Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System Reading Grade 10

The room I rented in Gloucester had a view of three roofs and a strip of harbor narrow enough to cover with my thumb. I had come in January to finish a series of paintings called Winter Silence. In the rental advertisement, the room looked almost empty. I imagined that emptiness would spread around me like fresh paper.

At six each morning, the shop below began receiving deliveries. The first cart struck a metal edge with a sound that climbed through my floorboards. Later came a radio, a rolling shutter, and voices asking where a box should go. I complained to the owner, who listened while writing a receipt. He said he could ask the crew not to drop the shutter, but the deliveries had to arrive when the truck came. His apology was specific. I had wanted a different kind of quiet, one large enough to erase the shop.

I painted the harbor strip in gray. To simplify the composition, I left out a red warning light near the pier. I also removed the delivery truck visible between the roofs. Each removal made the picture more like the title I had brought with me. When a friend visited, she called the canvas peaceful. I took that as praise until she asked whether anyone lived in the town in winter.

Downstairs, a worker named Isa let me sit near the packing table during a slow hour. She did not offer an argument against silence. She showed me how a sheet of paper folded around a fragile object, where to place the pressure, and how an apparently empty space inside a box could be necessary. Her hands moved quickly, then paused while she judged a corner. I filled two pages with drawings of those pauses.

Back upstairs, I tried to paint the room without removing the sounds I could not show. The window remained. So did the table, a cup, and a line where the wall had been repaired. I placed a red stroke at the edge of the harbor strip. It was too bright. I scraped part of it away and left part visible beneath the gray.

The owner came to look before I left. He said the first harbor canvas would probably sell more easily. I expected him to prefer the picture with the shop’s activity restored, but he had not asked to become a lesson in my work. He liked its pale light. Isa preferred the drawing of the folded paper. Neither response belonged entirely to the argument I had begun rehearsing for them.

I kept the series title on the folder and changed it on the exhibition list. The new title was Room above a Shop. It sounded like an address rather than an achievement. On my final morning, the first cart struck the metal edge again. I heard it, woke, and waited for the next sound. It had not become music. It had become part of where I was.

In a fictional memoir, a student describes helping prepare an exhibition about a neighborhood garden in Boston.

My father knew the trees by where people had waited beneath them. The maple was the bus tree, though the bus stop had moved years before. The oak was Mrs. Fernandes’s tree because she had sat there on a folding chair during the summer street repairs. At school, I learned to prefer names that could appear in a catalog. I thought my father’s map would be impossible for anyone else to use.

When our class began an exhibition about the garden, I volunteered to produce the labels. I visited with a guide to identify each tree and recorded the botanical names carefully. My father came along and carried the folder. At the old bus tree, he began telling me about the mornings when neighbors gathered before an early shift. I asked him to wait until I finished the identification. The guide stepped aside, leaving him room to finish anyway.

His account was not a substitute for the botanical name. It did not tell a visitor how the tree reproduced or how its leaves were arranged. But my label did not tell anyone why a worn patch of ground widened on that side of the trunk. I had photographed the patch and intended to crop it out.

We collected memories from several neighbors. Two disagreed about when the bus stop had moved. One remembered the last stop in autumn; another remembered standing there during a January snow. We kept the disagreement in the transcript and looked for a dated transit notice. It established when the official stop changed, but did not tell us the last day every neighbor continued to wait in the familiar place.

I designed labels with two parts. The first identified the tree; the second gave a short attributed memory and a date range where we could support one. The guide helped check the first part. My father objected to the second when I changed his phrase “we stood close” to “the neighbors enjoyed community.” He said he had meant that the shelter was too small and everyone wanted to stay out of rain. I had turned a crowded morning into a celebration he had not described.

We restored his words. At the exhibition, a visitor read them and said the old stop sounded uncomfortable. My father agreed, then named two people he had met there. The inconvenience had not prevented friendship; the friendship had not enlarged the shelter.

After the exhibition, I walked the garden path without the label folder. At the maple, I could hold the catalog name and the bus name together. Neither made the other unnecessary. The worn patch remained in the photograph, spreading beyond the edge of the space I had first allowed it.

1 The kettle ticks, then settles into steam. / 2 Outside, Commercial Street is a thin wet line. / 3 A bike leans where the wind left it at noon. / 4 Its bell gives one small sound and then is done.

5 I came for a week and stayed to watch the tide / 6 erase the footprints past the breakwater. / 7 The monument keeps its own tall errand. / 8 It does not turn to see who locks a door.

9 Someone across the street fries fish for late / 10 customers who still trust a yellow sign. / 11 The smell arrives before the voices do. / 12 I set two cups out, though one cup will wait.

13 Waiting is not the same as being lost. / 14 The second cup is how the room keeps count. / 15 If that bell speaks again, I will not go down. / 16 I let the steam decide the hour for me.

The kitchen in New Bedford is dark except for the lamp over the table. A coil of line sits beside a lunch tin. CELIA, seventeen, holds a pencil over a list. MARCO, her uncle, has not yet put his coat on.

CELIA: You said I could come if the weather held.

MARCO: I said you could come if you finished the list. The list is still a list.

CELIA: I mended the blue crate. The red one was already split before I touched it.

MARCO: Then write "split" beside it. A blank looks like a skip.

CELIA: A blank looks like I was careful not to guess.

MARCO: Careful is fine at a desk. On a deck, a blank is a thing nobody braced.

He taps the lunch tin. The radio gives the harbor forecast: wind rising after ten.

CELIA: So we go and come back before ten.

MARCO: We go if the list is honest. Coming back is the harbor's sentence, not yours.

CELIA, pushing the paper across: Then look. I wrote "split" on the red one. I did not write that I can fix it.

MARCO: Good. That word earns the seat.

In the boathouse at Marblehead, the club kept a rack of oars labeled by boat. Lena found an unlabeled oar on the floor and assumed someone had been careless. She was about to lock it in the lost-equipment cage. Mr. Adey, who sanded hulls in the corner, asked which boat was missing an oar.

Lena checked the rack. Every labeled pair was complete. The extra oar matched an old dinghy stored in the loft, the one the junior sailing class used when the harbor was calm. Its label had worn off. Mr. Adey said the oar was a spare, not a mistake. The class kept it downstairs on windy Saturdays so no one had to climb for it. On this Saturday the class had not gone out. The oar on the floor was the spare waiting, not evidence that a rower had dropped a pair.

Lena had already drafted a notice: "Missing label means missing care." She crossed it out. The missing label was real. The missing care was her conclusion, and the rack did not support it. She wrote a new slip: "Spare for the loft dinghy. Label worn off. Do not cage." She tied the slip to the oar and left it on the lower hooks, where the class expected it.

Imani wrote to the Worcester city council about the crossing on Chandler Street near her high school. She asked for a longer pedestrian interval only during dismissal, from 2:10 to 2:25 on school days. She did not ask for the street to be closed. She did not ask for the longer interval at night or on weekends. She counted one Wednesday: 46 students used that crossing in the dismissal window. She did not claim that every afternoon is identical.

A reply from a traffic aide said that closing Chandler Street would push cars onto the next block. Imani wrote back that the reply answers a closing she did not request. The longer interval keeps the street open. It changes how long the walk signal holds, not whether cars may use the street.

She conceded that a longer interval all day could back traffic up. That concession is why her request stops at 2:25. The 46 students are the reason for the dismissal window. They are not a count of weekend pedestrians.

The Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts was built to send water toward Boston. The Swift River valley was flooded. The towns of Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, and Prescott were disincorporated. Buildings were not all treated the same way. Some were moved to new sites. Some were taken down. Cellar holes remained in places the water later covered and along the shore. A visitor who expects to row over intact streets of houses will not find that picture in this account.

Winsor Dam holds the water at the southern end. A guidebook at the lookout claimed the four towns had been picked up and set down, whole, in Boston. That sentence is false. People from those towns moved to many places. The buildings that were saved were not reassembled as the old towns on Boston streets. What Boston received was water.

A ranger told a school group that "lost" is a slippery word for the towns. The governments of the four towns ended. The names remain on maps of the reservation, and former residents held reunions. An ended town government is not the same claim as a claim that every memory was erased.

On a fall tour in Carver, a card explains the wet harvest of cranberries. Workers flood a bog. The berries float because each berry holds small air pockets. Crews then corral the floating fruit toward a conveyor. The card says this wet fruit is more often headed for juice. Berries sold fresh in bags are often picked by machines that move through the bog without a flood, because wet fruit bruises more easily.

A child on the tour said the plants must live underwater all year, since the bog is flooded. The guide said the flood is a harvest tool, not the plants' ordinary home. During the growing season the bog is not kept under that harvest flood. The plants grow in the bog bed. The water comes up for the wet harvest and is drawn down afterward.

The card also says a flooded bog can look like a red lake. The color is the berries on the surface, not a dye poured into the water.

Rafi and his cousin Noor climbed Mount Greylock from the north. The memorial tower was in cloud. Noor said the hike had failed because there was no view of the Berkshire hills. Rafi opened the trail register. The last entry, from the day before, said the writer had turned back at a signed icy step and had not reached the summit. Rafi and Noor had reached the summit. The missing view was weather, not a missed peak.

A ranger's note on the register box said the ridge can ice over before the trees below show any shine. Rafi read it aloud. He did not treat the note as a reason to stay. He treated it as a reason to start down while they could still see the next blaze. Noor wanted a photograph with a valley in it. Rafi took a photograph of Noor beside the register instead and wrote their names under the previous entry. He added one sentence: "Summit in cloud. Going down before the step ices."

Noor looked at that sentence and said it was a smaller story than the one she wanted. Rafi said the smaller story was the one they could prove. By the end they were below the cloud, able to see one switchback ahead, and the valley was still hidden.

Speaker A, a teacher, wants the science-class boat to leave Woods Hole at 7:00 a.m. She cites one Tuesday in April when a 7:30 departure met a chop that forced the class to skip a plankton tow. She then says a 7:30 departure will make every spring field trip lose its tow. The Tuesday shows one skipped tow. It does not show every spring trip.

Speaker B, the boat operator, wants 7:30 because the predicted water level at 7:00 on the upcoming trip date is too low for the boat to clear the float. He agrees the April Tuesday tow was skipped. He says the skip was recorded as wind, not as the clock. The log lists wind at 22 knots at 7:40, before they left the harbor. He does not say a 7:00 departure would have completed the tow. He says an earlier hour does not erase a wind note.

Both speakers can accept that the Tuesday tow was skipped. They do not accept the same cause. Speaker A treats the clock as the cause of every future loss. Speaker B treats the wind log as the record of that Tuesday and the tide as the reason for 7:30.

In a mill building in Lowell that now holds a museum, Inez read her script to her grandmother, who had once worked on the third floor. The script said, "Every worker wanted to leave." Her grandmother asked her to name the person who said that. Inez said she had written it to give the room a clear feeling. Her grandmother said a clear feeling is not a quotation.

She told Inez about the stairwell. The treads were slick when the windows leaked. What she wanted, in the years she worked there, was a repair to those stairs and a lamp that stayed lit on the landing. She did not want a narrator to announce that she dreamed only of the door.

Inez revised. The new line was: "On the third floor, one worker asked for a lit landing and stairs that did not shine with rain." She kept the word "one." Her grandmother nodded at "one" and still corrected "shine with rain." The treads were slick, she said, but the water came from the window frames, not from rain falling inside. Inez wrote "leaking frames" in the margin. The revision is closer because it names a person, a place, and a request, and because it leaves a margin for the correction. The new line is not finished.

A chart at a pier in Charlestown lists Tuesday's afternoon high tide at 3:10 p.m. A poster beside the chart says the harbor has high tide at the same clock time every day. The poster is wrong. Boston Harbor has two high tides in a day, and the time from one high tide to the next is about 12 hours and 25 minutes. The clock time therefore shifts later from day to day.

From Tuesday at 3:10 p.m., the next high tide is about 12 hours and 25 minutes later, at 3:35 a.m. on Wednesday. The Wednesday afternoon high tide comes about 12 hours and 25 minutes after that, at 4:00 p.m. Those times are the chart's pattern. The account does not say the water is higher at 4:00 than at 3:10. It says the clock time is later. The shift is about 50 minutes a day for a given high tide, because 25 minutes plus 25 minutes is 50. The poster's "same clock time" would fit a tide that ignored that shift. The harbor does not.

A student asked whether the Moon is the only body involved. The Moon is the main reason for the timing of the tide, and the Sun also pulls on the water. No number is given for how many centimeters the Sun adds on that Tuesday.

The following documents concern a fictional farm stand in Hadley.

ADVERTISEMENT DRAFT Come before nine: our first peach crate always sells out early. The draft was based on three mornings in a student notebook. Monday’s crate was half full at noon. Tuesday’s was empty at 8:50. Wednesday’s still held fruit at 9:30. A handwritten note identified Tuesday as the morning of a nearby festival but did not count festival customers separately.

LETTER FROM THE STAND OWNER I accept that always is wrong. I do not accept that we must stop inviting people to arrive early. Fruit that sits in the sun loses the coolness customers like, and our small parking area becomes crowded later. “Come early” can be advice about the visit without pretending to be a statistical law about every crate.

We should also be careful about the notebook. It records a few useful moments, not a continuous observation of the stand. We cannot infer the exact hour Monday sold out if the observer left at noon. We can say the crate had not sold out by then. Those are different sentences. I would rather advertise a visit we can offer than a shortage we have not established.

RESPONSE FROM A STUDENT REPORTER The owner’s distinction matters. An invitation need not carry the same evidence as a claim that a recurring event always occurs. Yet the words surrounding an invitation can still suggest a reason to hurry. If the sign places “Come early” beside a photograph of an empty crate, readers may infer scarcity even after always is removed.

I propose a sign stating the opening time, the day’s available varieties, and that stock can vary. That will not tell a customer exactly when a particular fruit will be gone. We do not know that. The stand could also post updates during the day, provided someone can maintain them. A stale update is another way of making yesterday’s condition look like today’s promise.

OWNER’S FOLLOW-UP We can post a morning list and mark items sold out as staff confirm them. We cannot promise minute-by-minute online counts during the busiest period. The board beside the entrance will therefore be the current stock list, and the website will identify when its morning note was posted. I still want the words “Come early,” but I will explain them with the cooler morning and easier parking, not an invented sellout pattern.

EDITORIAL NOTE The revised sign is less dramatic. It asks customers to consider what kind of visit they want and provides information the stand can actually maintain. It may sell fewer peaches through fear of missing out. Whether it changes sales is a question for later records, not a result produced by the revision itself.

The first notebook remains behind the counter. Its small set of observations helped stop a large claim. It did not become a complete account merely because it had been used responsibly once.

In the fictional town of Alder Brook, a student observer attends a public budget workshop.

The projector showed a row of numbers labeled Unspent. Lina saw the playground repair line beside a balance large enough to replace the broken gate. She had spent the winter photographing that gate for the school paper. Whenever a child pushed it, one corner scraped the ground. In her notebook she wrote, “The money is there.”

The finance clerk asked participants to distinguish money not yet paid from money not yet promised. Part of the line was committed to a contractor for work scheduled after the ground thawed. The payment had not left the account, but reallocating it would leave the signed project without funds. Another part was a contingency for an inspection whose cost was uncertain. A smaller balance had no assigned purpose.

Lina crossed out there and wrote free. Then she crossed that out too. The word unspent had seemed to offer a gate with no competing cost. The clerk’s explanation did not make the broken hinge less real; it made the possible choices more crowded.

A parent proposed using the unassigned portion and postponing a decorative sign. A committee member objected that the sign carried accessibility information, not decoration. The parent had seen its illustrated front, but not the reverse, where the route and contact information appeared. Lina asked to photograph both sides before writing about the proposal.

The workshop did not decide the transfer. Its purpose was to identify options before the council’s formal vote. Nevertheless, a neighborhood post that evening announced, “Council Refuses Gate Repair despite Spare Funds.” Lina began to share it, then noticed that the workshop had not been a council meeting. Refuses turned an unresolved discussion into a completed action.

Her article the next day described the damaged gate, the distinctions within the account, and the two functions of the sign. The headline said the repair remained unresolved. Several readers complained that the story was too patient with delay. One sent Lina a photograph of a child waiting while an adult lifted the gate’s corner.

She added the photograph to her reporting folder. The account’s constraints did not cancel the child’s wait any more than the child’s wait made every balance uncommitted. At the next workshop, she asked what temporary action could make the entrance usable while the funding decision continued. The clerk referred the question to the maintenance supervisor, who agreed to inspect it that week. Lina recorded the commitment and the date.

Her final paragraph had no victory in it. It ended with the gate still waiting for work and a named next step. She left enough space in the folder for the inspection, the council vote, and whatever happened when someone next pushed the gate.

In a bakery kitchen in Jamaica Plain, Omar and his sister Laila found their aunt's card for morning buns. One word was stained. Omar said it must be cinnamon, because cinnamon is what the neighborhood expects. Laila said expectation is not a reading. She covered the stain and read only the words she could see: butter, sugar, orange zest, and a pinch of a spice she would not name.

They baked a small tray with cinnamon, six buns, and labeled it "test." They did not put the tray in the case. Their aunt called that night. The word was cardamom. She said the orange zest was there to meet the cardamom, not to decorate a cinnamon bun. The test tray was still cinnamon. Laila boxed it for the staff and wrote "not the card" on the lid. Omar had wanted to sell it, because the buns smelled right. Smell was his evidence, and the phone call was a better record than smell.

The next morning they made the card as the aunt had read it. A customer asked why yesterday's smell was different. Laila said yesterday was a test that stayed in the kitchen. She did not say the aunt disliked cinnamon in every bread. The correction is limited to this card.

At the herring run in Weymouth, a sign says alewives swim from salt water to fresh water in the spring to spawn. After spawning, they return toward the sea. A child said the fish climbing the ladder were lost, because the ocean was the other way. The upstream swim is the migration, not a mistake. The ocean is where they came from. The fresh water is where they spawn.

For one watched hour, a counter recorded 40 fish. A visitor multiplied 40 by 24 and announced 960 fish a day. The ranger said the hour was a midday hour in the peak week. The run is not steady through the night, and it is not steady from week to week. The count of 40 may stand for that hour. It may not stand as 960 for a day. The midday hour may not stand for the year.

The sign also says people may watch from the rail and may not scoop the fish. A video of one scoop, the ranger said, would break the rule even if the person put the fish back. The scoop itself is the violation. Putting the fish back does not erase it.

A short play set in a fictional visitor center near the Blue Hills. An old wooden trail arrow lies on a table. A new map hangs behind it. ELAINE, a retired trail volunteer, has brought the arrow from storage. REN, preparing the center’s exhibition, holds a label. Outside, visitors can be heard asking about an overlook.

REN: The old route washed out. If we put this beside the door, people will follow it.

ELAINE: It has pointed toward that ridge longer than you’ve been alive.

REN: That is exactly the difficulty.

ELAINE: We painted it after the first storm. Not the recent one. There was a different bridge then. My brother carried the posts, and I held them upright while he drove the stakes.

Ren sets the label down. Elaine rubs a pale mark where the paint has worn through. The arrow’s point is intact; the word OVERLOOK is barely legible.

REN: I’m not asking you to pretend it was never useful.

ELAINE: The storage room is very good at pretending. Put something behind a stack of chairs and wait a year. No argument required.

REN: Then we should display it. With the old route and the new one beside it.

ELAINE: A map makes the old way look like a thin line. It took us three weekends to clear the fallen branches. Your line has no weight.

A visitor opens the door and points toward the arrow. Ren steps between the table and the doorway, then directs the visitor to the new map. When the door closes, Elaine moves the arrow so its point faces the wall.

REN: You see?

ELAINE: I see what a point does. That doesn’t answer what a person does with the years behind it.

REN: Tell me about the bridge. We can put your account with the map.

ELAINE: And the washout?

REN: That too.

ELAINE: It will sound like we failed to build it properly.

REN: Does the ground’s changing mean that every person who worked there failed?

Elaine does not answer. She takes the label and reads it. Ren has written, “Obsolete sign.” Elaine places it face down, as carefully as if it were wet paint.

ELAINE: That word points as well.

After a pause, Ren turns the label over and begins again. Elaine describes the sound of the creek beneath the old bridge, then corrects herself: in summer the creek was often barely audible. Ren writes both the memory and the correction.

Later, the arrow stands inside a case, beyond a small barrier separating the exhibition from the route-information desk. Its point faces a photograph rather than an exit. The label names the closed route, the work that opened it, and the storm that ended its use. Beneath the photograph is Elaine’s account. She has crossed out one line and left the change visible.

At closing, Ren finds her standing beside the case.

REN: Is that better?

ELAINE: It isn’t the path.

REN: No.

ELAINE: But it doesn’t send anyone onto it.

She looks once more at her brother in the photograph, holding a post that has not yet been driven into the ground.