Description

ACCUPLACER Next-Generation Reading

Next-Generation Reading – Question 1 of 20

Instructions

Read the passage(s) below and answer the question based on what is stated or implied in the passage(s) and in any introductory material that may be provided.

Passage

This passage is from a 2019 novel. The narrator is reflecting on a time when she was about ten years old. A ham (amateur) radio is a device for exchanging messages and requires a license to operate.

1. One day, my father brought home a pile of the parts needed to build a ham radio and asked if I wanted to help him put it together.
2. It took us a week, and we built it at our kitchen table, which meant that for that week we ate dinner on our laps in our living room.
3. After dinner, my father went straight to the kitchen table where he’d left a mess of wire and cables and vacuum tubes, and got to work.
4. I started by helping my mother clean up, but then I went over to him, leaning over the part of the radio he was working on to study the diagrams and assembly instructions.
5. Once the receiver was built, we took it into the garage and built a simple transmitter.
6. Then we studied for the radio license, quizzing each other on Morse code and electrical principles and radio wave characteristics every night.
7. My father already knew all of it from the war.
8. He’d been a radio operator as a soldier, and he told me how radio waves could go far, far out into space—and how a few years ago two radio operators from opposite sides of the world had sent messages to each other by bouncing them off the moon.

Question

Which choice best summarizes the passage?

• The narrator receives a ham radio from her father, then begins using it to exchange messages with another child.
• The narrator’s father is interrupted as he’s putting together a ham radio, but later returns to the project and eventually completes it.
• The narrator’s father brings home the parts needed to build a ham radio, but he and the narrator struggle to assemble them.
• The narrator and her father put together a ham radio and get radio licenses, then use the radio to receive messages.The best summary of the passage is:
  • The narrator and her father put together a ham radio and get radio licenses, then use the radio to receive messages.