Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress English Language Arts Grade 7

On the south pier at South Haven, after the summer lamps had been hooded for the week, Chris Nguyen pointed at a thin bright curve over Lake Michigan. He told volunteer Ada Voss that Earth was biting the Moon. Ada opened the pier log to a printed card and read the first line aloud. A crescent is sunlight on the lit half. The Moon is still whole. The half turned away from the Sun gets no sunlight, so from the pier that half looks dark. The bright curve is the lit edge a person can see.

Chris had guessed that Earth's shadow was trimming the Moon into that curve. The next line on the card answers him. Earth's shadow is a lunar eclipse, and a lunar eclipse is rare. A crescent appears on many evenings. A shape that returns that often cannot be a rare shadow. When a lunar eclipse does happen, the Moon is full, and the darkening is Earth's shadow crossing that full disk.

Ada gave him a check that needs no telescope. On a crescent night the dark portion is the Moon's own night side, not a bite traveling across a full disk. If the pier log called every crescent an eclipse, the word would name any Moon that was not a perfect circle. She wrote both names in the log, phase and eclipse, so the next volunteer would not mix the monthly sunlight pattern with the rare shadow.

In the science room at Munising Middle School, Leif Holst proposed a project. He would shut pale moths in a dark box so they would work at growing darker wings, then raise their young and expect those young to be dark too. He had seen pale moths and darker moths on the paper birches behind the school. He had also seen the new charcoal shed, where a pale wing showed up like chalk.

Ms. Carr set an older contact sheet on the bench. Darker moths were already present in those frames, taken before the shed was painted. She said the box would not teach a wing. Birds had been eating more of the moths that stood out. On pale bark, dark wings were easier to miss. On the dark shed, pale wings were easier to find. The moths that survived carried colors the birches already held. Selection acts on variation.

Leif asked again about effort. If a moth struggled in the dark, could that struggle be passed on? Ms. Carr said no. A trait acquired by use is not inherited. The young receive colors the parents already carried, not a color earned by trying. Leif crossed out the box plan. He wrote a new question: which moths do the birds miss, on bark and on the shed? He clipped the old sheet to the new shed photo so the dark wings from before the paint stayed on the page.

At a special meeting in the fire hall beside the rink in Calumet, the question was whether to pay for a warming hut. The first shout sounded, to many people, like a clear yes. Three voters asked for a counted vote. The count was 51 yes and 35 no. Clerk Inez Lahti added those votes on the tally sheet. Her line reads: 51 yes and 35 no means 86 people voted. She announced that the hut proposal passed, and that the finished count was the record. A memory of how the shout had sounded was not a second result.

Forty-two people on the roll never came. Lahti's note says the 42 absent people are in neither number. They are not inside the 51, and they are not inside the 35. That night a message said Calumet was unanimous for the hut. Lahti struck the word. The vote is not unanimous. Unanimous would mean there were no no-votes. The room produced 35 no-votes. A majority of the people who voted is not every name on the roll.

Otto Brandt had to post a sentence for the school paper before the rink lights went out. He wrote that the warming hut passed, 51 to 35, among the people who voted. He did not write that the shout overruled the count. He did not write that the town was unanimous. He kept 35 in the sentence so a reader could see a passed vote and a divided room in the same record. Passing tells the town to build. The 35 tells the town the room did not all agree.

At a riverside display in Newaygo, on the Muskegon River, a sign reads: Keep off the boom. Farah Dean steps back. She knows boom from movies, where it means a blast. A speaker at the next panel plays a recorded explosion for a mill whistle, and that sound makes the sign feel like a warning about a bomb.

Guide Norm Hicks taps a chained line of timbers in the current. That line is the boom. It is a floating fence that holds loose logs in this part of the river. The sign's second sentence says: Do not walk the timbers. People slip between the logs. Farah had carried a blast meaning into a display that was naming a fence of wood.

Norm asks her to write a glossary card for younger visitors. She writes that a boom is a floating fence of timbers, not a blast. Then she moves the card away from the explosion speaker so the sound and the word are not neighbors. She uses the river word to ask which end of the line is tied to the bank. The speaker had pointed her at a noise. The timbers in the water were the object she needed.

At a sugar shack outside Vermontville, boiler Maeve Lind shows helper Pete Lang two boils that throw up the same steam and do different jobs. The sap boil cooks water out of maple sap until syrup can be drawn into jars. That boil is the crop.

The rinse boil comes after the draw-off. Maeve runs plain water in the pan to lift sugar stuck to the steel. Pete asks to bottle that water and count more jars. Maeve refuses. Bottling the rinse would thin any syrup it touched, and it would skip the cleaning the pan needs. Steam over the rinse is not a second crop. A job can look busy and still be a wash.

A card on the wall lists the sap boil and the rinse boil in two rows, with the purpose of each. The card is there so the rows do not get mixed. Mixing them would make a person treat cleaning water as syrup. The sap boil fills jars. The rinse boil saves the pan for the next sap.

In a letter to the Lansing City Council, seventh grader Priya Shah asks for a leading pedestrian interval at Washington Avenue and Capitol Avenue, near her middle school. The walk signal would start 5 seconds before cars get a green. She asks for that order at school-arrival time, not all night. She does not ask the city to remove parking.

A shop owner wrote that any signal change would hurt the ten parking spaces on the corner. Priya says those spaces can stay. The interval does not take one of them. She does grant a cost: drivers would have to learn a new order, and she calls that a real inconvenience. Her evidence is a notebook of 9 near-misses across five mornings. The dates begin the week before the plan appears in her letter.

A rumor said she chose the number 9 after she had already picked the plan. The notebook order answers that rumor. She does not claim every driver failed. Her claim is those 9 near-misses, at that corner, in the morning. The parking worry and the near-miss count are different subjects, and she refuses to trade one for the other.

At the Soo Locks in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, new volunteer Samir Quinn watched lead volunteer Helen Bird recopy the approach board. He thought she did it to look busy. The board lists each boat's radio name, its direction, and the gap in minutes before the next one. Upbound means heading toward Lake Superior. Downbound means heading toward Lake Huron.

The night list had the freighter Elm County as downbound. A morning radio call said Elm County was upbound. Helen had already rewritten that direction after the first correction. When the call came again, her board matched the radio, and the night list did not. She asked the lock crew to hold the gate plan that assumed the freighter was heading toward Lake Huron. A downbound plan would aim the crew the wrong way for a boat heading toward Lake Superior.

Samir had wanted to keep the night list because the handwriting was neater. Helen told him neat is not current. She had him write the next correction himself, in his own uneven letters, and initial it. He still found her printing easier to read. He stopped treating the rewriting as a show. The board is a check against the last radio call. A neat wrong direction is worse than a messy right one.

A reading packet at a middle school in Port Huron holds three pages about the steamer Marta Bell, a boat that exists only in this packet. The purser's list is dated Friday, May 2, 1890, the afternoon the boat tied up. It records 18 passengers, fog, and a cracked gangplank. It was written at the dock, on that day.

A draft plaque agrees that Marta Bell stopped that week. It prints 80 passengers. In the margin, a pencil note says a reader may have turned 18 into 80 by misreading the digits. The plaque names the right boat and the right week. Its passenger line does not match the list it claims to follow.

The third page is a short story. On the day the boat docks, a drum line leads the passengers up Water Street. The purser's list does not mention drums, music, or a parade. It mentions fog and the cracked gangplank. The packet's cover tells students how to sort the pages. The list is a record made on the day. The plaque is a later summary that may have turned 18 into 80. The story adds a parade the list does not contain. For the passenger count, the packet points to the purser's 18.

The signed sheet at the perch derby on Houghton Lake has two columns. One column is weight, measured on the derby scale. The other is the booth prize, given for the loudest cheer at the tent. Lila Brooks is first in the weight column with a perch of 2 pounds. Omar Singh is second with a perch of 1 pound. North Tent Bait is first in the booth column. That shop entered no fish. Its entry was a paper fish pinned over the counter.

In the parking lot, students chant that the shop won the derby. A photo of the paper fish moves faster than the sheet. The band on the paper fish reads Loudest Cheer. Nothing on the band says the shop ranked first by weight. The chant is loud, and the photo is a real picture of a real paper fish. Neither one is the signed weight column.

A livestream caption already says North Tent Bait won Houghton Lake. Editor Grace Cho has to correct it before the evening post. The derby guide says the correction must lead with the weight column. The cheer can be named after, in its own sentence. Grace writes that Lila Brooks took first by weight with a 2-pound perch, and Omar Singh was second with 1 pound. North Tent Bait won Loudest Cheer and entered no fish. She deletes the caption that gave the shop the weight win. Merging the columns would make one prize look like the other.

On a class visit to Sleeping Bear Dunes, Bea Solano asked to place a 1998 photo in a glass case. The photo shows a stair called Pine Step and a painted arrow. The dune has moved over that stair. The sand covers it. Bea wants the case to include a resident's sentence: We used these stairs before the dune covered them.

A vendor had been selling the same photo with no date. Two hikers tried to find the stair and slid on open sand. The park stopped the loose sales. Bea feared that stopping the sales would erase the stair's story. Ranger Luis Ortega said the case keeps the story, and the loose sale was the hazard. A picture with an arrow still behaves like a map if nothing says the sand moved.

The case will hold one photo, the year 1998, and the resident's sentence. It will not include a trail diagram that draws Pine Step as open. Bea writes the label herself: The dune moved over Pine Step. The arrow in the photo is not a route today. She gets the memory she asked for. Hikers do not get a false route.

Kenji Marsh's report on the Boardman River in Traverse City asks one question at the top: How did the count under these rocks change after the river turned muddy? He lifted the same 12 rocks in the morning and again in the afternoon. The morning water was clear, and he counted 40 mayfly nymphs. After the rain the water was muddy, and the afternoon count under those rocks was 15.

His classmate Pilar Gomez said the afternoon had won because more people were on the bank then. The report answers that a crowd is a look. The result being counted is nymphs under the rocks, and on that result the morning count is larger. A footnote says the rocks were the same 12, so the drop is not a new set of stones.

Kenji does not write that the nymphs left the river forever. He writes that fewer were under those rocks once the water turned muddy. A reader who reports only the busier bank has dropped the count the question is using.

The year timeline in the Flint school paper leaves March as a date with no sentence. Two club notes disagree about why the school garden flooded. One blames a locked pump. The other blames a torn liner. Editor Joan Hale will not print either account until the pump log is checked.

Reporter Devon Bell wants a sentence about the October parade in that March slot so the timeline looks full. Joan says the parade was real and it was in October. A true parade placed in the wrong month would be a lie about March, and it would hide the flood under a celebration. The empty slot is waiting on a document. It is not waiting on a decoration.

Devon may write the parade on the sports page, dated October. He may not move it. Joan pins a slip on the March slot that reads: Waiting on the pump log. By Friday, Devon can explain the slip to a reader. A full-looking line can be the less honest one. The slip tells a reader what is missing and why.

Asha Rahman of Saugatuck asked the historical society to add one sentence to the sign at the dune overlook: A lumber town called Singapore stood here before the dunes covered the site. The sign already names the dune grass and the view west. It says nothing about a town. Asha writes that the sand visitors photograph is the same sand that covered the town site in the nineteenth century. The streets are not waiting behind the dune for a tour.

A board member replied that naming a lost town will make visitors try to dig. Asha answers that the sentence can carry its own warning: Do not dig. She agrees that digging would harm the dune and the site under it. She does not agree that silence is the only way to stop a shovel. A person can be told both that a town was here and that the sand should stay put.

Her last paragraph says what the sentence is for. It would not rebuild Singapore, and it would not uncover a single board. It would keep a visitor from calling the dune empty, as if the view had never been a town site. The grass and the view can stay on the sign. The name and the warning can stand in the same line.

We drag the hut toward the ramp on two green planks. The floor ticks as ice lets go of the nails. A stovepipe lies in the truck bed, black and quiet. My uncle's spare mitten stays clenched on the auger.

The lake keeps a pale scar where the trucks went out. Thin-ice markers are sticks with no cloth left. He counts the holes we bored and frowns at the number, the way a person frowns at a clock that will not argue back.

I asked for one more dawn with the tip-up bells. The ramp has the last word: boards, then gravel, then the highway. In the mirror the lake lies flat as a closed gate. We take the mitten. The kitchen sink can thaw what the ice kept.

The wings of a middle-school auditorium in Kalamazoo. A fire bell and a scene bell can sound alike from backstage. RAE is the stage manager. ELLIS is the new cue caller. A light over the door shows red or amber.

RAE: A long bell means the building. Hold the curtain and watch the door. If that light turns red, we clear the stage. ELLIS: Both bells sound like work to me. I should pull something. RAE: A short bell is the scene. The light goes amber. You pull only when I nod.

Stage direction: Rae speaks softly. Her palm rests on the curtain rope so it cannot travel. Ellis puts a hand on the rope to feel useful.

RAE: Off the rope. Wanting to help is not a cue. Stage direction: Ellis steps back. The door light stays amber. Rae nods. Only then does Ellis pull, and the curtain opens on the set change, not on an alarm.

In a pasty shop in Ishpeming, a card wired to the steel table reads: fill, then crimp, then bake. Owen Pike, on his first Saturday, wants to slide the folded dough in at once. The oven is already hot, and waiting feels wasteful. Baker Nell Kozlow stops him. The seam has to be crimped while the dough is raw.

Nell taps the card's middle word. Heat sets the edge. A crimp pressed into a cooked edge cracks, and the filling spills. The hot oven is a real fact. It is not a reason to reorder the card. She also tells him to cut a vent. Owen glances at the metal duct on the ceiling. Nell points at the top of the dough. In this shop a vent is a slit cut so steam can leave, not a duct in the wall.

Owen waits, crimps the raw edge, cuts the slit, and then bakes. The first pasty holds its filling. He still thinks the wait felt long. He stops calling the card fussy. The order was the difference between a sealed crust and a crack.

Mina Ortiz drafted a post for her Marquette class: Lake Superior makes our snow because the lake is cold, and cold things make snow. Mr. Adeyemi wrote in the margin before she published it. Lake-effect snow here happens when cold air travels across lake water that is warmer than the air. The air picks up moisture and rises. Snow falls on the downwind shore, which includes Marquette.

The note adds what a frozen lake would do. If the lake froze solid across the path of the wind, that moisture source would be capped, and this kind of snow would weaken. Cold air is necessary. Open water, warmer than the air above it, is also necessary. Cold alone, with no vapor from the lake, does not finish the explanation.

A classmate said more cold always means more of this snow, so a fully frozen lake should increase it. The note says that guess drops the moisture. A thermometer can show that the air is cold. A thermometer by itself is not the whole cause.