TSIA2 Practice Test 2

In this passage from a novel, a young woman returns to her hometown to help her grandfather close his repair shop.

(1) The bell above the door of Ortega Clock & Watch had stopped ringing years before Inés came home, but her grandfather still glanced up whenever the door opened, as though the bell might decide to work again. (2) On her first morning back she found him at the long bench under the window, a loupe screwed into one eye, coaxing a hairspring no thicker than a thread into place with a pair of brass tweezers. (3) He did not look up when she said good morning. (4) "The Delgado clock wants a new mainspring," he said instead, "and Mrs. Delgado wants it by Saturday, which tells me she has never owned a clock." (5) Inés laughed, though she understood the remark was also meant for her: she had promised, on the phone from Houston, that she would stay only until the shop's lease ran out in May.

(6) For the next week she kept the books while he worked, and the books told a story he had never mentioned. (7) Repairs had fallen by half in five years; most of the customers who still came were old men bringing in watches that had belonged to their fathers. (8) One afternoon a teenager carried in a cheap digital watch with a cracked face, and her grandfather turned it over twice in his palm before handing it back. (9) "There is nothing inside it to fix," he told the boy gently. "Only something to replace." (10) After the boy left, he sat without moving for a long time, and Inés, pretending to total a column of figures, watched the second hand of the wall clock sweep through a full minute, then another.

(11) On Saturday Mrs. Delgado arrived early, and her grandfather set the mantel clock on the counter and wound it with a key from his vest pocket. (12) It began to tick at once, a steady, unhurried sound that seemed to fill the narrow shop. (13) Mrs. Delgado paid, thanked him twice, and carried the clock out as carefully as if it were a sleeping child. (14) When the door had closed behind her, her grandfather slid the brass tweezers across the bench toward Inés, handles first. (15) "The hairspring on the Ruiz watch," he said, as if continuing a conversation they had been having for years. (16) She looked at the tweezers, then at the lease pinned to the corkboard, its corner curling in the heat. (17) Then she pulled the second stool up to the bench and held out her hand for the loupe.