Mother Loves to Cook for Her Family

STUDENT EDITION of Reading and Comprehension Placement Test 2 for Grades 6 – 12

APPENDIX F

READING COMPREHENSION AND

PLACEMENT TESTS

STUDENT EDITION

GRADES 6 - 12

Mother loves to cook for her family. She prepares

special meals for them. On certain holidays she cooks

delicious foods that are family favorites. In the warm

summer season, the family’s favorite eating mode is

picnics. Father often lights the gas grill for these

numerous outdoor meals. Ann and Matt help by setting

up the tablecloth and outdoor chairs. The entire family

insists that food tastes much better when it is grilled

and eaten in the fresh air.

Both Ann and Matt were amateur geologists. They searched for specimens of unusual rocks when they were on vacations. One of the most beautiful and lasting kinds of building stone they found was marble. Marble may be colored or pure white, or it may have streaks in it. It can be polished so that it has a very smooth and shiny surface. All marble was once limestone. Limestone, deep beneath the ground, may be metamorphosed to marble by heat and pressure.

Ann was very encouraged by Matt’s success with his neighborhood newspaper. She liked to read the real newspaper, and when she did she found a notice about an essay contest. She wrote a five hundred word essay about the constitution and won a one hundred dollar savings bond! Wow! Was she excited!

‘A tree,’ said Josh, ‘is like a person.’

‘What do you mean, Josh?’

‘Well, look upon it this way. You don’t give care and help to someone, that body’s going to turn against you and not grow straight and useful. Right?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Amy, thinking of herself. Nobody has given me much care and help, she thought; except Josh, to be sure. And I am against everybody. That is true.

‘Leave your tree alone for three years,’ pursued Josh, ‘and it’ll grow every which way. The branches will get too dense, and the light won’t get to the fruit to make it grow. Insects and mold might plague the tree. You’ll have to prune, feed, and train your tree to grow the best way before it will reach its potential.

‘You mean it’s good that Aunt Beth is punishing me for what I did yesterday? Even though I said I was sorry?’

‘That don’t make no kind of difference. You need to pay back what you took to really show you’re sorry enough to be honest and trustworthy.’

‘Then I’m glad to be pulling the weeds around this tree. I’m paying for what I did, and helping the tree grow better too.’

There are at least two ways in which a man or woman can be enslaved.

One is through sheer force. He or she may be corralled behind barbed wire fences, watched feverishly, chastised harshly for violating the smallest law, and caused to live in continuous anxiety.

The second is to direct him or her to think that their own interests will be best served by doing what their master wishes them to do. They can be educated to believe that they are inferior and that only through slavery will they eventually ascend to the “level” of their master.

The slave owner of the south used both methods.

The first was the pain of the lash, the threat of family separation through the auction block, and finally, murder. Its purpose was to make the enslaved live in constant terror.

The second way was more subtly manipulative. Its entire aim was to brainwash the slave into not wanting a different way of life.

The Statue of Liberty

Miss Liberty proper was a lady of parts. Her head went to the Paris World’s Fair in a sturdy wagon pulled by twelve horses. Her finished arm, with an index finger taller than a man, was sent to America for the one-hundredth anniversary of American independence. Finished at last, she arrived in America in 214 crates. Now she lifts her lamp “beside the golden door.” More than a symbol of friendship, she has come to stand for freedom for the whole world.

The Jews under German control were treated like a natural resource to be exploited until nothing was left. An official decree began this treatment.

All Jews from fourteen to sixty years of age are subject to forced labor....Jews called up for forced labor must report promptly and must bring food for two days and their bedding. Skilled Jewish workers must report with their tools....

Forced labor began at once, to clear away the rubble of war. At first, when the Nazis needed labor, they would seize people off the ghetto streets. In Warsaw, the Judenrat halted the terrifying press gangs by organizing forced-labor squads and putting them at the disposal of any Nazi agency which wanted them. The labor columns were paid little or nothing to do the emergency day-to-day jobs. Gradually, when large-scale projects began and a more stable kind of labor was required, the Nazis organized special concentration camps for specific use as slave-labor installations. At first, the inmates were used on outdoor projects: to dig canals and antitank ditches, to build roads and railways, to reclaim land or to control floods. Then, industrial production was started up, and factories erected near camps, or camps near factories. Jews were used in aircraft plants, steel works, munitions factories, food depots – everywhere the war effort required them.

As a grown man, my dearest and closest friend is my colleague for more than three decades. Paul (PJ) Jessen is some five years older than I, a fellow communicator and a man with whom I share vacations, construction projects, committee meetings at Penn State University, sports and movies, and an endless stream of talk about politics, in and out of the university, also our parents and life in America. We give support to each other. He knows my wife and is godfather to my children, and I know his.

Like Ike, Paul has a talent for friendship. Paul was the man I had in mind when I thought of David and Jonathan of Biblical fame, especially the part about how real friends have no secrets and tell each other no lies. We share all aspects of our lives – work, play, family. He knows everything about me as I do about him.

Since Matt’s weight loss, he saw quite a difference in his running speed. He decided to help his school’s team win the cross country championship. He strengthened his legs and heart with powerful running practice, resting only occasionally at first. Even though his muscles ached, he obstinately kept practicing until running was not troublesome. In fact, he began to find it enjoyable. His teammate’s thoughtfulness in encouraging him helped their whole team win the state championship.

In 1814, the United States was at war with England. The British soldiers, known as Red Coats because of the scarlet of their uniforms, were readying for action against the newly formed United States of America.

President Madison was away when word came that the Red Coats were marching on Washington D.C.. Dolly Madison carefully packed important state papers and sent them away with her disguised servants. As the British were entering the city, she ordered a large picture of George Washington, who had been her husband’s close friend, to be taken from the frame and hidden. Then Dolly, dressed up as a poor farmer’s wife, entered a waiting coach and fled to safety. That night the British burned all the government buildings in Washington. The next day all that was left of the President’s House were the four blackened outside walls

Though students do not have books, they most emphatically do have music. Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music. This is the age of music and the states of soul that accompany it. To find a rival to this enthusiasm, one would have to go back at least a century to Germany and the passion for Wagner’s operas. They had the religious sense that Wagner was creating the meaning of life and that they were not merely listening to his works but experiencing that meaning. Today, a very large proportion of young people between the ages of ten and twenty live for music. It is their passion; nothing else excites them as it does; they cannot take seriously anything alien to music. When they are in school and with their families, they are longing to plug themselves back into their music. Nothing surrounding them—school, family, church—has anything to do with their musical world. At best that ordinary life is neutral, but mostly it is an impediment, drained of vital content, even a thing to be rebelled against. Of course, the enthusiasm for Wagner was limited to a small class, could be indulged only rarely and only in a few places, and had to wait on the composer’s slow output. The music of the new votaries, on the other hand, knows neither class nor nation. It is available twenty-four hours a day, everywhere. There is the stereo in the home, in the car; there are concerts; there are music videos, with special channels exclusively devoted to them, on the air nonstop; there are the Walkmans so that no place—not public transportation, not the library—prevents students from communing with the Muse, even while studying.

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. . Hale at once declared his name, his rank in the American army, and his object in coming within the British lines.

Sir William Howe, without the form of a trial, gave orders for his execution the following morning. He was placed in the custody of the provost marshal, who was…hardened to human suffering and every softening sentiment of the heart. Captain Hale, alone, without sympathy or support, save that from above, on the near approach of death asked for a clergyman to attend him. It was refused. He then requested a Bible; that too was refused by his inhuman jailer.

On the morning of his execution…my station was near the fatal spot, and I requested the provost marshal to permit the prisoner to sit in my marquee, while he was making the necessary preparations. Captain Hale entered: he was calm, and bore himself with gentle dignity, in the consciousness of rectitude and high intentions. He asked for writing materials, which I furnished him: he wrote two letters….He was shortly after summoned to the gallows. But a few persons were around him, yet his characteristic dying words were remembered. He said, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

Captain Hull recorded Captain John Montresor’s words, reprinted here from The Book of Virtues edited by William J. Bennett (Simon & Schuster, 1993), p. 716.

In the old days when such things were learned by rote, anyone who struggled successfully through the list of King Henry VIII’s Queens always ended ‘Katharine Parr, who survived him’. Few people realize that she had a very narrow escape, if not from death, from Henry’s displeasure, which was still formidable. It is a misconception to think of Henry’s last marriage as a placid, Darby-and-Joan affair or of Katharine as an elderly woman, fit mate for an ageing man. She was thirty when she married him; he was fifty-two. What makes her sound so middle-aged is the fact that she had already been widowed twice. Both her former husbands had been elderly men, and both had left her considerable fortunes. She was on the point of marrying a third time, this time the most handsome, sought-after man in England, Thomas Seymour, when the King indicated that his young brother-in-law would be well advised to back

away.

From Queens of England by Norah Lofts (Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1977), p. 109

Blood pressure—whether high, low or normal—is a vital sign valued by all doctors in assessing your physical well-being. Next to your temperature, it is the single most common measure recorded in the doctor’s log on your health.

The procedure for measuring blood pressure may be familiar to you. A pressure cuff is wrapped around your upper arm, and air is then squeezed into it from a rubber bulb until the cuff begins to feel uncomfortably tight. This pressure device, called s sphygmomanometer, firmly compresses the main artery in your arm until blood flow is blocked.

Your blood pressure goes up and down, like waves of water, in perfect time with the beat of your heart. The crest of the wave corresponds to your systolic blood pressure, reached each time your heart pushes five ounces of blood into the big arteries in your body. The trough would be your diastolic blood pressure, present when your heart is relaxed and refilling with blood before its next beat.

Honesty, ethics, and humility are much more important qualifications for the successful investor than a big ego or high IQ. You must always be willing to analyze, discuss, and admit your many mistakes in the stock market. That’s really how we all learn and get smarter. It may also be why women do just as well as or sometimes better than men when it comes to investing. They seem to be less stubborn and ego oriented in hanging onto old market myths and more receptive to reading and learning sounder investing methods.

Adapted by permission from The Successful Investor by William J. O’Neil (McGraw-Hill, 2004), p. 118.

A limited liability company (LLC) is a combination of a corporation and a partnership in which each party buys shares in a property according to what he can invest. Many experts say that the LLC combines the best characteristics of corporations and partnerships. How? Well, the LLC is a separate legal entity like a corporation, and therefore offers personal liability protection in that you, as a member, cannot lose more money than you contribute. However, for tax purposes, it is entitled to be treated as a partnership in that earnings are taxed only once. This is different from a standard or C corporation, which, in effect, pays taxes twice. First, the corporation itself pays taxes; then, the stockholders pay taxes on their gains.