North Carolina End-of-Grade Tests English Language Arts Grade 7

On a clear evening over the Outer Banks, the Moon can show a thin bright curve. A crescent is sunlight on part of the Moon. The rest of the Moon is still there, but that side faces away from the Sun, so it looks dark from the ground. The curve is the lit edge. It is not a piece that has broken off.

Students in the night-sky club at Buxton Middle guessed that Earth's shadow was carving the Moon into that curve. The club note rejects the guess. Earth's shadow on the Moon is a lunar eclipse, and a lunar eclipse is rare. A crescent appears on many nights in a month. A shape that returns that often cannot be a rare shadow.

The note puts the difference into one sentence. A crescent is sunlight on part of the Moon, not Earth's shadow. The dark portion is the Moon's own unlit side. When Earth's shadow does cross the Moon, the event is a lunar eclipse, and that crossing does not happen on an ordinary crescent night.

A field notebook from a wooded ridge in the Uwharrie compares pale moths and darker moths that rest on bark. After a brush fire stained many trunks, birds found the pale moths more easily. Darker moths were harder to see against the stained bark, and more of them lived long enough to lay eggs. In later seasons, darker moths became more common.

The notebook is strict about the cause. Darker moths became more common because that variation was already present. The darker coloring was in the moths before the bark changed. Birds ate more of the pale moths, so the darker variation made up more of the next generations. The moths did not grow darker by trying. Wanting to match the bark does not change a wing.

A margin note blocks an old mistake. Natural selection is not use-and-disuse. Use-and-disuse would claim that a moth darkened its own wings by effort, as if trying could paint a new color. The notebook does not record that story. The dark wings were already in the population. Selection changed which variation was common.

Before the wind rose on the Cape Fear, Uncle Dee told Lila to put the spare coil of rope in the bow of the skiff. The coil was wet and heavy, and Lila wanted it left in the shed. She said they were only crossing to the fish house. Dee shook his head and told her a short crossing is still a crossing.

Halfway across, a gust shoved the skiff past the fish-house piling. The bowline in Dee's hand was too short to reach. Lila threw the spare coil. It slapped over the piling, and Dee hauled them in hand over hand. The rope she had called extra was the rope that stopped the boat.

On the dock, Lila coiled the spare again without being asked. She had judged the trip by the distance she expected. Dee had judged it by what the river can do when a plan is too neat. The weight in the bow had felt like a burden. It was a spare for a miss they could not schedule.

At a shop in Seagrove, potter Helen Ward walks new helpers through an order she will not swap. Clay pieces dry on open shelves until the color goes from dark to pale and the walls feel chalky, not cool. Only then do the pieces go into the kiln. Wet clay still holds water. Heat turns that water to steam inside the walls, and the piece can crack or burst.

A helper once asked to fire a bowl the same afternoon it was shaped, to save a day. Helen refused. Saving a day at the shelf spends the bowl. The schedule looks faster only if nobody counts a cracked pot as lost time. The shelf is not a delay stuck in front of the real work. Drying is part of the work.

Helen writes the order on a card above the wheel: shape, dry, then fire. The card is a sequence, and the sequence is the point. Skipping from shape to fire leaves out the step that lets water leave quietly. The kiln is hot enough for clay that is already dry. It is the wrong tool for clay that is still wet.

In a letter to the Elm Grove town board, in the North Carolina Piedmont, eighth grader Caleb Ruiz asks to move the school bus stop off the blind curve on Pond Street. He counted cars on three school mornings. Forty-one cars came around the curve while students were waiting, and nine of those drivers braked hard enough for the tires to yelp. Caleb writes that the yelp is a warning, not a story he invented after the fact.

A board member had said students could simply stand farther back on the same curve. Caleb answers that the bank is narrow there, so farther back puts a backpack in the ditch. His request is a stop one block south, where the sidewalk is straight and drivers can see the group. He is not asking the town to close Pond Street.

Caleb ends by naming the cost. A moved stop needs a new sign and a note home to families. He calls that a real bill, and he still wants the move. The letter's claim is about sight at the curve. The sign is the price of fixing that sight line. It is not a reason the count of braking cars should be ignored.

When Grandma Inez moved from her house in Kinston to the apartment behind her daughter's kitchen, she brought one chair and set it on the porch facing the road. The television inside faced the other way. People who visited asked why she watched the street. Inez said the street was where news still arrived on foot.

Her grandson Mateo thought she was avoiding the family. He noticed, after a week, that she called people in. A neighbor passing with a grocery bag got a question about a sick brother. The mail carrier got a warning about a loose step. The chair was not a wall. It was a seat close enough to catch a voice before it went by.

Mateo stopped offering to turn the chair toward the screen. He had read her direction as distance. She had aimed the chair at the road because that was the thread she refused to drop, the line of people who still walked where she could speak to them. Inside, the screen could wait. Outside, a person could answer.

A harbor note from a fishing dock on the North Carolina coast warns boaters about the inlet. Last spring the deepest water ran just west of the red marker. After the September storm, that deep water shifted east. The marker was not moved. Boaters who followed last year's instructions ran where the bottom had become a shoal, and two skiffs scraped.

The note separates what changed from what did not. The marker is a pole in a known spot. It did not walk east with the water. A channel is moving water over moving sand. A direction that was true in the spring can be false in the fall without anyone rewriting it on purpose. The old sentence stays dangerous because it still sounds sure.

The dockmaster's last line tells boaters to read the posted depth board each morning, not the route clipped to a cabin wall from the year before. Memory of a trip is not a measurement of this tide. The inlet is the same name on the map. The deep water inside that name has moved.

On a corner in Briar, a small Piedmont town in North Carolina, a historic marker dates a short fight to 1781 and calls it a skirmish. The town archive keeps a diary from a woman who lived two streets away. Her page says she heard shots on a Tuesday in March of that same year, and that neighbors spoke of a fight, not a celebration. The marker and the diary agree on the kind of event and on the year.

A booklet sold at the visitor desk tells a different story. It places the event in 1790 and calls it a parade for a new road. The booklet is lively and short. It does not quote the diary, and it does not explain why its year differs from the marker. A parade and a skirmish are not two words for one thing. One has music and a road. The other, in the diary, has shots.

The archive note tells readers how to sort the pages. The diary is a witness writing near the time. The marker follows that account. The booklet is a later retelling that changes both the year and the kind of event. When the booklet conflicts with the diary and the marker, the booklet is the page that has left the record.

A 4-H note from a yard in Sampson County compares two rows of pecan trees. The north row was pruned in January. By harvest it had fewer branches and more filled nuts. The south row was not pruned. Its crowns looked fuller, and more of its nuts were empty. The note keeps one column for how full the trees look and another column for filled nuts.

A cousin who visited at harvest said the south row had won because the trees looked bigger. The note answers that full is a look. The crop the family is counting is filled nuts, and on that column the north row is ahead. A bigger crown can still hold empty shells. Size in the air is not the same fact as food in the shell.

The note also says pruning has a cost. Cut branches do not grow back by the next month, and the north row looks thinner at the reunion picnic. The writer leaves that cost on the page and still treats filled nuts as the result that decides the rows. A reader who reports only the fuller crown has dropped the column the note is using.

At a trail club meeting in Charlotte, 14 members raised hands for a Saturday hike and 9 raised hands for a museum visit. Twenty-three members were in the room. The secretary wrote that the hike won the vote of the members present. She did not write that every member of the club wanted a hike.

Two people on the roster were absent. Their votes are not in the 14 or the 9. A member who arrives late and wishes the museum had won cannot add those absent hands after the count. The minutes record the room that voted. They do not record a wish from someone who was not there.

The secretary adds a line so the result will not be stretched. Fourteen is more than 9, so the hike has a majority of the people who voted. A majority of those present is not the same phrase as everyone in the club. The museum still had 9 votes. Winning the count does not erase the smaller number. It decides the plan.

On a porch in Beaufort, Jonah found his aunt's note taped inside the lantern door. The flame is guttering, the note said. Wind is leaking at the crack along the left pane. Jonah first pictured rain running through a roof gutter and dropping into the lamp. That picture did not fit the sentence above it. The note was about the flame, and the next sentence named wind at a crack.

He looked the word up in the shop dictionary his aunt kept by the sink. Guttering, for a flame, meant flickering and sinking, not falling into a metal trough. The crack let wind nudge the fire. The flame bent, stood, and bent again. Jonah's first picture had used a different meaning of a familiar word.

He pressed clear tape over the crack and lit the lamp again. The flame held. The note had given him the clue in the sentence after the hard word: wind at the pane, not water from the roof. A word can share a sound with a household object and still name what the fire is doing.

The bow knocks once against the piling. It is a soft knock, like a knuckle on a door. The net hangs over the rail in a wet sheet, and a few small fish still flash silver in the knots.

Nobody shouts. The engine ticks as it cools. Deck boots leave salt prints toward the cabin, and the harbor lights are coins stood on their edges. Work is over, but the boat has not gone quiet.

A gull waits on the next piling, patient as a clerk. I shake the net, and the silver drops into a bucket that rings once. Then the rings stop. Coming in off Core Sound is a small noise after a long water.

The garden club in Wilmington met on Tuesday. The approved minutes say the committee agreed to plant rosemary along the front walk. The treasurer reported that the herb bed would cost 12 dollars. Members heard the minutes read aloud and voted to approve them before anyone left.

That night a social post said the committee had rejected rosemary and chosen roses at 40 dollars. The post was written by a member who left during the break, before the vote. It names the right club and the right night. It names a plant and a price the minutes do not contain.

The club's rule is printed under the minutes. An approved set of minutes is the record of what was decided in the room. A later post can travel faster than that record. Speed does not replace the vote. When the post and the minutes conflict, the minutes hold the decision: rosemary, at 12 dollars, along the front walk.

The concert note for the Greensboro youth choir assigns section 1 to the melody. Section 2 sings a lower part that starts two beats later. The lower part looks quieter on the page because the notes are printed smaller. The note says smaller print is a space-saving choice, not a musical instruction to sing late or to sing softly.

At rehearsal, a new singer in section 2 entered with section 1. She had watched the melody because it was easier to see. Her entrance covered the tune and left the harmony empty for those two beats. The director stopped the piece. Entering with the easier line is still a missed entrance.

The note's last paragraph tells section 2 what the late start is for. The two beats of rest let the melody be heard alone, and then the lower part comes in under it. Quiet on the page is not late in the music. The singer's job is the harmony. Without that entrance, the tune has a hole under it where the second part should have been.

A chalkboard at a farmers market in Durham prices strawberries in two baskets. The small basket costs 4 dollars. The large basket costs 7 dollars and holds twice as many berries as the small one. The berries in both baskets are the same fruit from the same field. The sign states those facts and leaves the comparing to the reader.

A shopper says the large basket is a worse deal because 7 is more than 4. The market note under the sign answers that comparison. Twice 4 dollars is 8 dollars. The large basket costs 7 dollars, which is less than 8, and it holds twice the berries. Paying 7 instead of 8 for a double basket means less money per berry, even though the number on the large sign is higher.

The note warns against one shortcut. The higher price tag is not the higher price per berry. A reader who looks only at 7 and 4 has compared totals and skipped the amount of fruit. The small basket can be the right choice for someone who wants less fruit. It is not the better price per berry on this sign.

I was paddling on Jordan Lake when a heron left the shallows in a heap of wings. I told myself the bird was clumsy. The takeoff looked like too much work for too little grace, and I was pleased with that opinion. It made me the calm one in the boat.

Then my paddle scraped a stump I had not seen. The scrape was loud, and I had to lean hard to keep the canoe straight. When I looked up, the heron was already a small shape over the far trees. The distance had closed while I was busy correcting a mistake of my own.

I did not get a second look at the takeoff. What I had called clumsy was one moment, the moment of leaving the water, and I had judged the whole flight by it. In that first minute I trusted a single hard flap. After the stump I had less room to sneer. A bird can be awkward at the start of a wingbeat and still be gone before a paddler finishes one error.

The writing guide used in a Goldsboro classroom gives one rule for a paragraph of evidence. A claim sentence must be followed by a detail, and the detail has to be something the assigned text states. A feeling about the topic is not that detail. The guide says the reader should be able to point to the sentence that carries the proof.

The guide then shows two student samples about a story in which a lantern goes out. Sample A says the dark scares the boy, and then tells a personal story about a beach trip with no lantern. The guide marks Sample A as a miss. The beach trip is not in the assigned story. Sample B uses the same claim, then gives the story's sentence that he would not cross the yard until the lantern was lit again. The guide marks Sample B as a fit.

The samples are doing a different job from the rule itself. The rule states what to include. The samples show one miss and one fit so a writer can see the difference. A personal story can be vivid and still fail the rule. Vivid is not the same as stated in the assigned text. The proof the guide accepts is the sentence a reader can find.