Write about yourself for a reader who decides
Grade 11 Reading Worksheet - Building Confidence
Circle the best answer.
Read this first
The Coffee Can of Screws (sample college essay by an invented student (fictional))
[1] Hardware stores are important places in every town, and working in one can teach a young person many valuable lessons about life and about work. [2] Last June I was hired at Delmore Hardware, a narrow store with creaking floors, to restock shelves twenty hours a week while the regular clerk recovered from knee surgery. [3] On my first morning, the owner, Mrs. Okafor, slid across the counter a coffee can that held roughly four thousand loose screws, bolts and washers collected over a decade. [4] She explained that each piece belonged in one of two hundred small drawers along the back wall, and that nobody had found the patience to sort the can in years.
[5] I spent three afternoons at the counter with a magnifying lamp and a thread gauge, matching each screw to its drawer by length, diameter and the shape of its head. [6] I learned a lot about responsibility at that job. [7] Near the bottom of the can I found a brass hinge pin that matched no drawer, so I set it aside on a paper towel instead of guessing where it belonged. [8] Two weeks later, a retired carpenter came in searching for exactly that pin to repair a cabinet door, and Mrs. Okafor handed it across the counter without a word. [9] She simply raised her eyebrows in my direction, which I have since learned is the highest praise she offers anyone who works in her store.
[10] By August I could locate a quarter-inch carriage bolt faster than Mrs. Okafor could, and customers asked for me when they needed something obscure. [11] I kept working at the store until the end of August, and then I went back to school in September. [12] This fall I have taken a second job tutoring geometry at the public library, where students arrive with homework that looks as tangled as that coffee can once did. [13] I find myself setting aside the piece I do not understand, the way I set aside the hinge pin, and sorting the pieces I do understand first. [14] Most problems, I have discovered, are considerably smaller than they appear once someone is willing to give them three patient afternoons.
Ari is revising this sample essay. Sentence [6] makes a general claim. Which sentence should replace [6] with a specific detail that shows it?
- That job showed me how much it matters to be responsible and dependable whenever someone trusts me with an important task at work.
- I wrote each drawer's size on a strip of masking tape as I emptied the can, so the next clerk would not have to measure twice.
- I learned the names of the regular customers and asked the old carpenter each week about the cabinets he was building.
- I was named employee of the month in July and earned a raise of fifty cents an hour before the end of summer.
Bo notices that sentence [11] only summarizes. Which sentence should replace [11] so that the essay begins to reflect on the moment?
- Mrs. Okafor later wrote in my reference letter that I was the most careful clerk she had hired in twenty years.
- What stayed with me was the hinge pin: setting aside what I could not place had been a decision, not a failure.
- By the end of the summer I had sorted the whole can, restocked forty shelves and trained the new weekend clerk.
- This experience taught me that hard work pays off in the end, no matter what kind of job a person has.
Esme is helping the writer. An admissions reader reads hundreds of essays. Which sentence should replace [1] so the essay opens well for that reader?
- In this essay, I will describe my summer job at a hardware store and explain what it taught me about patience.
- The dictionary defines responsibility as the state of being accountable for something within one's power or control in daily life.
- As people often say, good things come in small packages, and my summer job showed it with a coffee can of screws.
- On my first morning at the hardware store, I was handed four thousand loose screws and told that each one had a home.
The Shadow at Twenty Past Two (sample college essay by an invented student (fictional))
[1] People often say that a garden teaches patience, and after three summers on a rented plot, I have found that the saying is true. [2] For three summers I have rented a plot at the Larch Hill community garden and kept a spiral notebook in a coffee tin wedged beneath the shed steps. [3] In it I record what I plant, when each seed comes up, how much rain falls, and anything that looks wrong, from yellowed leaves to the morning a groundhog flattened the lettuce. [4] I am a very observant person.
[5] Last July, while copying the third summer's notes into a cleaner table, I noticed that the northeast corner of my plot had produced almost nothing in all three years. [6] I had blamed the soil, the seeds and, more than once, my own carelessness, and I had dug compost into that corner each spring without changing the result. [7] So I went back on a clear afternoon, sat on an overturned bucket with the notebook on my knees, and watched the corner from noon until the light began to fade. [8] At twenty minutes past two, the shadow of the neighbor's tall board fence slid across the corner and stayed until evening. [9] The corner was not suffering from bad soil or bad care; it was receiving four fewer hours of sunlight than the rest of the plot, and no amount of compost could repair that. [10] I moved the peppers to the sunny end, planted shade-tolerant spinach in the corner, and wrote the time of the shadow inside the notebook's cover in red ink.
[11] That fall I harvested more peppers than ever, and the spinach did fine too. [12] Since then I have started keeping notes on other things, such as how long my chemistry homework takes on nights after practice, simply to see what patterns the pages reveal. [13] The answers are rarely the ones I expect, and they seldom appear until the information has been written down and read again. [14] I used to think a notebook was where I stored what I already knew, but I now think of it as the place where I discover what I had noticed without knowing it.
Jun is revising this sample essay. Sentence [4] makes a general claim. Which sentence should replace [4] with a specific detail that shows it?
- When I kneel in the soil, I feel the earth speaking to me, and I listen closely to the whispers of the growing plants.
- Last spring I noted that the bean seedlings leaned east each morning, and a week later I saw that they were following the sun.
- I have a strong ability to notice small details that other people tend to overlook in the world around them.
- I water the plot at six each morning before school, even in August, and I have not missed a day in three summers.
Luz is helping the writer. An admissions reader reads hundreds of essays. Which sentence should replace [1] so the essay opens well for that reader?
- This essay is about my garden journal and the important lesson that keeping it has taught me over the years.
- For three summers one corner of my garden plot grew almost nothing, and for three summers I blamed myself.
- The dictionary defines a journal as a record of experiences or ideas that a person keeps regularly for private use.
- Since the beginning of history, human beings have grown food from the soil in order to survive and thrive.
Three Call Numbers Away (sample college essay by an invented student (fictional))
[1] In this essay, I will describe my job as a page at a public library and explain what the work taught me about paying attention. [2] Since sophomore year I have worked six hours a week as a page at the Fennimore Branch Library, pushing a squeaking cart through the stacks and returning each book to its exact place. [3] The work is quieter than people imagine and more exacting, because a book shelved two inches from its place is, for practical purposes, a book the library no longer owns. [4] Shelving taught me to be detail-oriented.
[5] One Saturday in March, a man in a paint-spattered jacket asked the reference desk for a book on restoring old windows, and the catalog insisted that it was on the shelf. [6] The librarian, Ms. Teague, checked the shelf, found a gap where the book should have been, and apologized to the man, who looked as though he had driven a long way. [7] While I shelved the next cart, I kept thinking about that gap, because I had learned that missing books are usually hiding a shelf or two away. [8] I started at the window section and worked outward, reading each spine within three call numbers of the empty space, and after twenty minutes I found it. [9] It had been shelved under a call number with two digits reversed, almost certainly by a tired hand, perhaps even mine, at the end of a long shift. [10] The man was still at the copy machine, and when I handed him the book he held it with both hands, as if he had not quite believed the library would come through.
[11] Then I went back to the cart and finished my shift. [12] I have thought since then about how much of any system depends on people willing to look past the place where something is supposed to be. [13] In physics lab this year, when a measurement refuses to match the prediction, I search the neighborhood of the error before deciding the whole experiment has failed. [14] A gap, I have learned, is usually information about where to look next, provided someone is patient enough to read the nearby spines.
Milo is revising this sample essay. Sentence [4] makes a general claim. Which sentence should replace [4] with a specific detail that shows it?
- In two years I have shelved more than nine thousand books and trained three new pages for the branch.
- Each book I shelve feels like a small treasure returned to its rightful home in a great kingdom of knowledge.
- I learned to read the last two digits of a call number first, because that is where a misplaced book usually hides.
- Working as a page has made me a much more careful and attentive person in many areas of my life, at school as well as at work.
Noah notices that sentence [11] only summarizes. Which sentence should replace [11] so that the essay begins to reflect on the moment?
- Ms. Teague told the branch manager about the search, and the manager mentioned it at the next staff meeting.
- Walking back to the cart, I realized the book had never been lost, only waiting for someone to look one step further.
- Ms. Teague thanked me at the desk, and I shelved two more carts before the library closed at five.
- Afterward I thought about how libraries have changed since my grandparents were young, and how few people visit now.
Pia is helping the writer. An admissions reader reads hundreds of essays. Which sentence should replace [1] so the essay opens well for that reader?
- Libraries have served as centers of learning and community in many civilizations throughout human history.
- They say not to judge a book by its cover, and working in a library has taught me how true that saying is.
- Most of my job happens in silence, between the moment a book comes back and the moment someone needs it again.
- The dictionary defines attention as the act of applying the mind closely to something or someone.
Forty-One Chickadees (sample college essay by an invented student (fictional))
[1] The dictionary defines patience as the capacity to accept delay without becoming annoyed, and a winter morning showed me what that definition leaves out. [2] Each January the Ashgrove Nature Club counts the birds within a fifteen-mile circle on one day, and last year I tallied the feeders along the Moss Creek trail with a retired teacher, Mr. Lindqvist. [3] We arrived at seven, when his car thermometer read eleven degrees, and stood behind a stand of cedars with a clipboard, borrowed binoculars and a thermos of cocoa. [4] Bird counting requires a lot of focus and dedication.
[5] For forty minutes nothing came to the feeders, and I began to suspect that the birds had more sense than we did. [6] Then a single black-capped chickadee landed, took one seed and left, and within a minute the feeders were crowded with chickadees, juncos, two cardinals and a nuthatch walking headfirst down the pole. [7] Mr. Lindqvist would not let me write a number until I had counted the same flock three times, because a careless counter can easily record one quick chickadee twice. [8] My fingers were too cold to hold the pencil properly, so I learned to count in fives and to make a tally mark when the flock paused. [9] By nine o'clock we had recorded forty-one chickadees, the highest count on that trail in the eleven years Mr. Lindqvist had kept it. [10] We walked back to the car, turned in our sheets at the club meeting, and then I went home.
[11] I had always thought of patience as a kind of waiting, something that happens to a person who has nothing better to do with the time. [12] That morning showed me a different version, active and exacting, in which the waiting is the price of a number accurate enough to trust. [13] When I study for a difficult exam now, I try to count the flock three times, checking a solution again before I write the answer down and move on. [14] I would rather be slow and right than quick and almost right, and I suspect that is the most useful thing I have learned standing still in the cold.
Ren is revising this sample essay. Sentence [4] makes a general claim. Which sentence should replace [4] with a specific detail that shows it?
- Standing in the frozen silence, I could feel my determination burning brighter than the winter sun.
- Before dawn Mr. Lindqvist had me number the trail's six feeders on the clipboard, so no feeder would be counted twice.
- I brought extra mittens for both of us and kept the thermos of cocoa wrapped in a wool scarf so it would stay warm until nine.
- I have volunteered for the club's count three years in a row and earned its junior counter certificate.
Tala notices that sentence [10] only summarizes. Which sentence should replace [10] so that the essay begins to reflect on the moment?
- Driving home, I realized that the forty empty minutes had not been wasted; they were part of getting the count right.
- On the drive home I thought about how winter birds survive the cold and wished I knew more about their feathers.
- That day taught me that good things come to those who wait, which is a lesson worth learning early in life.
- At the club meeting, the organizer read our chickadee total aloud and said it was a remarkable count for one trail.
