Florida Assessment of Student Thinking English Language Arts Reading Grade 8

The letter to the activities board disagrees with cutting the jazz band, and it starts by giving the flyer a point. Instruments cost money. A school should not pretend that trumpets, a drum kit, and music stands are free. That grant is narrow. It accepts the price of buying instruments. It does not accept the next sentence on the flyer, the one that says cutting the band would save that full price this year.

The band closet already holds the trumpets, the drum kit, and the stands the flyer lists as if they were new purchases. Those instruments were bought in earlier years, and the letter says they are still in usable condition. Money that has already been spent cannot be un-spent by canceling the ensemble that uses it. A cut can take away rehearsals. It cannot recover a bill the school paid before this budget was written.

The ending puts the two counts side by side. The flyer counts a purchase that is not in this year's budget. The letter counts the instruments on the closet shelves. Because those instruments are already owned, the cut saves less than the flyer claims. The writer still agrees that instruments cost money when a school actually has to buy them.

1 A red lamp crowns the steel mast. 2 It opens and shuts on a slow count. 3 Cars on the county road ease off, 4 as if the blink were calling them in.

5 Streetlamps already mark the corners. 6 The light warns planes and is not a signal to the town. 7 No shop unlocks when the red returns. 8 No bell in the square answers it.

9 The lamp only marks a height in the dark 10 so a cockpit can keep its distance. 11 People in town may notice the blink. 12 The blink was not built as a message to them.

In the foods lab, butter went into a warm pan before anything else was mixed. It softened at the edges, then melted into a yellow liquid that could be tipped from one side of the pan to the other. Ms. Okada stopped the class there and asked for a name for that step. Melting changed the butter's form, from a soft solid to a liquid, and it did not turn the butter into a new substance. Set the pan aside to cool, and the same butter would firm again. That step is a physical change.

The batter went into the oven after the butter was stirred in with the other ingredients. Heat drove changes that a spoon could not undo. What came out had a set crumb and a browned surface, and it could not be stirred back into the bowl of batter that had gone in. Baking the batter into a new substance is a chemical change. The oven did more than pour the mixture into a new shape.

On the lab sheet, the class wrote the two steps on separate lines so the labels would not trade places. Melting the butter stayed with physical change. Baking the batter stayed with chemical change. The sheet asked for those two steps and did not treat every action in the kitchen as the same kind of change.

The loading ramp behind the shop rises 2 feet from the sidewalk to the door. The run is the horizontal distance along the ground, from the foot of the ramp to the point under the door, and that run is 8 feet. Slope is rise divided by run. The rise is 2 and the run is 8, so the slope is 2/8, which simplifies to 1/4. A cart on this ramp climbs one foot for every four feet it travels toward the door.

At the shop meeting, a speaker told the owner the slope was 8/2. That fraction puts the run on top and the rise on the bottom. It swaps the two measures. Eight divided by two is 4, a steepness this ramp does not have. The boards do not climb 8 feet across a run of 2 feet. They climb 2 feet across a run of 8 feet.

The diagram tacked by the door labels the vertical arrow "rise, 2 ft" and the horizontal arrow "run, 8 ft." A reader who follows those labels divides rise by run and gets 2/8, or 1/4. The speaker's 8/2 is the same pair turned upside down. It is not a second measurement of a different ramp.

Tuesday's town council voted on a road levy. Before the meeting closed, the clerk read the minutes into the record. Those minutes say the levy passed 4 to 3. Four council members voted yes. Three voted no. The page names the motion, the count, and the time the vote was taken.

That evening a social post said the levy had failed. The post did not quote the minutes. It said a friend in the audience had felt the room go against the levy. A feeling in the audience is not the vote. The post describes a mood. The minutes describe the count. They are not two wordings of one result.

For the question of whether the levy passed, the minutes are the record. They say it passed 4 to 3. A social post can be copied widely and still be wrong about that count. Readers who want the result cite the minutes, not the post that said the levy failed.

The meadow display holds a simple food chain on one card. Plants stand at the start and store 20,000 units of energy captured from sunlight. Arrows run from the plants to the animals that eat them. The card states that the next level gets about one tenth of the energy stored in the level before it. About one tenth of 20,000 is about 2,000 units, and that is the figure printed beside the animals.

A draft caption under the card said the animals receive all 20,000 units the plants stored. The editor crossed the sentence out. Most of the stored energy is used by the plants themselves or lost as heat as living things carry on. The eaters do not collect the whole store. The card's figure for the next level is about 2,000, not 20,000.

The word about is doing work on that card. It does not promise that the handoff lands on 2,000 to the last unit every day in the meadow. It says about one tenth, and about 2,000. A claim that the eaters get all 20,000 is rejected because it drops the fraction. A claim that names an exact unit past what the card states asks the text for a precision it does not give.

The student handbook prints the phone rule as one sentence: phones are banned in class. Three examples sit under that sentence. A phone on a desk is banned. A phone in a hand during a lesson is banned. A phone that rings while class is meeting is banned. Every example happens in class. The rule does not name a phone that is switched off and kept in a bag in the hall.

The hearing report gave a different set of facts. Jordan's phone was off. It was zipped inside a bag. The bag sat on the hall bench during class. Jordan was in the classroom, and the phone was not. No line in the report said the phone had been used, seen on a desk, or heard during the lesson.

The charge still said Jordan had broken the phone rule. The written rule bans phones in class. It does not ban a phone kept off in a bag in the hall. The facts in the report and the words in the rule do not describe the same act, so the charge does not match the rule that was read aloud at the start of the hearing.

The assembly notice walks through the earthquake drill in the order students will practice it. When the alarm sounds, they drop to the floor, take cover under a sturdy table, and hold on until the all-clear. The notice names that sequence drop, cover, and hold. The steps are a practice of what to do if the ground moves. They are not a statement about when the ground will move.

The next paragraph is blunt about prediction. The drill does not predict a quake. Putting the drill on Thursday's schedule does not mean a quake is expected on Thursday, or on any other named day. The alarm inside a drill is the signal to practice. It is not a scientific warning that shaking has been calculated for that hour.

The notice also draws a line around what the page will not become. Practicing the steps is not the same as forecasting the event. The page does not give a plan for designing buildings. It tells students how to protect themselves in the drill they are about to run: drop, cover, and hold.

The speech is answering one question: can the mural go up this month? The answer arrives before any other sentence, and it arrives as a repeated phrase. "Not yet," the speaker says, then, after a breath, "not yet," and a third time, "not yet." The script in the speaker's hand shows the phrase written out three times. In the margin, the word repeat is underlined.

The repetition is there to delay a yes. Each "not yet" keeps the decision from closing and refuses to let this month's calendar settle the mural. One "not yet" would already withhold approval. Saying it three times holds that withholding in the room, so the audience hears the delay itself as the point, rather than a stumble on the way to agreement.

After the speech, a listener said the triple phrase must have been an accident, or a printer error that copied one line too often. The script answers both guesses. The words are marked to be spoken three times, and the speaker follows the mark. The repetition is on purpose. It delays a yes. It is not an accident, and it is not a printer error.

A poster by the gym door announced, "Most of the town wants a new mascot." The only numbers on the poster came from a survey of twelve friends. The student who designed the poster asked them after practice. Nine said they liked the new mascot. Three said they did not. The poster turned that split into a claim about the town.

A methods note was taped beside the poster before the next bell. It said twelve friends are not the town. A town includes people who never came to that practice and people who do not know the designer. Twelve is too small a sample to stand in for those residents. The nine-to-three split describes the friends who were asked. It does not describe most of the town.

The note then names a second fault that size alone does not cover. The twelve are close to the asker. They share a team, a practice time, and a reason to answer the person holding the sheet. A sample that is too small and too close to the asker cannot be relabeled as the town. The poster's phrase reaches past the twelve names.

Moon phases are the changing view of the moon's lit half as the moon orbits Earth. The sun lights about half the moon during the ordinary orbit that produces those phases. From Earth, observers see more of the lit half or less of it, depending on where the moon is. A full moon shows the lit half face-on. A new moon places that lit half away from our view. The shape in the sky is a viewing angle. It is not a lamp being switched off.

Those monthly shapes are not Earth's shadow. Earth does cast a shadow, and the moon can pass through it. That event is a lunar eclipse, and it is rare beside the phases that return every month. If the ordinary phases were Earth's shadow, the moon would darken only in that uncommon alignment. It would not follow the regular schedule of new, quarter, and full.

The lab card draws the orbit and writes a phase at each position. Its caption tells students not to explain a crescent by saying Earth has blocked the sunlight. The crescent is a slim view of that same lit half. Earth's shadow explains a lunar eclipse. It does not explain the phases people see month after month.

The shop card compares two fictional clamps, invented for the comparison and sold by no real company. The Brisk clamp costs less and breaks sooner. A note under its price says buyers often replace it within two years. The Helder clamp costs more and lasts longer. Its note says it is built to stay in service well past five years if it is used as directed. The card does not add a star, a crown, or any line that names a winner for every buyer.

A buyer who needed a clamp for five years asked which description to read first. The clerk pointed to the Helder. Across five years, a tool that breaks sooner would have to be replaced, and the lower price would be paid more than once. The longer-lasting clamp matches the span that buyer named. The clerk did not say it was the better buy for every person who walks in.

A buyer who needs the tool for a single short job can read the same card and choose differently. That buyer might take the cheaper clamp and accept that it breaks sooner. The passage ties the Helder to a five-year need. It does not declare a universal winner, and it leaves other spans of use to other needs.

Mara paused in the doorway of the workroom and said, "What a quiet room." She smiled as she said it, the way someone smiles at a place that has finally settled. The sentence praised the room for stillness, as if the afternoon had gone soft.

The paragraph that holds her sentence also holds the room's noise. A drill ran at the far bench, biting into a board. A horn sounded in the alley beyond the open window. A cart with a loose wheel rattled across the tile and stopped when it met a table leg. The drill, the horn, and the cart were all part of the sound while she was praising the quiet.

The irony sits in the gap between that praise and that list. The word quiet would fit a room that did not contain those three sounds. Here the word and the sounds share a moment, and they do not match. Mara's praise does not describe the drill, the horn, or the cart. A reader is meant to hear the mismatch. Taking quiet as an accurate report would mean ignoring the sounds the text has already listed.

The log that follows belongs to the fictional freighter Nia Shore, and the harbor it names, Marrow Bay, is invented for this passage. It is not a historical document. At dawn the mate wrote one cargo line and underlined the numbers: "Cargo count: 40 crates loaded aboard. 2 crates left on the dock, tagged for a later truck." Forty crates were on the ship. Two crates stayed on the dock.

After the midday meal the mate added a second line. "Wind light. Gangway up at 12:40. Harbor master waved us off." The line records weather and the moment of departure. It does not mention crates. It does not move the two dock crates onto the ship, and it does not replace the number two with any other number.

Before the watch changed, the mate copied the morning count into a last line so the next mate would not smooth it from memory. "Still 40 loaded and 2 on the dock. The noon line is weather and departure, not a new cargo count." The two crates remain two. A later line in the log does not revise them.

Two metal blocks sit on the same lab table, and a card under them lists their sizes. Each block has the same length, the same width, and the same height, so each has the same volume and takes up the same amount of space. When the blocks are set on the balance one at a time, one is heavier. The other is lighter. Their sizes match. Their masses do not.

Density compares mass with volume. Because the volume is the same, the heavier block has more mass in that shared space, and the heavier block is denser. The comparison uses the equal volume. If the volumes were different, a heavier reading on the balance would not, by itself, settle which block was denser.

A sentence at the bottom of the card blocks a shortcut students often try. A larger object is not always denser. A big block of a light material can weigh less per unit of space than a small block of a heavy material. In this trial the volumes match, and that match is what lets the class call the heavier block the denser one. Same volume is required for the comparison the card is making.

The temperature paragraph follows a single beaker through one trial. The reading begins at 20 degrees and rises steadily until it reaches 80 degrees. Then the climb stops. For 10 minutes the line on the graph stays flat at 80. After those 10 minutes, the temperature falls. A student looking at the flat part said the thermometer must have broken, because a working thermometer, the student said, would have kept moving the whole time.

The lab text rejects that account of the flat part. It says the substance was changing state during those 10 minutes. While a substance changes state, energy going into it can be used for the change itself, and the temperature can hold steady instead of climbing. On this graph, the flat line at 80 is that hold. It is not a sign that the instrument had failed.

The fall that comes after the hold is part of the same paragraph. The reading leaves 80 and moves down, which means the thermometer was still reporting a change. A broken thermometer does not fit a line that rises, holds for a reason the text names, and then falls. The flat part is the substance changing state. It lasts 10 minutes, and it sits at 80 degrees.

January in this northern town is winter. Snow is ordinary, the noon sun stays low, and the days are short. On the walk to school, Ivo tells a younger cousin that January is winter because Earth is farthest from the sun in January. The cousin writes the sentence in a notebook, with distance as the cause and the season as the result.

The science page assigned that morning gives a different cause. Seasons come from Earth's tilt. In northern winter the northern hemisphere tilts away from the sun, so sunlight arrives at a lower angle and the days are shorter. This town's January is winter for that reason. Being closer to the sun or farther from it is not what makes northern summer or northern winter.

The page also corrects Ivo's picture of the orbit. Earth is not farthest from the sun in January. Northern January happens while Earth is near its closest point in the yearly orbit, and the northern town is still in winter because of the tilt. A sentence that explains January by calling Earth farthest misses the cause and misses the distance.