North Carolina End-of-Grade Tests English Language Arts Grade 8

Earth's path around the Sun is slightly stretched, so the distance changes a little from month to month. Earth is closest to the Sun in January. A reader might expect the closest month to be the warmest. In the northern half of Earth, January is still winter. Being nearer the Sun does not turn that winter into summer.

Seasons come from tilt, not from distance. The planet leans as it travels. When the northern half leans toward the Sun, that half gets more direct light and longer days. That is northern summer. When the northern half leans away, the light arrives at a lower angle and the days are shorter. That is northern winter. January can be the closest month and still be winter in the north because tilt, not distance, makes the season.

A poster in the stairwell said summer arrives when Earth swings nearer the Sun. The distance record disagrees with that poster. The closest approach is January, and a northern January is still winter. If a shorter distance caused summer, the north would be hot in January. The passage says it is not.

The library's new door sits higher than the sidewalk, and a ramp joins them. The builder's sheet lists a rise of 3 feet and a horizontal run of 12 feet. Slope is rise divided by run. The rise is 3 feet and the run is 12 feet, so the slope is 3/12. Three divided by twelve simplifies to 1/4. The ramp rises 3 feet over a run of 12 feet, so the slope is 1/4.

A penciled note in the margin called the slope 4/1. That note turns the fraction upside down. Four divided by one equals 4. A slope of 4 would mean the ramp climbs 4 feet while the horizontal run is only 1 foot. This ramp does not climb that way. The inverted fraction 4/1 is not the slope.

A label on the handrail repeats the sheet: rise, 3 feet; horizontal run, 12 feet. Dividing rise by run gives 1/4. Adding 3 and 12 gives 15, and 15 is not a slope. Writing the run over the rise gives 12/3, which is not the definition the sheet uses. The margin's 4/1 does not describe a second ramp. There is one ramp, and its slope is 1/4.

1 The blue ticket marks a page I meant to leave. / 2 A thumb pressed its corner flat in the book. / 3 The bus it names left on a Thursday. / 4 The page it marks is 40.

5 I meant to ride as far as the river, / 6 then walk the last blocks to your kitchen. / 7 The book came with me. The bus did not. / 8 The ticket never met the slot.

9 A person could call the stub a plan. / 10 The ink does not use that word. / 11 It lists a time, a fare, and the words "one way." / 12 The kitchen light was on without me.

The equipment shed was supposed to have one key, and the posted rule said that key stayed with the coach. On Tuesday Jonas found a second key taped under the bench by the shed. He took it to the coach that same afternoon, before practice, and said where he had found it.

The coach had thought the second key was lost. The plan for that evening was to change the lock. Because Jonas returned the key before practice, the lock was not changed. Practice was held, and Jonas was there.

After practice a teammate said Jonas had hidden the key to skip the day. The passage does not show that. The key was back before practice started, practice was held, and Jonas took part. The teammate's sentence adds a motive the afternoon does not show.

In 1936 the cannery whistle at Pier 2 blew at 6:00 a.m. Workers who lived across the inlet rowed over after they heard it. When the inlet was rough, some boats waited, and those workers reached the cannery late. The whistle time did not change with the water.

In March 1937 the town hung a bell on Pier 2. The bell rang at 5:40 a.m., twenty minutes before the whistle, so rowers could leave while the inlet was calmer. The whistle still blew at 6:00 a.m. The bell moved the departure. It did not move the start of work.

A later pamphlet said the bell moved the workday. The passage says that sentence overstates the record. Work still started when the whistle blew at 6:00. The bell changed when the rowers set out, not the hour the cannery day began.

Speaker A wants the late bus kept until 5:30 p.m. She counts one Thursday in October: 22 students were still in the building at 5:00 because of a choir rehearsal and a math help session. She then says that ending the bus at 4:45 would cause every after-school club to lose members. The count shows that 22 students were present that Thursday. It does not show club membership before or after a schedule change.

Speaker B wants the rolling bus to end at 4:45 because the route sheet already lists 4:45 as the driver's last loop. He agrees that 22 students were in the building at 5:00. He says 14 of them were in the choir rehearsal or the math help session, and an activity van is assigned to those two sessions. The other 8 were in clubs and are not on the van list.

Speaker B's claim is narrower than Speaker A's. He says those 8 club students would need another ride that day if the bus ended at 4:45. He does not say every club would lose members. He does not say the Thursday count describes the whole year. The two speakers can both be right that 22 students were present. They do not make the same claim about what that count proves.

Rain on the tin roof drummed a hurried alphabet. Mara's uncle said the roof was talking too fast to spell. The words were a joke about the noise. The roof was not writing letters, and the sentence was not a weather report.

Mara was in the shed to sort seed packets. A card on the bench listed four colors: red, yellow, green, and brown. She matched each packet to a color and dropped it in a bin. That list was a set of directions, not a figure of speech.

A rain gauge sat on the shelf. She did not open it and did not write down a depth. The work that afternoon was the card, the packets, and the bins. A reader who treats "alphabet" and "talking" as measurements will miss the joke. Those words describe the sound of the rain.

The town board should leave the reading lamp on in the park shelter until 9 p.m. on school nights. Students who walk home from the late bus use the shelter when it rains. Last November the lamp was dark on six of those school nights. The request is limited to school nights until 9. It does not ask for a lamp left on all night.

A reply says an all-night lamp will waste money. That reply answers a plan this request does not make. The ledger from last November shows the lamp was used for about one hour on the school nights when it was on. The complaint that month was darkness, not cost.

The request still says the lamp should go off at 9. A 9 p.m. shutoff answers the worry about waste. The six dark nights are what the ledger's complaint records. Darkness, not an all-night plan, is the problem the request is answering.

The hall clock gains time. The shop note gives two causes that work together. A spring was wound too tight, and the shelf is not level, so the pendulum swings short. The note does not say either cause would explain the gain by itself.

A student blog blamed only the new paint on the wall behind the clock. The shop note does not list paint. A new coat of paint can change a wall's color. In this note it does not explain the gain. The causes the note names are the tight spring and the unlevel shelf.

The note records a gain of two minutes a day across ten school days. It does not name the morning the spring was last wound. A reader can say the clock gained time through that ten-day span. A reader cannot pull a single winding morning out of a note that leaves the morning unnamed.

On Friday the eighth-grade relay ran at the city meet. A post at 4:05 p.m. said the team finished third. The post did not name a timer or a sheet. At 4:20 p.m. the meet page printed a correction from the heat sheet signed by the timer: the team finished second.

The signed sheet is the record the passage says to use for the place. The 4:05 post was earlier and had no signature behind it. Being first in time did not make it the final place. A reader who stops at 4:05 will think the team finished third.

At 5:00 p.m. a repost repeated the word third and did not mention the heat sheet. Sharing the early sentence did not replace the signed sheet. For the question of second or third, the passage treats the timer's sheet as the record: the team finished second.

The auditorium closet rule has two halves, and both are required. The microphone may leave the closet only with a teacher's signature, and it must return before the next class bell. A checkout that has a signature but comes back after the bell breaks the return half. A checkout that comes back on time but has no signature breaks the signature half.

One allowed example is written under the rule. A student takes the microphone to the courtyard at lunch with a signature and brings it back before the bell. That checkout follows both halves. The rule does not say the microphone must stay in the closet during lunch if those two halves are met.

Tuesday's log shows a signature at 11:10 and a return at 11:40. The next class bell was 11:45. That checkout followed both halves. A rumor said the microphone was missing all afternoon. The log does not support the rumor. The microphone was signed out and back before the bell.

The hike card starts the group at the oak post. Walk 200 yards to the split rail. Take the left fork. Do not take the gravel spur. The spur leads to a private gate. The card's route stays on the left fork.

At the blue stake, stop and count the group. The overlook is 50 yards past the stake. The turnaround is the overlook, not the ridge above it. A student who continues to the ridge has left the card's route.

The card says the hike is 0.8 miles out and 0.8 miles back, so the full walk is 1.6 miles. It warns that the ridge adds a distance the card does not give. The 1.6 miles is the overlook route only.

Priya won the school spelling bee. The winning word was crescent, and she spelled it correctly. Her teammate Owen had drilled her all week. The certificate named only Priya. That night she wrote Owen a postcard about the win. She did not mail it. She slid it into a book.

A classmate told friends that Priya hid the card because she was ashamed of a misspelled word. That account does not match the passage. The winning word was spelled correctly. The card stayed in the book that night because Owen's name was left off the certificate. She did not want a mailbox to be the first place he learned that.

The next day she found Owen in the library and read the postcard aloud. The unsent card is tied to the missing name. It is not evidence that she lost the bee or misspelled the winning word.

Paper Boats is a one-act play in the school theater. This review praises the timing of the final blackout: the lights go out just as the last paper boat is set on the floor. The review then finds a fault in the program note, which tells the ending before the play begins. The review does not say the acting was poor.

The lead spoke too softly to be heard in the first scene and spoke clearly in the last scene. The change is about volume, not about a change in the plot. The reviewer recommends that a visitor see the play and skip the program note until afterward.

The sentence "The boats never leave the stage, and that is the point" is the reviewer's reading of the prop. It is not a complaint that the crew forgot to move the boats. The review's order is praise, then a limit, then a recommendation.

Note A was written at the park desk. At 3:10 the red kite was in the east tree. A staff member brought it down with a pole. No one was hurt. The note does not name the owner.

Note B was written by a classmate at home that night. It says the kite crashed into the crowd and caused a panic. Note B does not mention a pole, a tree, or a clock time. Both notes are about the red kite at the park.

Note A does not describe a crash or a panic. For what happened to the kite, the passage treats the desk note as the record. A reader can use Note A for the time, the tree, the pole, and the report that no one was hurt. Where Note B adds a crash and a panic, the passage does not treat Note B as the record.

In the school print shop the instructor said, "We will press the posters tonight." In this shop, the manual's glossary says "press" means to run paper through the printing press. A new student heard the sentence and thought it meant to hurry.

A second sentence appears in the tour notes: "Do not press the visitors for questions." There, "press" means to push someone to speak. The passage says the two sentences do not share one meaning. A reader has to use the words around "press."

Hurry is a third sense, and neither sentence uses it. Tonight's poster job uses the machine meaning. The tour sentence uses the urging meaning. The new student's guess fits a different sense from the one the poster sentence requires.

At 1 p.m. the class read two soil thermometers on one flat garden bed. The shaded plot, under the hedge, was 62 degrees. The open plot was 74 degrees. The open plot was twelve degrees warmer. The passage names one difference between the plots: shade from the hedge.

The higher reading on the open plot fits more direct sun at that hour. A student said the shaded plot must sit at a higher elevation. The passage says both plots are on the same flat bed. Elevation is not the difference it names.

The passage does not say the shaded soil is wetter. It does not say the shaded plot is farther from the Sun in space. It reports the two temperatures, the twelve-degree gap, and the hedge.