Writing Test 1...

[passage-header]Choose the most suitable option to complete the dialogue.[/passage-header]

In between school days, we gathered hazelnuts,
fished, had long deer-hunting weekends, went to
powwows, beaded on looms, and made quilts. I did not
question the necessity or value of our school education,
but somehow I grew up knowing it wasn't the only
education I would need. I'm thankful for those experiences
of my Anishinaabe heritage, because now I know by heart
not only the national anthem, but the ancient song of the
loon. I recognize not only the alphabet and the parts of an
English sentence, but the intricate language of a beaver's
teeth and tail.

Daily life is overflowing with mundane mental events.
A paper clip gleams amid stacks of documents, a friend's
face shines like a beacon out of a crowd, the smell of
freshly baked bread evokes childhood memories -- 
thoughts and perceptions such as these flow by with
monotonous ease.
So it seems, anyway. Yet given what scientists know
about how brains work, even the ability to perceive a
paper clip on a messy desk represents an extraordinary
and mysterious achievement.

The following passage is from a 1991 essay that discusses
the debate over which authors should be taught in English
classes.
Now, what are we to make of this sputtering debate,
in which charges of imperialism are met by equally
passionate accusations of vandalism, in which each side
hates the other, and yet each seems to have its share of
reason? It occurs to me that perhaps what we have here
is one of those debates in which the opposing sides,
unbeknownst to themselves, share a myopia that will turn
out to be the most interesting and important feature of the
whole discussion, a debate, for instance, like that of the
Founding Fathers over the nature of the franchise. Think
of all the energy and passion spent debating the question
of property qualifications, or direct versus legislative
elections, while all along, unmentioned and unimagined,
was the fact - to us so central - that women and slaves
were never considered for any kind of vote.
While everyone is busy fighting over what should be
taught in the classroom, something is being overlooked.
That is the state of reading, and books, and literature in our
country, at this time. Why, ask yourself, is everyone so hot
 under the collar about what to put on the required-reading
shelf? It is because, while we have been arguing so fiercely
about which books make the best medicine, the patient has
been slipping deeper and deeper into a coma.
Let us imagine a country in which reading was a popular
voluntary activity. There, parents read books for their own
edification and pleasure and are seen by their children at
this silent and mysterious pastime. These parents also read
to their children, give them books for presents, talk to them
about books, and underwrite, with their taxes, a public
library system that is open all day, every day. In school,
the children study certain books together but also have an
active reading life of their own. Years later, it may even
be hard for them to remember if they read Jane Eyre at
home and Judy Blume in class or the other way around.
In college, young people continue to be assigned certain
books, but far more important are the books they discover
for themselves browsing in the library, in bookstores, on
the shelves of friends, one book leading to another, back
and forth in history and across languages and cultures.
After graduation, they continue to read and in the fullness
of time produce a new generation of readers. Oh happy
land! I wish we all lived there.
In that country of real readers, voluntary, active, self-
determined readers, a debate like the current one over the
canon would not be taking place. Or if it did, it would be
as a kind of parlor game: What books would you take to
a desert island? Everyone would know that the top-ten list
was merely a tiny fraction of the books one would read in
a lifetime. It would not seem racist or sexist or hopelessly
hidebound to put Nathaniel Hawthorne on the list and not
Toni Morrison. It would be more like putting oatmeal
and not noodles on the breakfast menu - a choice partly
arbitrary, partly a nod to the national past, and partly, dare
one say it, a kind of reverse affirmative action: School
might frankly be the place where one reads the books that
are a little off-putting, that have gone a little cold, that you
might overlook because they do not address, in reader-
friendly contemporary fashion, the issues most immediately
at stake in modern life but that, with a little study, turn out
to have a great deal to say. Being on the list wouldn't mean
so much. It might even add to a writer's cachet not to be on
the list, to be in one way or another too heady, too daring,
too exciting to be ground up into institutional fodder for
teenagers. Generations of high school kids have been turned
off to George Eliot by being forced to read Silas Marner
at a tender age. One can imagine a whole new readership
for her if grown-ups were left to approach Middlemarch
and Daniel Deronda with open minds, at their leisure.