeks earlier, Callum Hart had slid his notebook across our lab table. He had drawn a bridge covered in small triangles, each one braced against the next. “A triangle can’t change its shape unless one of its sides breaks,” he had said. “A square can fold flat. We should brace every section.” I had looked at his sketch for about three seconds. My design used long, straight beams, like the bridge over Larchmont Creek, and it was already half finished at home. “Mine is simpler,” I told him. “You’ll see.” He had closed his notebook and built a bridge of his own.

⁵Now I decided to run a test of my own. I laid a ruler across the center of the deck and set my math textbook on top of it. The bridge held. I added Gabe’s science book. The bridge held, but the silver railings leaned outward, the way a person’s elbows stick out when carrying something too heavy. When I added the dictionary, I heard a sound like a knuckle cracking. The deck folded into a shallow V, and the dictionary slid onto the table with a thump.

⁶I did not cry, exactly. I sat down and stared at the broken middle for a long time. Every square I had built had simply leaned over until it became a flat diamond. Callum had described exactly this, and I had not listened, because listening would have meant admitting my plan had a problem.

⁷Mom came in, looked at the bridge, and then looked at me. “What’s the damage?” she asked.

⁸“Just the middle,” I said. “But the middle is the part that matters.”

⁹She pulled out a chair and sat down across from me. “Then fix the middle. You have until six o’clock tomorrow.”

¹⁰I messaged Callum before I could change my mind. “Can you show me how you braced your sections?” I typed. My thumb hovered over the screen for a full minute before I pressed send.

¹¹He answered with a photo of his notebook and one line: “Glue the diagonals first, and let them dry before you load anything.”

¹²I worked until almost eleven. I did not repaint anything. I cut new sticks and glued them corner to corner across every square, so that each section became two triangles. The new pieces were unpainted and messy, and the glue dried in cloudy drops. The bridge looked worse than it had that morning. When I pressed gently on the middle with two fingers, though, it pushed back.

¹³At Engineering Night, my bridge held forty-one pounds before a single joint split. Callum’s held fifty-three. I came in fourth and he came in second, and when the judge handed him his ribbon, I clapped loudly enough that he turned around and grinned.

¹⁴On the ride home, Gabe flicked one of the unpainted sticks. “It’s not very shiny anymore,” he said.

¹⁵“No,” I said, running my thumb along a cloudy drop of glue. “But now I know why it holds.”

Fix It, Don’t Toss It: Why Our School Needs a Repair Café

¹Last month, I watched a classmate throw a perfectly good backpack into the trash because one zipper pull had snapped off. A new zipper pull costs less than a dollar. The backpack had years of use left in it. That moment convinced me that Garfield Middle School needs a repair café.

²A repair café is an event where people bring broken items—bikes, clothes, lamps, toys, backpacks—and volunteers help them fix those items for free. The idea started in the Netherlands in 2009, and today there are thousands of repair cafés around the world. Our school could hold one in the cafeteria on the first Friday afternoon of every month.

³A repair café would teach skills that every student can use. When you learn to sew on a button, patch a bike tire, or tighten a loose screw, you are learning to solve problems with your hands. Mr. Fairbanks, who teaches technology, has already offered to show students how to use simple tools safely.

⁴Repairing things also keeps them out of the trash. Every backpack, jacket, or lamp that gets fixed is one less item in a landfill. People who fix their own things are happier than people who buy new ones. Fixing also saves families money, because a repair usually costs far less than a replacement.

⁵A repair café would even bring our school community together. Students could work side by side with parents, grandparents, and neighbors who know how to fix things. When I visited a repair café in a nearby town, volunteers told me that some of the best conversations happen while people wait for a repair to be finished.

⁶Some people worry that a repair café would cost too much. But most repairs need only basic supplies, such as thread, glue, screws, and patches. The parent-teacher association has offered to donate a starter toolbox. A hardware store downtown has also agreed to give us a discount on supplies.

⁷Others say students are too busy for another club. A repair café is not a club, though. It happens one afternoon a month, and you can stop by for ten minutes or stay for two hours.

⁸Throwing something away takes a second. Fixing it takes a little longer, but it teaches us something every time. Let’s give Garfield Middle School a place where broken things—and the people who own them—get a second chance. If you agree, tell your homeroom teacher that you support a repair café.

Dancing Directions: How Honeybees Share the Way to Food

¹A Message in the Dark A honeybee returns to her hive after finding a patch of flowers rich with nectar. Inside, the hive is nearly pitch dark, and thousands of her sisters are crowded onto the wax combs. She cannot point, and she cannot draw a map. Yet within minutes, other bees leave the hive and fly toward the same flowers, sometimes more than a mile away. How do they know where to go?

²The answer is a dance. For nearly a hundred years, scientists have studied how this dance works—and tested whether it really carries a message.

³Reading the Dance The returning bee, called a forager, performs what scientists call the waggle dance. She runs a short, straight line across the comb while shaking her body rapidly from side to side. Then she circles back to her starting point and runs the same line again, looping first to the right and then to the left. She may repeat the pattern dozens of times.

⁴The direction of the straight run tells the other bees which way to fly. Bees use the sun as a reference point. If the forager runs straight up the comb, the flowers lie in the same direction as the sun. If she runs at an angle 40 degrees to the right of straight up, the flowers lie 40 degrees to the right of the sun. Because the comb hangs straight up and down, “up” on the comb stands for the sun’s position in the sky.

⁵The length of the waggle run tells how far away the food is. The longer the forager waggles during each straight run, the farther the other bees must fly. In many colonies, each second of waggling stands for roughly one kilometer of flight, though the exact amount differs from colony to colony. The chart below shows approximate values for one colony.

⁶Bees that follow the dance cannot see it in the dark hive. Instead, they press close to the dancer and touch her with their antennae. They also pick up the scent of the flowers clinging to her body and feel the vibrations she makes with her wings. Then these new bees, called recruits, leave the hive and fly off on their own to find the flowers.

⁷A Scientist Who Watched Closely The first person to explain the dance was Karl von Frisch, an Austrian scientist who studied bees for more than fifty years. Von Frisch set out dishes of sugar water at different distances and directions from his hives. He marked the visiting bees with tiny dots of paint so he could tell them apart. Then he spent hour after hour at glass-walled hives, watching what the marked bees did when they returned home.

⁸Slowly, a pattern appeared. When he moved a dish farther away, the dancers’ waggle runs grew longer. When he moved it in a new direction, the angle of the runs shifted to match. Von Frisch published his findings in the 1940s, and in 1973 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries about animal behavior.

⁹Doubters and Tests Not everyone was convinced. In the 1960s, a scientist named Adrian Wenner argued that recruits might find flowers by smell alone, without using the dance’s directions at all. His challenge was a fair one. After all, bees do pick up scents from the dancer. Could the dance simply be a bee’s way of getting attention?

¹⁰Over the next several decades, scientists designed new experiments to find out. Around 1990, a team of European researchers built a small robot bee and moved it through the waggle dance inside a real hive. Recruits that followed the robot tended to show up at feeding spots in the direction its dance pointed. Then, in 2005, scientists in England attached tiny radar tags to bees that had followed a dance and tracked their flights. The bees flew in the direction the dance indicated and traveled about the right distance before they began searching. Decades after von Frisch first sat beside his glass hives, new tools had confirmed what his patient watching revealed.

¹¹Scent still matters; it helps recruits recognize the right flowers once they arrive. But a honeybee’s dance, it is now clear, is a real set of directions, written in movement instead of words.