Close words with a different edge
Grade 11 Reading Worksheet
Circle the best answer.
Read this first
The Quiet Reorganization (editorial)
[1] When Marguerite Voss took over the county transit authority in January, the board expected a cautious inventory of what she had inherited. [2] Instead, within nine weeks she had bulldozed three bus routes into one, shuttered the downtown service counter, and herded forty drivers onto new shifts announced by a posted memo. [3] The board, which had been consulted on none of the three, learned of the merger from a reporter. [4] Asked about this, Voss said that consultation was a luxury for agencies with time to spare, and that riders had waited long enough.
[5] Her supporters, and there are many, point out that the merged route now runs every ten minutes where it once ran every thirty. [6] That is true, and it is the strongest fact in her favor. [7] It is also true that the counter she closed was the only place where riders without phones could buy a monthly pass, and no one on her staff has yet said how those riders will pay.
[8] Voss is a person of real ability, and even the board's members concede that the old schedule was a patchwork. [9] But a patchwork mended by one hand, without a word to the people who sit under it, is still a patchwork, and it is now hers. [10] Effective as they have been, her methods are ___: when the board asked to see the shift plan, the answer was a single memo saying that it took effect Monday and that objections would not be entertained.
[11] The drivers have kept their opinions to the break room, but they are not the only ones listening. [12] Next month the authority will ask the county for four million dollars, and the commissioners who must approve it will remember who learned of the merger from the newspaper.
[13] None of this makes the old schedule worth defending. [14] A transit authority is entitled to move quickly, and riders who waited years for a ten-minute bus are entitled to be impatient. [15] The question the board never got to ask is whether speed and consultation were ever really in conflict, or whether the first was simply easier without the second.
Kira fills the blank in sentence 10. Which word shows the editorial’s attitude toward Voss’s methods?
- tyrannical
- decisive
- peremptory
- assertive
The Lab That Is Never First (magazine feature)
[1] In the nine years Dr. Imani Okoro has directed the soil-microbiology lab at Calder University, it has never retracted a paper, a record that very few labs of its size can claim. [2] It has also never been first. [3] In March a team in Leiden swooped in with the first full map of the fungal network beneath a boreal forest, borrowing a method that Okoro's students had sketched on a whiteboard two years earlier. [4] Okoro had the preliminary data in a drawer; she believed, she says, that three seasons of replication were owed to the field before anyone drew a conclusion from it.
[5] Her postdoctoral fellows, who describe her as generous and exacting, were less sure. [6] "We kept asking what we were waiting for," said one, "and the answer was always another season." [7] It is easy to admire the discipline behind such a record, and the scientific community has reason to; the literature is full of confident maps that a second season unmade.
[8] But discipline that cannot decide when to act is not the same thing as virtue, and the Calder lab's habit has become ___: out of fear of being wrong it treats every claim as a liability to be postponed rather than a risk worth taking. [9] The grant agencies, which fund the first map and not the second, have noticed. [10] Okoro, to her credit, has noticed too, and last month she told her fellows that one preprint a year would henceforth be a requirement rather than a courtesy.
[11] Whether the change will come too late for the grant renewal is a question her fellows discuss in lowered voices. [12] The Leiden team, for its part, sent the lab a gracious note and a copy of the method section, which several fellows read twice.
[13] Okoro does not dispute any of this. [14] "I would rather be late and right than early and sorry," she told me in her office, where the drawer in question now stands open, its folders labeled by year. [15] It is a good sentence, and it is also the sentence her fellows have heard for nine years.
Milo fills the blank in sentence 8. Which word shows the writer’s attitude toward the lab’s habit?
- prudent
- cautious
- craven
- timid
The Ruler (memoir essay)
[1] Mr. Halloran taught eleventh-grade chemistry for thirty-one years, and in all that time I never heard him say that an answer was almost right. [2] He said it was right or he said it was wrong, and he said so in the same dry voice whether the answer belonged to the valedictorian or to the boy who slept behind the fume hood. [3] When I handed in my first lab report, he returned it with one line across the top: "Your conclusion is a wish." [4] I did not speak to him for a week.
[5] The other teachers in the building used the language of encouragement, which I now understand to be a kind of weather report, always sunny and never quite about the actual weather. [6] Halloran's comments were more like a ruler laid against the work: they told me exactly where the edge was and made no promise about what lay past it. [7] Some of my classmates found this unbearable, and two of them transferred out by December.
[8] I will not pretend that he was always right to be as ___ as he was; the girl who cried in the stairwell after the midterm had done real work, and a sentence from him might have helped her more than the silence she got. [9] But when I think of the teachers who called my work "wonderful" and meant that I had turned it in, I remember that Halloran never once wasted my time. [10] He read the revision I brought him in April, handed it back with no comment but a small check mark, and I carried that check mark around for a month.
[11] I teach now, and my own students, who regard encouragement as a form of courtesy, have learned to flinch whenever I tell them that a result is almost right. [12] I have kept his habit of marking what is wrong before anything else, and I have learned, slowly and with some embarrassment, to mark what is right afterward. [13] Whether that order is a debt I owe him or a habit I ought to have outgrown is a question that I have not been able to settle.
Noah fills the blank in sentence 8. Which word shows the narrator’s attitude toward Halloran’s manner?
- cruel
- blunt
- candid
- direct
The Quiet Reorganization (editorial)
[1] When Marguerite Voss took over the county transit authority in January, the board expected a cautious inventory of what she had inherited. [2] Instead, within nine weeks she had bulldozed three bus routes into one, shuttered the downtown service counter, and herded forty drivers onto new shifts announced by a posted memo. [3] The board, which had been consulted on none of the three, learned of the merger from a reporter. [4] Asked about this, Voss said that consultation was a luxury for agencies with time to spare, and that riders had waited long enough.
[5] Her supporters, and there are many, point out that the merged route now runs every ten minutes where it once ran every thirty. [6] That is true, and it is the strongest fact in her favor. [7] It is also true that the counter she closed was the only place where riders without phones could buy a monthly pass, and no one on her staff has yet said how those riders will pay.
[8] Voss is a person of real ability, and even the board's members concede that the old schedule was a patchwork. [9] But a patchwork mended by one hand, without a word to the people who sit under it, is still a patchwork, and it is now hers. [10] Effective as they have been, her methods are ___: when the board asked to see the shift plan, the answer was a single memo saying that it took effect Monday and that objections would not be entertained.
[11] The drivers have kept their opinions to the break room, but they are not the only ones listening. [12] Next month the authority will ask the county for four million dollars, and the commissioners who must approve it will remember who learned of the merger from the newspaper.
[13] None of this makes the old schedule worth defending. [14] A transit authority is entitled to move quickly, and riders who waited years for a ten-minute bus are entitled to be impatient. [15] The question the board never got to ask is whether speed and consultation were ever really in conflict, or whether the first was simply easier without the second.
Pia drafts a news brief from sentence 2. Which rewrite drops the slant and keeps every fact?
- Within nine weeks she had merged three bus routes into one, closed the downtown service counter, and herded forty drivers onto new shifts announced by a posted memo.
- Within nine weeks she had streamlined three bus routes into one, retired the downtown service counter, and reassigned forty drivers to new shifts announced by a posted memo.
- Within nine weeks she had merged three bus routes into one, closed the downtown service counter, and moved forty drivers to new shifts announced by a posted memo.
- Within nine weeks she had merged three bus routes into one, closed the downtown service counter, and, after consulting the board, moved forty drivers to new shifts.
Hung by Watershed (exhibition review)
[1] The Hartwell Gallery's new exhibition gathers sixty-one landscapes painted in the river valleys of the region between 1880 and 1935, and it is, on the whole, a pleasure to walk through. [2] The rooms are hung by watershed rather than by artist, so a pale morning canvas by Edith Marsh can face a dark winter study by a painter nobody has heard of, and each seems to learn something from the other. [3] The wall labels are brief and modest, and several correct attributions that earlier catalogs had repeated for decades. [4] The catalog is another matter.
[5] In its introduction the curator, Dr. Anselm Pryce, argues without a hedge that these valley painters, working apart and mostly unaware of one another, together produced a single "regional vision" that explains a century of rural change. [6] The claim is ___: it extrapolates from what a few of the painters did to all sixty-one pictures, and the catalog's thirty essays cannot quite carry it; most are careful studies of one painter or one town, and a few quietly contradict the introduction. [7] One essay shows that the best-known painter of the group left the valley at twenty-two and never painted it again from life. [8] Another notes that the winter studies were made for a single dealer, who wanted them dark because dark pictures sold.
[9] This does not diminish the pictures, which are better than the argument deserves. [10] Marsh's morning canvas, in particular, is a small marvel of restraint, with a river rendered in three strokes of gray and a barn that seems to wait for the light to reach it. [11] It would be a shame if visitors left remembering Pryce's thesis rather than her barn. [12] A gallery is entitled to a theory; it is merely unwise to hang the theory higher than the paintings.
[13] The last room, given to the valley's winter studies, shows the cost of a thesis most clearly. [14] The dealer's taste for dark pictures hangs beside a wall text that calls the same canvases "the valley's true mood," and the visitor is left to decide which sentence to believe. [15] I suspect most visitors will believe the paintings.
Ren drafts a catalog note from sentence 10. Which rewrite drops the praise and keeps every fact?
- Marsh’s morning canvas renders a river in three strokes of gray and a barn that the light has not yet reached.
- Marsh’s morning canvas renders a river in two strokes of gray and a barn that the light has not yet reached.
- Marsh’s morning canvas is sparse, with a river dashed off in three strokes of gray and a barn the light has barely touched.
- Marsh’s morning canvas is a small marvel, with a river rendered in three strokes of gray and a barn that the light has not yet reached.
The Lab That Is Never First (magazine feature)
[1] In the nine years Dr. Imani Okoro has directed the soil-microbiology lab at Calder University, it has never retracted a paper, a record that very few labs of its size can claim. [2] It has also never been first. [3] In March a team in Leiden swooped in with the first full map of the fungal network beneath a boreal forest, borrowing a method that Okoro's students had sketched on a whiteboard two years earlier. [4] Okoro had the preliminary data in a drawer; she believed, she says, that three seasons of replication were owed to the field before anyone drew a conclusion from it.
[5] Her postdoctoral fellows, who describe her as generous and exacting, were less sure. [6] "We kept asking what we were waiting for," said one, "and the answer was always another season." [7] It is easy to admire the discipline behind such a record, and the scientific community has reason to; the literature is full of confident maps that a second season unmade.
[8] But discipline that cannot decide when to act is not the same thing as virtue, and the Calder lab's habit has become ___: out of fear of being wrong it treats every claim as a liability to be postponed rather than a risk worth taking. [9] The grant agencies, which fund the first map and not the second, have noticed. [10] Okoro, to her credit, has noticed too, and last month she told her fellows that one preprint a year would henceforth be a requirement rather than a courtesy.
[11] Whether the change will come too late for the grant renewal is a question her fellows discuss in lowered voices. [12] The Leiden team, for its part, sent the lab a gracious note and a copy of the method section, which several fellows read twice.
[13] Okoro does not dispute any of this. [14] "I would rather be late and right than early and sorry," she told me in her office, where the drawer in question now stands open, its folders labeled by year. [15] It is a good sentence, and it is also the sentence her fellows have heard for nine years.
Tala drafts a news brief from sentence 3. Which rewrite drops the slant and keeps every fact?
- In March a team in Leiden beat Okoro’s lab to the first full map of the fungal network beneath a boreal forest, using a method that her students had sketched on a whiteboard two years earlier.
- In March a team in Leiden published the first full map of the fungal network beneath a boreal forest, using a method that Okoro’s students had sketched on a whiteboard two years earlier.
- In March a team in Leiden published the first full map of the fungal network beneath a boreal forest, using a method that Okoro’s students had shared with them two years earlier.
- In March a team in Leiden brilliantly completed the first full map of the fungal network beneath a boreal forest, building on a method that Okoro’s students had generously sketched on a whiteboard.
The Ruler (memoir essay)
[1] Mr. Halloran taught eleventh-grade chemistry for thirty-one years, and in all that time I never heard him say that an answer was almost right. [2] He said it was right or he said it was wrong, and he said so in the same dry voice whether the answer belonged to the valedictorian or to the boy who slept behind the fume hood. [3] When I handed in my first lab report, he returned it with one line across the top: "Your conclusion is a wish." [4] I did not speak to him for a week.
[5] The other teachers in the building used the language of encouragement, which I now understand to be a kind of weather report, always sunny and never quite about the actual weather. [6] Halloran's comments were more like a ruler laid against the work: they told me exactly where the edge was and made no promise about what lay past it. [7] Some of my classmates found this unbearable, and two of them transferred out by December.
[8] I will not pretend that he was always right to be as ___ as he was; the girl who cried in the stairwell after the midterm had done real work, and a sentence from him might have helped her more than the silence she got. [9] But when I think of the teachers who called my work "wonderful" and meant that I had turned it in, I remember that Halloran never once wasted my time. [10] He read the revision I brought him in April, handed it back with no comment but a small check mark, and I carried that check mark around for a month.
[11] I teach now, and my own students, who regard encouragement as a form of courtesy, have learned to flinch whenever I tell them that a result is almost right. [12] I have kept his habit of marking what is wrong before anything else, and I have learned, slowly and with some embarrassment, to mark what is right afterward. [13] Whether that order is a debt I owe him or a habit I ought to have outgrown is a question that I have not been able to settle.
Zee drafts a neutral summary of sentence 6. Which rewrite drops the figure and keeps every fact?
- Halloran’s comments marked exactly where my work met the standard and promised that more effort would be rewarded beyond it.
- Halloran’s comments marked exactly where my work met the standard and refused any promise about what lay beyond it.
- Halloran’s comments coldly marked where my work fell short and offered nothing beyond that.
- Halloran’s comments marked exactly where my work met the standard and made no promise about what lay beyond it.
Hung by Watershed (exhibition review)
[1] The Hartwell Gallery's new exhibition gathers sixty-one landscapes painted in the river valleys of the region between 1880 and 1935, and it is, on the whole, a pleasure to walk through. [2] The rooms are hung by watershed rather than by artist, so a pale morning canvas by Edith Marsh can face a dark winter study by a painter nobody has heard of, and each seems to learn something from the other. [3] The wall labels are brief and modest, and several correct attributions that earlier catalogs had repeated for decades. [4] The catalog is another matter.
[5] In its introduction the curator, Dr. Anselm Pryce, argues without a hedge that these valley painters, working apart and mostly unaware of one another, together produced a single "regional vision" that explains a century of rural change. [6] The claim is ___: it extrapolates from what a few of the painters did to all sixty-one pictures, and the catalog's thirty essays cannot quite carry it; most are careful studies of one painter or one town, and a few quietly contradict the introduction. [7] One essay shows that the best-known painter of the group left the valley at twenty-two and never painted it again from life. [8] Another notes that the winter studies were made for a single dealer, who wanted them dark because dark pictures sold.
[9] This does not diminish the pictures, which are better than the argument deserves. [10] Marsh's morning canvas, in particular, is a small marvel of restraint, with a river rendered in three strokes of gray and a barn that seems to wait for the light to reach it. [11] It would be a shame if visitors left remembering Pryce's thesis rather than her barn. [12] A gallery is entitled to a theory; it is merely unwise to hang the theory higher than the paintings.
[13] The last room, given to the valley's winter studies, shows the cost of a thesis most clearly. [14] The dealer's taste for dark pictures hangs beside a wall text that calls the same canvases "the valley's true mood," and the visitor is left to decide which sentence to believe. [15] I suspect most visitors will believe the paintings.
Bo reads for the reviewer’s judgment of the exhibition. Which statement gives it and the words that carry it?
- Warm approval throughout: “a pleasure,” “small marvel” and “entitled to a theory” show that the review forgives the thesis.
- Doubt about the paintings and trust in the thesis: “brief and modest” belittles the labels, and “regional vision” is the review’s own term.
- Admiration for the paintings and courteous doubt about the thesis, carried by the dates and the sixty-one landscapes counted in sentence 1.
- Admiration for the paintings and courteous doubt about the thesis, carried by “a pleasure” and “small marvel” against “cannot quite carry it.”
The Lab That Is Never First (magazine feature)
[1] In the nine years Dr. Imani Okoro has directed the soil-microbiology lab at Calder University, it has never retracted a paper, a record that very few labs of its size can claim. [2] It has also never been first. [3] In March a team in Leiden swooped in with the first full map of the fungal network beneath a boreal forest, borrowing a method that Okoro's students had sketched on a whiteboard two years earlier. [4] Okoro had the preliminary data in a drawer; she believed, she says, that three seasons of replication were owed to the field before anyone drew a conclusion from it.
[5] Her postdoctoral fellows, who describe her as generous and exacting, were less sure. [6] "We kept asking what we were waiting for," said one, "and the answer was always another season." [7] It is easy to admire the discipline behind such a record, and the scientific community has reason to; the literature is full of confident maps that a second season unmade.
[8] But discipline that cannot decide when to act is not the same thing as virtue, and the Calder lab's habit has become ___: out of fear of being wrong it treats every claim as a liability to be postponed rather than a risk worth taking. [9] The grant agencies, which fund the first map and not the second, have noticed. [10] Okoro, to her credit, has noticed too, and last month she told her fellows that one preprint a year would henceforth be a requirement rather than a courtesy.
[11] Whether the change will come too late for the grant renewal is a question her fellows discuss in lowered voices. [12] The Leiden team, for its part, sent the lab a gracious note and a copy of the method section, which several fellows read twice.
[13] Okoro does not dispute any of this. [14] "I would rather be late and right than early and sorry," she told me in her office, where the drawer in question now stands open, its folders labeled by year. [15] It is a good sentence, and it is also the sentence her fellows have heard for nine years.
Esme reads for the writer’s judgment of Okoro. Which statement gives it and the words that carry it?
- Impatience with the lab: sentences 2, 6, 8 and 9 stress what waiting has cost, and the admiration in sentence 7 is a courtesy.
- Admiration for her rigor and impatience with her delay, carried by the Leiden team’s “gracious note” and the grant agencies in sentence 9.
- Admiration for her rigor and impatience with her delay, carried by “never retracted” and “to her credit” against “a liability to be postponed.”
- Disapproval of her rigor itself: the lab’s record of no retractions in sentence 1 is offered as an empty boast.
The Ruler (memoir essay)
[1] Mr. Halloran taught eleventh-grade chemistry for thirty-one years, and in all that time I never heard him say that an answer was almost right. [2] He said it was right or he said it was wrong, and he said so in the same dry voice whether the answer belonged to the valedictorian or to the boy who slept behind the fume hood. [3] When I handed in my first lab report, he returned it with one line across the top: "Your conclusion is a wish." [4] I did not speak to him for a week.
[5] The other teachers in the building used the language of encouragement, which I now understand to be a kind of weather report, always sunny and never quite about the actual weather. [6] Halloran's comments were more like a ruler laid against the work: they told me exactly where the edge was and made no promise about what lay past it. [7] Some of my classmates found this unbearable, and two of them transferred out by December.
[8] I will not pretend that he was always right to be as ___ as he was; the girl who cried in the stairwell after the midterm had done real work, and a sentence from him might have helped her more than the silence she got. [9] But when I think of the teachers who called my work "wonderful" and meant that I had turned it in, I remember that Halloran never once wasted my time. [10] He read the revision I brought him in April, handed it back with no comment but a small check mark, and I carried that check mark around for a month.
[11] I teach now, and my own students, who regard encouragement as a form of courtesy, have learned to flinch whenever I tell them that a result is almost right. [12] I have kept his habit of marking what is wrong before anything else, and I have learned, slowly and with some embarrassment, to mark what is right afterward. [13] Whether that order is a debt I owe him or a habit I ought to have outgrown is a question that I have not been able to settle.
Jun reads for the narrator’s judgment of Halloran. Which statement gives it and the words that carry it?
- Plain admiration: “a ruler” and the check mark show the narrator thinks Halloran was right to treat students alike.
- Respect with a regret: the narrator values his exactness, shown by “weather report” and “always sunny,” while admitting the stairwell girl’s cost.
- Respect with a regret: “a ruler” and “never once wasted my time” credit his exactness, while the stairwell girl shows what it cost.
- Resentment that lasts: the week of silence in sentence 4 and “Your conclusion is a wish” show the narrator still holds a grudge.