Free AP English Language Practice Questions

Read this, then answer the questions about it.

Gentlemen, you have been told that a library is a luxury. I have come a long way to tell you that it is a tool, and that you would not call a hammer a luxury merely because a man may choose not to lift it.

Consider what we already pay for. We pay for the constable who takes the boy after he has gone wrong. We pay for the magistrate who hears him, and the keeper who holds him, and in the fullness of time we pay again for the poorhouse that receives him when no trade will have him. Every one of these is an expense we accept without complaint, because we have grown used to paying at the end of the story. I am asking you to pay at the beginning of it, where the sum is smaller and the return is a citizen.

I have heard the objection put in its strongest form, and I would rather answer that one than an easier one I invented myself. It is this: that a town of eleven thousand, which has lately borrowed to build a bridge and borrowed again to lay water pipe, cannot in conscience borrow a third time for a building full of books that no ordinance obliges anyone to enter. That is not a foolish objection. It is the objection of a careful man, and I would rather argue with a careful man than a generous one.

But observe what the objection assumes. It assumes that the bridge is a necessity because its use is visible, and the book a luxury because its use is not. Test that against your own history. When the bridge was proposed, the argument for it was never that men wished to stand upon it. The argument was that a farmer eight miles east could bring his grain to a mill on this side of the water, that the mill would grind more, and that the man who owned the mill would hire. The bridge was never a bridge. It was a wage, disguised as timber and iron.

I say the library is the same kind of thing, disguised as shelving. The boy who reads the trade journals in your reading room is not improving himself in the vague and comfortable sense in which improvement is usually recommended to the young. He is learning what the men in Pittsburgh already know, and he is learning it at an hour when your shops are shut. In ten years he will either use that knowledge here, or he will carry it to a town that had the sense to build the room he read it in.

I am aware that I am asking you to pay now for a benefit you cannot itemize later. No clerk will ever hand you a paper showing that the town earned eleven thousand dollars because a boy read a book. The benefit does not arrive in that shape. It arrives as a man who did not leave, a foreman who could read a specification, a girl who kept the accounts of a shop that would otherwise have closed. You will never prove these to a committee. You will only notice, twenty years from now, that the towns which built such rooms are not the towns whose young people are gone.

I do not promise you that every boy who enters this room will leave it improved. I promise you something less and better: that no boy will be turned away for want of a dollar. That is the whole of my argument, and I will not dress it up. A town that will build a jail and will not build a library has decided in advance what it expects of its children, and the children, who are not fools, will hear that decision and act upon it.

Read this, then answer the questions about it.

(1) Every weekday morning, thousands of teenagers arrive at school before eight o'clock, and many of them are not really awake.

(2) Sleep researchers have shown that adolescent body clocks shift later during puberty, so a teenager falling asleep at eleven is not being lazy.

(3) They are following a biological signal they did not choose and cannot easily override.

(4) Schools that have moved their start times later report improvements in attendance.

(5) One district in Minnesota found that car accidents involving teenage drivers fell after the change.

(6) Some parents object that a later start would interfere with after-school jobs and sports.

(7) This is a real concern and deserves an answer rather than a dismissal.

(8) However, the districts that have made the change have generally found workable arrangements within a year.

(9) The evidence is not perfect, and a few studies have found smaller effects than the early research suggested.

(10) But the direction of the findings is consistent, and the cost of acting is low.

(11) We should move the first bell to half past eight.

(12) A common objection is that teenagers would simply stay up later, canceling out the gain.

(13) The districts that have tracked this report that average bedtimes moved by only a few minutes.

(14) That finding is worth stating carefully, because it comes from self-reported surveys rather than sleep laboratories.

(15) Still, it is the best evidence available, and it points the same way as the rest.

(16) There is also a cost that supporters of the change rarely mention.

(17) Bus fleets that currently run two routes each morning would need reorganizing, and in rural districts that is expensive.

(18) One county in Kentucky put the figure at eleven dollars per student per year.

(19) Set against the accident data, that seems to me a price worth paying, though I recognize a reasonable person could weigh it differently.

(20) None of this requires believing that a later bell will fix everything that is wrong with adolescent sleep.

(21) It requires only believing that a school system should not begin its day at the hour its students are least able to learn.