Accuplacer Jun 2026: Next Gen. Reading

Question 1

Passage

Accuplacer Jun 2026: Next Gen. Reading. This passage is from a 2019 novel. The narrator is reflecting on a time when she was about ten years old.

A ham (amateur) radio is a device for exchanging messages and requires a license to operate.

(1) One day, my father brought home a pile of the parts needed to build a ham radio and asked if I wanted to help him put it together. (2) It took us a week, and we built it at our kitchen table, which meant that for a week we ate dinner on our laps in our living room.

(3) After dinner, my father went straight to the kitchen table where he left a mess of wire and cables and vacuum tubes, and got to work. (4) I started by helping my mother clean up, but then I went over to him, leaning over the part of the radio he was working on to study the diagrams and assembly instructions.

(5) Once the receiver was built, we took it into the garage and built a simple transmitter. (6) Then we studied for the radio license, quizzing each other on Morse code* and electrical principles and radio wave characteristics every night. (7) My father already knew all of it from the war. (8) He’d been a radio operator as a soldier, and he told me how radio waves could go far, out into space—and how a few years ago two radio operators from opposite sides of the world had sent messages to each other by bouncing them off the moon.

(9) After we received our radio licenses, we spent many nights sitting side by side in the garage, picking up radio stations and messages from other amateur radio operators. (10) There were so many messages floating around, waiting to be picked up. (11) How are you? (12) How’s the weather like there? (13) There were reports of shipwrecks, and messages from as far away as Canada—and we decoded each message as it arrived. (14) Nowadays, when communication is so instantaneous, I cannot help remembering with nostalgia how my father and I turned the knob to the correct frequency but still all the messages came in through our complicated machine of vacuum tubing and plumbing wire.

(15) We recorded the tapes as they came in—and I marveled that each tape traveled only a little bit slower than the speed of light. (16) The tap top came like pulses of radio waves into our ears, and I transcribed the taps as fast as I could into letters, watching them gather into words and then sentences. (17) It was the closest thing to performing magic that I could imagine, manipulating the radio waves that were all around us to talk to someone across the world.

*A method of sending and receiving messages using electronic signals.

Adapted from Catherine Chung, The Tenth Muse ©2019 by Catherine Chung

Question

Which choice best summarizes the passage?

• The narrator receives a ham radio from her father, then begins using it to exchange messages with another child.
• The narrator’s father is interrupted as he’s putting together a ham radio, but later returns to the project and eventually completes it.
• The narrator’s father brings home the parts needed to build a ham radio, but he and the narrator struggle to assemble them.
• The narrator and her father put together a ham radio and get radio licenses, then use the radio to receive messages. ✓

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Question 2

Question

The third paragraph (sentences 5-8) indicates that in this case, the narrator’s father had

• survived a shipwreck
• served as a soldier ✓
• failed to become a professional radio operator Accuplacer Jun 2026: Next Gen. Reading
• learned Morse code from his own father

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Question 3

Question

As used in sentence 17, “manipulating” most nearly means

• chasing
• using ✓
• playing with
• carrying out

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Question 4

Question

What is the main purpose of the questions in sentences 10-12?

• To reveal the narrator’s sense of isolation from family members other than her father
• To suggest the narrator’s uncertainty about whether the radio will work
• To demonstrate the knowledge of electric principles required to operate the radio
• To provide examples of the kinds of messages the narrator and her father obtained ✓

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Question 5

Passage 1

“Translocation” refers to the movement of organisms by humans from one site to another. It occurs in a number of contexts. For example, conservationists might use translocation to reintroduce an extirpated (eradicated) species to an area it once inhabited or to supplement an area’s existing population. Alternatively, the purpose might be to establish a species in a new area that offers an appropriate habitat. Although humans have been moving species for centuries, the use of translocation as a conservation strategy is a relatively recent development. Perhaps the best-known example of translocation occurred in the mid-1990s when wolves from Jasper National Park in Canada were relocated to Yellowstone National Park in the United States, helping to reestablish a wolf population in the latter area.

Passage 2

Translocation has been used successfully by wildlife professionals to enhance or reintroduce populations of rare or extirpated wildlife, provide hunting or wildlife viewing opportunities, farm wild game, and reduce local human-wildlife conflicts. However, accidental and intentional translocations may have multiple unintended negative consequences, including increased stress and mortality of relocated animals, negative impacts on resident animals at release sites, increased conflicts with human interests, and the spread of diseases.

Many wildlife professionals now question the practice of translocation, particularly in light of the need to contain or eliminate high-profile, economically important wildlife diseases and because using this technique may jeopardize international wildlife disease management initiatives to control rabies in raccoons, coyotes, and foxes in North America.

From R. Chipman et al., “Essentials of Wildlife Translocation” ©2008 by the International Association for Biological Safety

Question

Which choice best describes the relationship between the passages?

• Passage 1 studies in a practice that Passage 2 explains in greater detail.
• Passage 1 poses a question about a practice that Passage 2 addresses.
• Passage 1 provides an overview of a practice that Passage 2 criticizes. ✓
• Passage 1 states an objection to a practice that Passage 2 holds is baseless.

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Question 6

Question

The example involving Yellowstone National Park cited in Passage 1 most likely reflects which of the following goals of translocation mentioned in the first sentence of Passage 2 (“Translocation . . . conflicts”)?

• “enhance or reintroduce populations of rare or extirpated wildlife” ✓
• “provide hunting or wildlife viewing opportunities”
• “farm wild game”
• “reduce local human-wildlife conflicts”

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Question 7

Question

The first sentence of Passage 1 (“Translocation . . . another”) mainly serves to

• establish an argument that’s developed throughout the passage
• advance a claim that’s challenged later in the passage
• define a term that’s used throughout the passage ✓
• introduce an event that’s discussed later in the passage

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Question 8

Question

Passage 2 indicates that many wildlife professionals believe that translocation could

• reduce the economic impact of rabies in certain countries
• prove more harmful to raccoons than to coyotes or foxes
• have unintended positive effects at Yellowstone National Park
• have unintended negative effects on certain animals in North America ✓

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Question 9

Passage

Even its diminutive lavender flowers or its straggly windown stalks, there is nothing about the beach weed known as the Great Lakes sea rocket to suggest that it might be any sort of a botanical wonder.

Yet scientists have found evidence that the sea rocket is able to do something that no other plant has ever been shown to do.

The sea rocket, researchers report, can distinguish between plants that are related to it and those that are not. And not only does this plant recognize its kin, but it also gives them preferential treatment.

From Sam Kassell, “New Plant Found That ‘Loves Its Kin'” ©2010 by The New York Times Company

Question

In the first half of the passage, the first sentence (“Even . . . wonder”) indicates that the appearance of the Great Lakes sea rocket is

• striking
• vibrant
• unsightly
• unexceptional ✓

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Question 10

Question

Because these speeding particles’ compositions were quite different from those of other low-energy cosmic rays, scientists dubbed them ________ cosmic rays.

• intermittent
• transitory
• resilient
• anomalous ✓

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Question 11

Question

Rather than addressing the facts, the defense attorney relied on ________, hoping to deflect references to deficiencies in the witness’s character.

• paraphrase
• presumption
• skepticism
• innuendo ✓

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Question 12

Passage

What has “family history” meant to historians? While the scholarly field of family history emerged only recently, its roots lay in the methods and practices of biography, genealogy, public history, and microhistory. Biographers had long studied the familial roots of well-known political and cultural figures. In the early twentieth century, however, as the historical profession took shape, academic historians were increasingly determined to establish a “scientific school of history”—built on the bedrock of “objectivity”—and to distance their work from sentimental literary notions of “history as literature” and “history as art.” With the exception of Founding Fathers, biographies fell out of favor altogether. Insofar as academic historians of the nineteenth century proceeded, the discipline took renewed interest in the plight of working people, social historians were limited to their “familial origins or interior lives.”

From Kendra T. Field, “The Privilege of Family History” ©2012 by Kendra T. Field

Question

Which choice best states the main idea of the passage?

• Responding to readers’ changing preferences, historians began publishing fewer biographies in the early twentieth century, with some historians mocking the genre for focusing on personal and emotional details rather than on objective data.
• Although professional historians did not begin to emerge until the early twentieth century, they were preceded by nineteenth-century biographers who provided the foundations for the later development of a scientific school of history.
• Seeking to distance themselves from nineteenth-century notions of history, many twentieth-century historians dismissed familial relationships as unimportant in most cases, deeming such information anecdotal.
• As the twentieth century progressed, historians increasingly turned their attention from documenting the lives of well-known individuals, writing instead about the familial origins and interior lives of laborers. ✓

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Question 13

Passage

Nothing seems to work better in England than the theater, and it works to perfection. Reactions are not hard to find: a sense of community involving both actors and audiences, and a vital, self-renewing tradition stretching back to Shakespeare. Company loyalty rather than cutthroat competition is intelligently underwritten by state subsidy. The theaters must fill a high percentage of seats to qualify for government grants. Their programs must be serious, but not so self-indulgent as to be out of the grasp of the audience. The result is a standard of performance consistently as high as any in the Western world.

Question

The author of the passage is primarily concerned with

• describing the traditional patterns of theater in England
• discussing reasons why English theater is flourishing ✓
• showing how community involvement affects English theater
• showing how English audiences respond to new plays

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Question 14

Question

Daryl and Kristen preferred not to see the latest horror film that their friends wanted to see, so they chose a ________ showing of a highly rated comedy film that started and ended at the same time as the horror film.

• reciprocal
• congruent
• relevant Accuplacer Jun 2026: Next Gen. Reading
• concurrent ✓

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Question 15

Passage

When most people, including experts, think of subatomic reality, they imagine particles that behave like little billiard balls bouncing off one another. But the notion of particles is a holdover of a worldview that dates to the ancient Greek atomists and owes much to the mechanical clockwork universe. Scientists overlapping layers of thought make it clear that the core units of quantum field theory do not behave like billiard balls at all.

From Meinard Kuhlmann, “What Is Real?” ©2013 by Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.

Question

The last sentence of the passage (“Several . . . all”) mainly serves to

• negate a comparison made earlier in the passage
• criticize a theory discussed earlier in the passage
• qualify a claim made earlier in the passage ✓
• dismiss an objection raised earlier in the passage

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Question 16

Passage

Since its 1989 inception, the Asian American Women Artists Association’s activities have filtered into most discussions about Asian American arts activism. News of these interesting Asian American women artists in northern California who were meeting, strategizing, and supporting one another fascinated my classmates around 1990. I was living in Brooklyn. When I moved to Los Angeles in early 1992, I heard even more about the support and exciting environment of AAWAA from people in other fields, such as Asian American theater and dance. So, too, I spoke of the generous and committed women in the group. As I began to conduct research for an exhibition of art from the internment camps, I noticed that AAWAA also took their mission of supporting Asian American women artists seriously and broadly, reaching out to women artists of an earlier generation like Hisako Hibi, an important painter of internment camp life.

Adapted from Karin Higa, “Asian American Women Artists Association” ©1994 by Karin Higa

Question

Which statement best describes how the author views the AAWAA?

• She feels the group should devote more time to promoting Asian American art.
• She sees it as primarily fulfilling a social need for women with similar interests.
• She is impressed with its dedication and solidarity. ✓
• She fears that it will be replaced by other groups in the future.

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Question 17

Passage

It is notable that in his early writing, Shakespeare developed genres very carefully, as though he had a plan: he wrote one history play a year from about 1590 to about 1600, and then he stopped writing history plays. He wrote a romantic comedy every year from about 1590 to about 1600, but he did not write another history play (at least not about English history) until 1613, at the very end of his career, when Henry VIII (in collaboration with John Fletcher) appeared.

In 1600, Shakespeare must have appreciated himself in the task of writing one romantic comedy every year from 1590 to about 1600, but he did not write another history play (at least not about English history) until 1613, at the very end of his career, when Henry VIII (in collaboration with John Fletcher) appeared. In 1600, Shakespeare must have appreciated himself in the task of writing one romantic comedy every year from 1590 to about 1600, but he did not write another history play (at least not about English history) until 1613, at the very end of his career, when Henry VIII (in collaboration with John Fletcher) appeared. In 1600, Shakespeare must have appreciated himself in the task of writing one romantic comedy every year from 1590 to about 1600.

From David Bevington, The Comedy of Errors and Early Experiments in Comedy ©2005 by David Bevington

Question

Over the course of the passage, the focus shifts from a discussion of

• English history to a discussion of Shakespeare’s early plays inspired by that history.
• Shakespeare’s early history plays to a discussion of Shakespeare’s early comedies. ✓
• two genres of plays by Shakespeare to a discussion of those plays’ cultural importance.
• plays written by Shakespeare from 1590 to 1600 to a discussion of Shakespeare’s later plays.

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Question 18

Passage

Archaeologist Serena Ensoli asserts that the lost namesake of the Roman Colosseum—a statue called the Colossus of Nero—might have fallen prey to a historic makeover. She believes the Colossus Neronis, which represented the Emperor Nero as a sun god, may actually be camouflaged inside a gigantic bronze sculpture dedicated to the emperor Constantine the Great.

The only remains of the Constantine sculpture, on display at the Capitoline Museums in Rome, are three fragments: the head, the left hand, and a sphere. In ancient Rome, it was common practice for older statues to be altered to reflect the current emperor. Ensoli believes that what happened to Nero’s statue, and she uses chronology to support her conclusion. Constantine’s features would have appeared last because Constantine lived after Nero, from A.D. 285-337.

Question

The purpose of the passage is to

• compare and contrast sculptures of Nero and Constantine
• describe an archaeological theory of Serena Ensoli
• explain why the ancient Romans altered statues of their former emperors
• determine how a statue of Constantine became fragmented ✓

Question 19

Passage

Organic chemistry is the chemistry of compounds that contain carbon. The carbon atom’s gift is that it is particularly good at making various sorts of chemical bonds. It can make straight chains, kinked chains, branched chains, and a variety of rings in ways that no other element can manage. These complex molecules were first seen in living things, which is how they came to be called organic. But for well over a century, chemists have delighted in making carbon-bearing molecules that life has never bothered with, and those synthetic molecules are called organic, too.

Question

The passage suggests that the “synthetic molecules” mentioned in the last sentence are

• unique in that they contain no carbon
• inaccurately but conventionally described as organic
• inadvertently created during many common experiments
• unable to form the same chemical bonds as natural molecules ✓

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Question 20

Passage

Bacteria can be exasperatingly difficult to isolate and study. Only about 1 percent will grow in culture. Considering how wildly adaptable they are in nature, it is an odd fact that the one place they seem not to wish to live is a petri dish. Plop them in a bed of agar (in a petri dish) and pepper them so, so, so, and most will just lie there, declining every inducement to bloom. Any bacterium that thrives in a lab is, by definition, exceptional.

Adapted from Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything ©2003 by Bill Bryson

Question

The fourth sentence of the passage (“Plop . . . bloom”) primarily serves to

• support the argument that better laboratory techniques are needed for studying bacteria
• underscore the idea that researchers have only a limited understanding of bacteria
• illustrate the claim that not all bacteria are highly adaptable in nature ✓
• reinforce the point that bacteria generally won’t grow in petri dishes