Florida Assessment of Student Thinking English Language Arts Reading Grade 7

The town note sets two footbridge designs side by side for the windy stretch of the Mill River. Design West uses less steel and costs less to build. When the engineers drive a strong sideways wind through the model, its deck bends enough that the note marks the bend as a problem for people crossing. Design East uses more steel, costs more, and stays stiff under that same wind.

A cost column and a movement column share the page. Someone who sorts the designs by price alone would circle West and stop. The note does not stop there. This part of the river is known for crosswinds that strike a span from the side, and stiffness is the feature that site needs. The lower price is a real number. It does not cancel a deck that flexes under the load the river actually brings.

The town note selects Design East. The closing paragraph says the choice is for a windy river, not for the cheapest line on the sheet. East's higher cost stays printed in the first column so nobody can say the price was hidden. Cost remains one fact among the facts the note is willing to use. It is not the fact that decides the span.

The stage manager's cuesheet for the spring play lists light cue 4 before line 12. Cue 4 brings up an amber wash across the porch. Line 12 is the first sentence spoken in that wash. The sheet places the light ahead of the words so the audience sees the porch change, and only then hears someone talk.

At the Tuesday run, the actor waited until line 12 felt due, then looked up for the light. The wash was already on. His entrance landed in a pause the scene did not have, because the cue had passed while he was still waiting on the sentence. He had treated line 12 as the signal to move. The cuesheet had treated line 12 as the line that follows the signal.

After the run, the stage manager tapped the page in order: cue 4, then line 12. Waiting for the sentence means missing the light that was written to greet it. The cuesheet is the order of the show. The actor's sense of which sentence felt important was a different list, and that list put him late.

Sunlight contains many colors, and air does not treat those colors in the same way. Molecules in the air scatter blue light aside more strongly than they scatter red light. That scattered blue reaches a viewer from all over the sky, which is why the daytime sky looks blue. Red light keeps a straighter path. When the sun is low and the path through the air is long, more of the blue has been scattered out of the direct beam, and the sun itself can look red.

The ocean is not the source of that blue. A blue sea can mirror the sky above it, but the sky does not take its color from water shining upward. Far inland, with no sea in sight, the daytime sky is still blue. The scattering happens in the air overhead. The inland example is there to shut the door on the ocean explanation: water nearby is not required.

The class note puts the cause into one sentence: air sends more blue light sideways than red light. The color is what happens when sunlight meets air. It is not a coat of paint on the sky, and it is not a color borrowed from the water below.

The Gray Point lighthouse log is the keeper's own record of the lamp. A March entry says the lamp completes one turn every 10 seconds. The pattern is a flash, a dark interval, and the next flash, with ten seconds from the start of one turn to the start of the next. Ships along that coast use the timing to tell Gray Point from the other lights.

The visitor pamphlet by the museum door says the lamp turns once every 30 seconds. The pamphlet is a short welcome for people walking the path, and it is wrong about the timing. A 30-second turn would be a different light, with a longer dark gap and a slower return. The log was written by the person who wound the mechanism and watched it. That page is the record the timing comes from.

Ten and thirty are not a small disagreement. A reader who trusts the pamphlet will wait for a slower pattern than the one on the water. When the pages conflict, the keeper's log is the page that matches the lamp. The pamphlet can still welcome visitors. It cannot reset the turn.

1 The pier's long boards have worked their nails loose, and the walk sags where the joints pull apart. 2 A paper notice is wired to the closed gate where the rail bends toward the bay. 3 Saturday people arrive with bags, read the notice, and turn back toward the street. 4 The water is bright, and the wind is too slight to do more than stir the small flags.

5 A boy tells his sister the weather must have shut the walk, the sky looking too fine for any other trouble. 6 The notice answers in a plain block of ink, with no cloud drawn and no word about rain. 7 The closed gate is not a comment on the weather. 8 Loose boards, not the sky, kept the latch set across the pier.

9 Come back when the planks are fastened and the paper notice is gone. 10 The bay will still be waiting, and so will the rail that held the gate. 11 Until then the pier keeps its quiet, boards up and latch down. 12 A clear afternoon does not unlock a walk that failed underfoot.

The review of The Desk in the Hall likes the ending. The reviewer writes that the last chapter lands cleanly and makes the earlier worry feel earned. That sentence is a judgment. Another reader can close the same chapter and wish the story had finished in a different room. Liking the ending records one response. It does not become a fact about the book's quality.

The middle of the book draws the opposite judgment. The reviewer calls chapters four through seven slow, because the search walks through rooms the reader has already been shown. Slow is taste as well. The book does not print a speed. It prints scenes, and this reviewer decides those scenes take too long.

One sentence in the review is not a judgment. In chapter nine the map is in the desk, under a stack of blank quizzes. The review reports that spot as something the book itself states. A reader can open chapter nine, look in the drawer, and test the sentence. The map stays there whether anyone liked the ending or found the middle slow.

In her speech to the grounds committee, Nia asks for a gravel path beside the west garden rather than a paved one. Her reason is rain. Pavement would send water across the path in a sheet and into the planted beds. Gravel leaves gaps between the stones, so rain can pass down through the surface and into the soil instead of racing off the edge.

She holds up two photos. One shows the paved walk beside the auditorium after a storm, water piled against the curb. The other shows the gravel court beside the art room, dark and soaked, with no sheet of water running into the grass. The photos support her claim about how those two surfaces treated the rain they show. She tells the committee they are examples, not a record of every storm the school will ever see.

Nia does not say gravel never needs repair. A gravel path can wash out along its edges and will have to be raked back into place. She names that work on purpose, before she sits down, so the request will not be heard as a promise of a surface that never asks for care. She still wants the gravel, because the path will let rain through. Upkeep is part of the offer, not a reason she drops it.

The drawing of the music room uses a scale of 1 centimeter on the paper for 50 centimeters in the real room. A length measured on the drawing has to be multiplied by 50 before it describes the room. The key sits under the border so that multiplication is part of reading the picture, not an extra chore a person might skip.

The south wall is a line 6 centimeters long on the drawing. Six times 50 is 300, so the wall is 300 centimeters long in the room. Three hundred centimeters is the same length as 3 meters. The caption under that wall prints both figures, 300 cm, or 3 m, and it shows the multiplication that produced them.

Two other results look nearby and are wrong. Adding 50 and 6 gives 56 centimeters, which treats the scale as a number to stick on the end instead of a number to multiply. Reading the 6 centimeters as 6 meters treats each paper centimeter as a full meter, and that is not the key. The drawing is a smaller picture of the room. Paper lengths become room lengths only after the scale is used.

The class table compares plants grown in full sun with plants grown in shade. The sun plants averaged 18 centimeters and had thick stems. The shade plants averaged 27 centimeters and had thin stems. Both groups were started on the same morning and measured on the same afternoon. The table keeps one column for average height and another column for the stem.

A taller average is one result, and it is not the whole result. The shade plants gained centimeters and lost thickness. The sun plants stayed shorter and stood on stems the table marks as thick. A summary that says only that the shade plants grew more keeps the height and drops the stem. That sentence is smaller than the table it claims to report.

A note under the table says the shade plants stretched toward the window from the far side of the room. The stretch accounts for the extra height. It does not turn those centimeters into a win on every column. Height answers how far the plants reached. The stem answers how they held themselves up. Those two answers can disagree, and the table lets them.

Tuesday's news brief gave the final score of the Harbor fencing meet as 5 to 2, with Harbor listed first. It named the two schools that had fenced and stopped there. A reader who saw only Tuesday left with that score and those teams.

Thursday's paper printed a correction. The teams did not change. Harbor was still first, and the same opponent was still second. The corrected final score was 5 to 4. The new line sat under the heading Correction and pointed back at the Tuesday sentence by date and page.

In this kind of brief, the later correction replaces the figure it names. The teams stay. The earlier score does not. Quoting 5 to 2 after Thursday means quoting a line the paper has withdrawn. The meet did not pick up a new sport or a new winner. One number on the opponent's side changed, from 2 to 4, and the Thursday line is the line that stands.

The game spinner is a circle cut into 4 equal parts. Two parts are blue, one part is red, and one part is yellow. Because the parts are the same size, each part is one outcome out of four on a fair spin. Blue covers two of those parts, so the chance of blue is 2 out of 4. Counting the three color names and skipping the second blue part would make the chance look like 1 out of 3, and that count does not match the board.

A player who spins once and lands on red may call the spinner unfair. One spin is a single result. It can fall on a color that covers less of the circle without changing the size of any part. Unfair would mean the parts were not the sizes printed on the board, or the pointer did not turn freely. A single red measures neither of those things.

The colors painted on the board are the evidence for the chance. Blue stays 2 out of 4 on the next spin, whether the last spin was red, yellow, or blue. The last spin is a result that already happened. The divided circle is the probability still in front of the player.

On Fridays the cafeteria sign lists two lunch plans. Plan A costs 3 dollars and includes a piece of fruit. Plan B costs 2 dollars and includes no fruit. The sandwich and the milk are the same on both trays. A buyer can check the dollar amount and the fruit on the sign. Those are the differences. The rest of the tray matches.

A poster beside the trays says Plan B is better in every way because it costs less. The poster takes the price and treats that one advantage as a total win. Plan B is cheaper. In the fruit column it offers nothing, while Plan A offers a piece of fruit. A plan that loses a column cannot be better in every way. Every is the word that fails.

A student who wants the fruit and can pay 3 dollars has a reason to take Plan A. A student who wants to spend 2 dollars has a reason to take Plan B and go without the fruit. The sign supports those separate reasons. It does not support a sentence that erases the fruit in order to crown the cheaper plan.

A solar eclipse happens when the moon moves directly between the sun and Earth. The moon blocks part or all of the sun's light, and the moon's shadow falls on a region of Earth. People standing in that shadow see the sun partly or fully covered. In this event the moon is the body in the middle, with the sun and Earth on opposite sides of it.

A lunar eclipse uses a different order. Earth moves between the sun and the moon, and Earth's shadow falls across the moon. The moon can look dark or copper-colored while it travels through that shadow. During a lunar eclipse the moon is not between the sun and Earth. It is the body in Earth's shadow, on the far side of Earth from the sun.

Moon phases are a separate fact. As the moon orbits, viewers on Earth see changing portions of its sunlit half, from a thin crescent to a full disk and back again. A crescent is sunlight on part of the moon, not Earth laying its shadow across the moon. Earth's shadow darkens the moon only in the special lineup of a lunar eclipse. The monthly change of shape does not need that shadow.

The rental note in the rowboat prints two clauses, one under the other. The boat is due back at 4. A late return costs 5 dollars. The second clause names a fee for missing the time in the first. It does not say the boat becomes free after 4, and it does not cross out the due time. The return that costs nothing extra is the return made by 4.

In the story, Chris reads the first clause and stops. He keeps the boat until 5, telling himself the rental day ends at 4 and the note has nothing left to charge. At the dock the clerk points to the second clause and writes 5 dollars on the slip. One hour past due is still one late return. The note prices that return at 5 dollars, not at 5 dollars for every hour and not at zero.

Chris had treated 4 o'clock as the moment the rules stopped. The note uses 4 o'clock as the moment a fee can begin. Keeping the boat until 5 does not turn the last hour into a gift. It makes the return late, and the late return costs 5 dollars. Both clauses stay in force. Reading only the first leaves the price off the page Chris looked at, and it does not leave the price off the bill.

Audio stop 6 describes a clay bowl with a long crack running from the rim toward the foot. The crack was repaired with gold-colored lacquer. The lacquer fills the break and leaves a bright line exactly where the clay had split. The stop asks visitors to look at that line, rather than glance past it toward the clay that still looks smooth.

The narrator is plain about what the repair did not do. It did not make the bowl new. A new bowl would have no crack to fill and no line of lacquer to follow with a finger. This bowl broke, and someone chose to keep it and to mark the break instead of grinding the split away. The gold-colored line records that choice. It also shows that the bowl had already been used long enough to crack.

The crack remains part of the bowl's history. Filling it did not delete the day the clay gave way. The stop treats the bright line as a record of damage and of care at the same time. Shine, in this stop, is not a claim that the bowl was never broken. It is the way the break was kept visible.

Two proposals are posted for the path into Cedar Park. The ridge proposal is the shorter one. It climbs a steep grade from the parking lot to the overlook and arrives in fewer steps. The meadow proposal is longer. It stays on level ground, curves around the base of the hill, and reaches the same overlook without asking anyone to climb.

The access note selects the meadow proposal. The goal written at the top of the note is a path a wheelchair can travel. A shorter route that rises too steeply for a wheelchair does not meet that goal, even though it wins on distance. The level path takes more minutes for a person who could have climbed. It also removes the climb the note was written to remove.

Both lengths stay in a table, so the ridge path's advantage is easy to see. The note does not pretend the meadow path is the short one. The sentence under the table says that shorter is not the access goal. The goal is a route with no required climb. On that column the longer path is the one that qualifies, and the note chooses it for that reason.

The science reader explains how a moth population grew darker across many generations in a woodland where soot had blackened the bark. Darker moths were already in that population before the trees changed. They were born dark. Birds hunting along the darkened trunks found light moths more easily and ate more of them. Dark moths were eaten less often, so more of them lived long enough to have young.

The young inherited the darker coloring their parents already carried. Over generations, dark moths became more common because those parents left more offspring. A light moth did not change its own wings to match a tree. An individual moth keeps the color it was born with. The account does not say a moth darkened itself by trying, by resting on bark, or by wanting to be hidden.

The reader calls this natural selection: a shift in which inherited colors are common, because some moths were eaten less and therefore had more young. It is not use and disuse, and it is not one insect rebuilding its body. The account sets its own limit. The dark color had to exist already, and the birds did the selecting by what they were able to see and eat. The reader gives no laboratory steps and describes no person directing the change.