B. Vogt
AP Language Diagnostic Mini Test
The Mini-Test that follow is designed to familiarize you
with some of the AP language exam question types. It will also
assist you in assessing some of your strengths and weakness.
This short assessment includes complete answers and
explanations, tow essays written by AP students, and analysis
of those essays.
The format, levels of difficulty, and question structures
are similar to those on the actual AP language exam. The actual
AP exam is copyrighted and may not be duplicated, and these
questions are not taken from the actual test.
Answer Sheet For the Mini Test
Section I: MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS
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Mini-Test
Section I: MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS
Time: 12 Minutes
10 Questions
This section contains a selection from a prose work and
question on its content, style, and form. Read each section
carefully. Choose the best answer of the five choices.
Questions 1- 10. Read the passage carefully before you
begin to answer the questions.
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(10)
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(35)
(40)
On Route 301 south of Tampa, billboards advertising Sun
City Center crop up every few miles, with pictures of Cesar
Romero and slogans that read FLORIDA’S RETIREMENT COMMUNITY OF THE YEAR, 87 HOLES OF
GOLF, THE TOWN TOO BUSY TO RETIRE. According
To a real-estate brochure, the town is “sensibly located…
comfortably removed from the crowded downtown areas,
the highway clutter, the tourists and the traffic.” It is
twenty-five miles from Tampa, thirty miles from Bradenton,
thirty-five miles from Sarasota, and eleven miles from the
nearest beach on the Gulf Coast. Route 301, an inland
route—to be taken in preference to the coast road, with its
lines of trucks from the phosphate plants—passes through a
lot of swampland, some scraggly pinewoods, and acre upon
acre of strawberry beds covered with sheets of black plastic.
There are fields where hairy, tough-looking cattle snatch at
the grass between the palmettos. There are aluminum
warehouses, cinder-block stores, and trailer homes in patches
of dirt with laundry sailing out behind. There are Pentecostal churches and run-down cafés and bars with rows of pickup
trucks parked out front.
Turn right with the billboards onto Route 674, and there
is a green-and-white suburban-looking resort town. Off the
main road, white asphalt boulevards with avenues of palm
trees give onto streets that curve pleasingly around golf
courses and small lakes. White ranch-style houses sit back
from the streets on small, impeccably manicured lawns. A
glossy four –color map of the town put out by a real-estate
company shows cartoon figures of golfers on the fairways
and boats on the lakes, along with drawings of churches,
clubhouses and curly green trees. The map is a necessity for
the visitor, since the streets curve around in maze fashion,
ending in culs-de-sac or doubling back on themselves. There
is no way in or out of Sun City Center except by the main
road bisecting the town. The map, which looks like a child’s
board game (Snakes and Ladders or Uncle Wiggily) shows
a vague area—a kind of no-man’s-land—surrounding the
town. As the map suggests, there is nothing natural about
Sun City Center. The lakes are artificial, and there is hardly
a tree or a shrub or a blade of grass that has any
correspondence in the world just beyond it. At the edges of
the development, there are houses under construction, with
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the seams still showing in the transplanted lawns. From
there, you can look out at a flat brown plain that used to be a
cattle ranch. The developer simply scraped the surface of
the land and started over again.
Sun City Center is an unincorporated town of about
eighty-five hundred people, almost all of whom are over the
age of sixty. It is a self-contained community, with stores,
banks, restaurants, and doctors’ offices. It has the advertised
eighty-seven holes of golf; it also has tennis courts, shuffle
board courts, swimming polls, and lawn-bowling greens. In
addition to the regular housing, it has a “life-care facility” –a
six-story apartment building with a nursing home in one
wing. “It’s a strange town,” a clinical psychologist at the
University of South Florida, in Tampa, told me before I
went. “it’s out there in the middle of nowhere. It has a
section of private houses, where people go when they retire.
Then it has a section of condos and apartments, where
people go when they can’t keep up their houses. Then it has
a nursing home. Then it has a cemetery.” In fact, there is no
cemetery in Sun City Center, but the doctor was otherwise
correct.
Sun City Center has become a world unto itself. Over the
years, the town attracted a supermarket and all the stores
and services necessary to the maintenance of daily life. Now,
in addition, it has a golf-cart dealer, two banks, three savings
and loan association, four restaurants, and a brokerage
firm. For visitors, there is the Sun City Center Inn. The town
has a post office. Five churches have been built by the
residents and a sixth is under construction. A number of
doctors have set up offices the town, and a Bradenton
hospital recently opened a satellite hospital with 112 beds.
There is no school, of course. The commercial establishments all front on the state road running through the center
of town, but, because most of them are more expensive than
those in the neighboring towns, the people from the
surrounding area patronize only the supermarket, the
laundromat, and one or tow others. The local farmers and
the migrant workers they employ, many of whom are
Mexican, have little relationship to golf courses or to dinner
dances with organ music. Conversely, Sun Citians are not
the sort of people who would go to bean suppers in the
Pentecostal churches or hang out at raunchy bars where
gravel-voiced women sing “Satin Sheets and Satin Pillows.:
The result is that Sun Citians see very little of their Florida
neighbors. They take trips to Tampa, Bradenton, and
Sarasota, but otherwise they rarely leave the green-and-
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1.
white developments, with their palm-lined avenues and
artificial lakes. In the normal course of a week, they rarely
see anyone under sixty.
In the first paragraph, the author refers to the “fields where
hairy, tough-looking cattle snatch at the grass between the
palmettos” in order to
I.
deny the area any pastoral attractiveness
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underscore the loss when farmland is subdivided
for retirement homes
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suggest the savagery of the natural world which
can be ordered and made beautiful by human
projects
(A) I only
(B) II only
(C) I and III only
(D) II and III only
(E) I, II, and III
2.
In the last three sentences of the first paragraph (“There
are fields…parked out front”), the author uses all of the
following EXCEPT
(A) parallel structure
(B) periodic sentences
(C) specific details
(D) direct statements
(E) subject-verb inversions
3.
In the quotation at the end of the third paragraph, the use
of two sentences with “where” clauses and three sentences
beginning with “Then” has which of the following effects?
I.
It provides a rhetorical parallelism for an unspoken
chronological progression
II.
It invites the reader to supply the “where” clauses
for the last two sentences that begin with “There.”
III.
It provides a series of transitions that direct the
reader’s attention to the speaker.
(A) II only
(B) I and II only
(C) I and III only
(D) II and III only
(E) I, II, and III
4,
In the lat paragraph, the list of services available in Sun
City Center itemized in the sentence in lines 66-69 (“Now,
in addition…brokerage firm”) effectively suggests the
residents’ concern with
(A) It reinforces the idea of the preceding sentence.
(B) It effectively contrasts the Sun City Center residents
and their neighbors.
(C) It recalls details of the description at the end of the
first paragraph.
(D) It attacks the values of the people who live in the area
near Sun City Center.
(E) It presents an image that is amusing in its incongruity.
5.
The effect of the last paragraph of the passage is to call
attention to
(A) age of the Sun City Center’s residents
(B) convenience of life in Sun City Center
(C) political indifference of the Sun City Center’s
residents
(D) isolation of the Sun City Center’s residents
(E) wealth of the Sun City Center’s residents
6.
Which of the following best describes the diction of the
passage?
(A) formal and austere
(B) informal and documentary
(C) abstract
(D) artless and colloquial
(E) highly metaphorical
7.
Which of the following quotation from the passage best
sums up its main idea?
(A) “As the map suggests, there is nothing natural about
Sun City Center.” (lines 38-39)
(B) “The developer simply scraped the surface off the
land and started over again.” (lines 45-46)
(C) “Sun City Center is an unincorporated town of about
eighty-five hundred people, almost all of whom are
over the age of sixty.” (lines 47-49)
(D) “In fact, there is no cemetery in Sun City Center, but
the doctor was otherwise correct.” (lines 61-63)
(E) “The result is that Sun Citians see very little of the
Florida neighbors.” (lines 86-87)