Free ISEE Middle Level Practice Test: 10 Questions
The Middle Level ISEE is for students applying to grades 7 and 8. Here are ten questions from verbal, quantitative, reading and math, taken from our full-length Middle Level exams.
Take these as an interactive quiz The full ISEE Middle Level exams
Read this, then answer the questions about it.
A beaver does not set out to build a pond. What it responds to is sound. Running water makes a particular noise, and a beaver that hears it will pile branches and mud against the noise until the noise stops. Researchers have tested this by hiding a speaker playing the sound of a stream on dry ground. The beavers buried the speaker.
The result of all that packing is a dam, and behind the dam a pond forms. For the beaver, the pond is a moat. It can swim to its lodge without ever walking on land, where wolves and coyotes are waiting. Everything else the dam does is an accident from the beaver's point of view, and there is a great deal of it.
Water slows down behind a dam, and slow water drops the sand and silt it was carrying. Over years, that settled material builds a flat, soft floor. Frogs lay eggs in the still shallows. Herons come for the frogs. Trees that cannot stand wet roots die, and the standing dead trunks become nesting holes for woodpeckers and owls. A stretch of fast, narrow stream with a handful of species living along it becomes a wide, slow wetland with dozens.
When the beavers finally leave, having eaten the nearby trees they can reach, the dam is not repaired. It leaks, then breaks. The pond drains, and what is left behind is the flat bed of silt, which is now the richest soil for miles. Grasses take it first. Within a few decades a meadow stands where the pond was, and the stream runs through the middle of it.
Some ecologists call this a cycle rather than a sequence, because beavers return. What looks from one summer like destruction, a chewed-through grove and a flooded field, is one turn of a wheel that has been going around far longer than anyone has been watching it.
Question 1
- A. how a beaver's simple instinct reshapes a whole stretch of land
- B. the methods that researchers use to study beavers
- C. danger from predators
- D. why beavers eventually abandon their ponds
Show the answer
The answer is A. How a beaver's simple instinct reshapes a whole stretch of land is right. The passage begins with the beaver responding to sound and then traces everything that follows, from pond to wetland to meadow.
- B is wrong: Research methods appear in one sentence, the buried speaker, used as evidence rather than as the subject.
- C is wrong: Danger from predators explains why the beaver wants a moat, which is one step in a much longer chain.
- D is wrong: Why beavers leave is mentioned in the fourth paragraph but is not what the passage is built around.
Question 2
- A. the sound of running water
- B. the sight of a fast-moving stream
- C. the arrival of cold weather
- D. the presence of nearby predators
Show the answer
The answer is A. The sound of running water is right. The passage says a beaver responds to sound and describes beavers burying a speaker that was playing a stream on dry ground.
- B is wrong: The sight of a stream is ruled out by the speaker experiment, where there was no water to see.
- C is wrong: Cold weather is never mentioned as a trigger anywhere in the passage.
- D is wrong: Predators explain why the pond is useful to the beaver, but the building itself is set off by noise.
Question 3
- A. is dug out rather than formed naturally
- B. fills with rainwater each spring
- C. keeps land animals away from the beaver's home
- D. forms a perfect ring
Show the answer
The answer is C. It keeps land animals away from the beaver's home is right. The next sentence explains that the beaver can reach its lodge without walking on land, where wolves and coyotes wait.
- A is wrong: Being dug contradicts the passage, which describes the pond forming behind a dam.
- B is wrong: Filling with rainwater is not how the pond forms; the dam holds back the stream.
- D is wrong: A perfect ring takes the comparison too literally. The point of the comparison is protection, not shape.
Question 4
- A. very large
- B. bright and clear
- C. quickly moving
- D. recently made
Show the answer
The answer is B. Bright and clear is right. A vivid color jumps out at you, and a vivid memory feels sharp and detailed.
- A is wrong: Very large confuses vivid with vast, which sounds similar and does describe size.
- C is wrong: Quickly moving is drawn from the sound of vivid resembling swift. Vividness is about how strongly something registers, not how fast it goes.
- D is wrong: Recently made is about age. An old painting can still be vivid.
Question 5
- A. angry
- B. hurried
- C. careful
- D. unfriendly
Show the answer
The answer is B. Hurried is right. A hasty decision is made in a rush, usually with too little thought.
- A is wrong: Angry comes from picturing someone storming off in a hurry. The speed is the meaning; the temper is not.
- C is wrong: Careful is close to the opposite. Hasty work is what happens when care is skipped.
- D is wrong: Unfriendly confuses hasty with hostile, which shares only its first two letters.
Question 6
- A. The quantity in Column A is greater.
- B. The quantity in Column B is greater.
- C. The two quantities are equal.
- D. The relationship cannot be determined from the information given.
Show the answer
The answer is B. Column B is greater. 3 x 8 is 24 and 5 x 6 is 30.
- A is wrong: Column A contains the biggest single number, 8, but the product is what counts, and 24 is less than 30.
- C is wrong: Both columns use small numbers, but they do not come out the same: 24 against 30.
- D is wrong: Both are straightforward multiplications with nothing unknown.
Question 7
- A. The quantity in Column A is greater.
- B. The quantity in Column B is greater.
- C. The two quantities are equal.
- D. The relationship cannot be determined from the information given.
Show the answer
The answer is A. Column A is greater. The square's perimeter is 4 x 7 = 28. The rectangle's is 2 x (5 + 8) = 26.
- B is wrong: The rectangle has the longest single side, 8 inches, but perimeter adds every side, and 5 + 8 is less than 7 + 7.
- C is wrong: The perimeters are 28 and 26, two apart. They would match if the rectangle were 6 by 8.
- D is wrong: Both shapes are described completely.
Question 8
- A. 26
- B. 30
- C. 50
- D. 120
Show the answer
The answer is A. 26 is right. Multiplication comes before addition: 4 x 5 = 20, and 6 + 20 = 26.
- B is wrong: 30 multiplies 6 by 5 and ignores the 4, pairing the wrong two numbers.
- C is wrong: 50 adds 6 and 4 first, then multiplies 10 by 5. Addition does not come first here.
- D is wrong: 120 multiplies all three numbers together, treating the plus sign as another times sign.
Question 9
- A. 9
- B. 3
- C. 24
- D. 81
Show the answer
The answer is A. 9 is right. One third means dividing into three equal parts, and 27 divided by 3 is 9.
- B is wrong: 3 is the bottom number of the fraction, not the result of dividing by it.
- C is wrong: 24 subtracts 3 from 27 instead of dividing by it.
- D is wrong: 81 multiplies 27 by 3. Taking a third means dividing.
Question 10
- A. 4,700
- B. 4,600
- C. 4,000
- D. 5,000
Show the answer
The answer is A. 4,700 is right. The hundreds digit is 6, and the digit after it is 8, so the 6 rounds up to 7.
- B is wrong: 4,600 keeps the hundreds digit unchanged. Because the next digit is 8, it must go up.
- C is wrong: 4,000 rounds to the nearest thousand and rounds down.
- D is wrong: 5,000 rounds to the nearest thousand rather than the nearest hundred.