Reading Comprehension · Humanities
PrepTest 109 · Section 2 · Passage 2
Questions 8–14
Before you start
Open PrepTest 109, Section 2 in your official copy from LSAC and read the passage for Questions 8–14, using the structure guide below. The passage is not reprinted here.
Structure guide
- P1: introduces a work and its creator, explains that the creator followed a popular form's conventions on purpose to reach a certain audience, and states the effect on that audience
- P2: presents critics' objection to that choice, rejects it as too simple, gives two examples of tension between the form and the creator's real experience, and ends with the author's own label for the work
Step 2 · The kid passage
Nadia's Scrapbook That Was Not a Vacation
For the fall project, Nadia made a scrapbook about her summer working in the family bakery. She built it like the vacation scrapbooks her classmates love, full of glitter and big ideas: summer is for fun, best friends, and long trips with the whole family. She chose that style on purpose so classmates who read such books constantly would care about her summer too. It worked. They saw that working kids prize fun and family just as much, and began to see those values in a bigger picture.
Marcus and a few others say copying that style shortchanged her real summer. Marcus claims the glitter crowds out what a plain work log, another kind of class project with its own goals, would have shown. It is not that simple: the style and her real days pull against each other. In a usual scrapbook, the best-friends page shows a pool party. Nadia's shows her waving from the bakery window at a party she missed. On her last page she has earned a new bike, but there is no photo of a family trip, because the price of that bike was a summer when her family was almost never together. Nadia notes that working kids face choices other kids never do. So her book is really an anti-scrapbook: it wants the same things but shows that the usual ranking of what matters does not hold for a working kid; you cannot fully get her summer without setting the usual view aside.
Step 4 · The courtroom tale
The Case of the Postcard Mural
The town hired Aunt Rosa to paint a mural in the cheerful postcard style everyone loves. Opposing counsel stood up. 'Your Honor, that sunny style smothers her true story about the night workers at the cannery.' Mr. Whitfield snapped his suspenders. 'Not so fast. The tension is the point. Postcards show families at picnics. Her picnic panel shows a family eating in shifts, one chair always empty. The postcard style wants togetherness, and so does the mural, but it shows the usual order of what matters does not fit the night crew.' Judge Okafor tapped her pen. 'So people stop because it looks like a postcard, then see something new.' 'Exactly, Your Honor.' 'Then the style is not hiding the story. It is the doorway.'