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OFFICIAL ACT Form F12 · June 2023

Reading

20 questions ~9 min recommended
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=== Janus ===
This passage is adapted from the short story 'Janus' by Ann Beattie (©1985 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.). The bowl was perfect. Perhaps it was not what you’d select if you faced a shelf of bowls, and not the sort of thing that would inevitably attract a lot of attention at a crafts fair, yet it had real presence. It was as predictably admired as a mutt who has no reason to suspect he might be funny. Just such a dog, in fact, was often brought out (and in) along with the bowl. Once, Andrea got a call from a woman who had not put in an offer on a house she had shown her. That bowl, she said—would it be possible to find out where the owners had bought that beautiful bowl? Andrea pretended that she did not know what the woman was referring to. A bowl, somewhere in the house? Oh, on a table under the window. Yes, she would ask, of course. She let a couple of days pass, then called back to say that the bowl had been a present and the people did not know where it had been purchased. She was sure that the bowl brought her luck. Bids were often put in on houses where she had displayed the bowl. Sometimes the owners, who were always asked to be away or to step outside when the house was being shown, didn’t even know that the bowl had been in their house. Once—she could not imagine how—she left it behind, and then she was so afraid that something might have happened to it that she rushed back to the house and sighed with relief when the owner opened the door. The bowl, Andrea explained—she had purchased a bowl and set it on the chest for safekeeping while she toured the house with the prospective buyers, and she... She felt like rushing past the frowning woman and seizing her bowl. The owner stepped aside. In the few seconds before Andrea picked up the bowl, she realized that the owner must have just seen that it had been perfectly placed, that the sunlight struck the bluer part of it. Her pitcher had been moved to the far side of the chest, and the bowl predominated. All the way home, Andrea wondered how she could have left the bowl behind. It was like leaving a friend at an outing—just walking off. Sometimes there were stories in the paper about families forgetting a child somewhere and driving to the next city. Andrea had only gone a mile down the road before she remembered.

1. The point of view from which the passage is told is best described as that of a:

2. The passage as a whole can best be described as an exploration of the:

3. The passage most strongly suggests that a useful characteristic of the bowl, in terms of Andrea’s purpose for the object, is the bowl’s:

4. In lines 53–75, Andrea responds to an inquiry about her bowl and explains why her bowl was placed in a client’s home with statements that can both best be described as:

5. In the passage, Andrea is characterized as believing that compared to most tricks used by real estate agents to impress potential buyers, her trick of placing the bowl in a home is:

6. According to the passage, the random placement of colors in the bowl’s glaze creates a surface that:

7. One main point of the fifth paragraph (lines 53–62) is that:

8. In the passage, the admiration the bowl receives is directly compared to the admiration received by:

9. The passage suggests that one reason prospective home buyers have difficulty sharing their thoughts about the bowl is they realize that:

10. Which of the following statements provides the best summary of the events portrayed in the sentences in lines 77–81?

11. The main purpose of the passage is to:

12. The main point of the second paragraph (lines 21–36) is that:

13. It can reasonably be inferred from the passage that some seventeenth-century tulip growers believed tulip breaks were mainly caused by:

14. The information in lines 56–63 primarily functions to:

15. The sixth paragraph (lines 78–84) differs from the rest of the passage in that it:

16. According to the passage, in the seventeenth century, the fact that broken tulip bulbs tended to produce fewer and smaller offsets compared to typical tulip bulbs resulted in:

17. It can reasonably be inferred from the passage that one group of modern multicolored tulips was named after Rembrandt to:

18. In the passage, the author compares broken tulips as they are represented in Rembrandt’s paintings to:

19. The passage author most likely mentions that peach trees were a staple of seventeenth-century gardens to:

20. As it is used in line 79, the word abandon most nearly means:

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