TSIA2 Practice Test 12

In this passage from a novel, two neighbors in a small Texas town compete each summer over their vegetable gardens.

(1) For eleven summers Harlan Pruitt had grown the largest tomatoes on Ash Street, and for eleven summers he had made sure everyone knew it. (2) He weighed each one on a kitchen scale he carried into the yard, wrote the figure on an index card, and pinned the card to a corkboard he had nailed, without asking, to the fence he shared with Rosa Villanueva. (3) Rosa, who grew her tomatoes for salsa rather than glory, regarded the corkboard the way she regarded the weather: as something that happened to her and could not be helped. (4) Then, in the twelfth spring, her granddaughter Pilar came to stay, and Pilar had opinions.

(5) Pilar was nine and had recently learned the word "compost," which she used as often as possible. (6) Within a week she had built a bin from shipping pallets behind Rosa's garage, filled it with eggshells, coffee grounds, and the grass clippings Harlan swept so carefully from his own lawn, and begun reporting its temperature at dinner like a meteorologist. (7) Rosa let her do as she liked. (8) By July the plants along the fence had climbed past the top rail and were leaning, with what Harlan clearly took as insolence, into his side of the yard. (9) He began coming out at dawn to inspect them, standing with his hands clasped behind his back like a general reviewing an enemy's troops.

(10) The tomato that ended the matter weighed two pounds and three ounces, and Pilar insisted on using Harlan's own scale. (11) He handed it over without a word, watched the needle settle, and then, to Rosa's astonishment, took a fresh index card from his shirt pocket and wrote the number down himself in his small, square hand. (12) He pinned the card to the board, at the very top, and stood looking at it for a while. (13) "Eggshells," he said finally, not quite to either of them. (14) "Coffee grounds, too," Pilar told him, "and your grass." (15) The next morning there was a second compost bin on the other side of the fence, and beside it a hand-lettered sign, in that same square writing, that read PRUITT—DO NOT DISTURB.