"Every Sunday Dad set two plates, though my brother had been at sea eleven months and wrote only at Christmas. He said the table looked wrong with one." What does the second plate reveal about Dad?

"Nora let her sister pick the movie, the seats, and the snacks, then spent the whole show watching the door. At home she said it had been a great night." What does the evening suggest about Nora?

"The new hire laughed at every joke in the break room his first week. The second week he stopped laughing and started asking questions, and by the third he was the one being asked." Which theme does this best support?

"Ms. Alvarez kept the broken metronome on her piano and would not have it fixed. Students who asked were told it had kept time for her own teacher for thirty years." What does keeping it show about her?

"When the power failed, Gabriel found the flashlight, the matches, and the radio in under a minute. Only then did he ask whether anyone was frightened." What does the order of his actions reveal?

"Hassan reread his acceptance letter at the bus stop every morning for a week, then folded it into his wallet and never mentioned it to anyone at work." What does his behavior suggest?

"The sisters split the last of the gas money at the county line. Ruth drove home. June bought a ticket for the next bus going the other way." Which theme does the passage best support?

"Every August Grandpa repainted the boat he had not put in the water since his knee gave out. The hull was flawless. The trailer tires had been flat for years." What does the contrast reveal?

"At the family reunion Vera greeted everyone by name, asked after their children, and left after twenty minutes without eating anything." What can the reader most reasonably infer?

"The envelope from the college sat unopened on the counter for two days. On the third morning it was gone, and Priya was in the yard, mowing a lawn she had already cut on Saturday." What does this suggest?

"Coach Bell keeps the scorebook from the winless 1998 season in his desk and shows it to every new player before their first practice." What does the habit suggest about him?

"My mother clipped coupons for foods we never bought and stacked them by the phone. When the stack got tall she threw it out and started another." What does the habit most likely give her?

"The landlord replaced the porch light the same afternoon the inspector's card turned up in the mailbox. It had been dark since March." What does the timing reveal?

"The director gave Dania's solo to a freshman with a smaller voice. After the concert Dania waited by the stage door to tell the freshman she had sung it well." Which theme does this best support?

"The plows salt the hill routes first and the flat streets last. Drivers on the flats complain every winter, but a car that slides on a hill does not stop until it reaches the bottom." What is the central idea?

"A library began lending hand tools. Within a year the drills circulated more often than the cookbooks, and borrowers who came in for a drill were leaving with books they had not planned to take." Central idea?

"Riverton High moved its first bell from 7:20 to 8:15. In the year that followed, first-period absences fell by a third, and the district's bus contract cost the same as before." Which detail supports the claim that the later start helped?

"The bakery began printing the mill and the harvest year on every loaf. Customers who had never asked about flour started asking, and the labeled loaves now sell out before the others." What is the central idea?

"Water expands as it freezes, so ice is less dense than the water under it and forms at the surface. That sheet then slows heat loss from below, and fish pass the winter in liquid water beneath it." Central idea?

"The city cut four stops on Grand Avenue down to two. End-to-end travel time dropped nine minutes, and riders at the removed stops now walk about three blocks to reach the route." What trade-off does the passage set up?

A hospital says its new hand-washing signs are working. Which finding would best support that claim?

"For sixty years the county measured rainfall at the airport alone. Gauges added in the hills now record twice as much during some storms, and the county's long-term average has been rewritten." Central idea?

"A 'best by' date tells a shopper when a food is at peak quality, not when it becomes unsafe. Many shoppers read it as an expiration date, and stores discard food that is still good." What is the central idea?

"The paper stopped printing a Monday edition and put those reporters on long investigations. Subscriptions slipped for two months, then climbed past where they had been." What does the passage show?

An article argues that the Saturday farmers' market kept the downtown storefronts occupied. Which detail does NOT support that claim?

"A sea wall stops the waves that reach the houses behind it, but the wall reflects that energy along the shore, and the beaches at either end of it erode faster than before." What is the central idea?

"The district gave every ninth grader a laptop and no place to charge one during the day. By November a third arrived at school with a dead battery, and teachers were planning two versions of each lesson." What does this show?

"Volunteers staff most fire departments in rural counties. They hold other jobs, train on weekends, and walk off those jobs when the pager goes off." Which statement is the central idea rather than a supporting detail?

A parent tells the school board, "My son's stop is a mile of shoulder with no sidewalk, and he walks it in the dark." What does the line do for her argument?

A coach tells the team, "We are not chasing the trophy. We are chasing the version of us that would have earned it." What does the second sentence do?

A student writes, "The cafeteria at noon is a train station that serves tater tots." What does the metaphor accomplish?

A speaker describing spring floods says, "The river remembers where it used to run, and every March it goes looking." Which device is at work, and what does it do?

A candidate says, "We fixed the roof. We fixed the boiler. We fixed the drains. Now let us fix the schedule." What does opening three sentences the same way do?

A speaker tells the council, "This district does not have a spending problem. It has a counting problem." What does setting the two halves against each other accomplish?

After a fire took the barn and the winter hay, the farmer told a reporter, "We will be a little short on feed this year." What does the understatement do?

A nurse ends her testimony by asking the council, "What do we tell the next family we turn away?" What does asking rather than asserting accomplish?

A student writes, "I have read this paragraph nine hundred times and it still says nothing." What does the number accomplish?

A columnist writes, "The council's budget is a house of cards, and the mayor keeps adding floors." What does the image add to the claim?

A narrator says, "The clock in the waiting room moved like something being dragged uphill." What does the comparison convey?

A reporter writes that the crowd "spilled" into the street rather than that it "entered" the street. What does the word choice suggest?

"The only garage open on Sunday charged an exorbitant fee for the tow, three times what the shop down the street asks on a weekday." What does exorbitant mean here?

"The novelist was prolific: forty books in thirty years, with two more waiting at the publisher when she died." Which meaning does prolific carry in this sentence?

"In a block of gray sedans the orange truck was conspicuous, and every witness on the street described it the same way." As it is used here, conspicuous means:

"Bailing the boat with a coffee can proved futile; the water came in faster than two of us could throw it out." What does futile mean here?

"The auditor took the whole afternoon to scrutinize the receipts, holding each one to the light and matching it against the ledger." Which phrase could replace scrutinize without changing the meaning?

"Her father was adamant about the curfew: he said it at dinner, again at the door, and once more through the car window." What does adamant mean here?

"The link between the two fires is tenuous, resting on one witness who thinks she may have seen a similar car near both." Which meaning does tenuous carry here?

"The pantry's meager shelves held two cans of beans and a bag of rice, and the line outside ran forty families long." What does meager mean here?

"Truckers circumvent the weigh station by turning onto the county road at the last exit and rejoining the highway a mile past the scales." What does circumvent mean here?

"The retiring chief would not relinquish her keys until the last box was out of her office and the new chief was at the door." As it is used here, relinquish means:

"The defendant stayed impassive through the verdict; not a muscle in his face moved while the clerk read it out." What does impassive mean here?

"His first steps on the repaired ankle were tentative, each one tested before he let his weight come down on it." Which meaning does tentative carry here?

Which sentence uses the apostrophe correctly?

A draft reads: "The ferry left at six, the last shuttle had already gone." Which revision fixes the error?

A draft reads: "Running late, the bus was already pulling away from Marcus." Which revision fixes the misplaced modifier?

Which sentence is correct?

A draft reads: "When Dana met Rosa, she had already read the report." What is the problem with the sentence?

Which sentence is parallel?

Which sentence is punctuated correctly?

Which sentence punctuates the quotation correctly?