Ohio's State Tests English Language Arts Grade 7

Late in the evening at Put-in-Bay, Marisol and her grandfather Wendell sat at the end of the ferry pier, listening to the water slap the pilings. Above the horizon hung a thin, bright crescent. “Look,” Marisol said, “somebody took a bite out of the Moon. Is that Earth's shadow?”

Wendell, who had taught middle school science for thirty years, shook his head. The bright curve, he explained, is sunlight falling on the half of the Moon that faces the Sun. The Moon itself is still whole. The other half, the part turned away from the Sun, is simply unlit, so it looks dark against the sky. From Earth we see only a slice of the lit half, and that slice is the crescent.

Earth's shadow does fall on the Moon sometimes. That is a lunar eclipse, and it is rare. A lunar eclipse happens when the Moon is full, because the Moon must be on the far side of Earth from the Sun. A crescent that appears on many evenings of the month, Wendell said, cannot be that rare shadow.

Marisol thought about it as a ferry horn sounded across the bay. She asked if she could come back in a week to watch the Moon change its shape. Wendell said yes and promised to bring a thermos of cocoa.

In Ms. Adeyemi's science room at a Dayton middle school, a tray of photographs sat on every table. Each photo showed moths resting on the side of a shed. The moths came in pale shades and dark shades, and a few dark ones had lived in the field long before a farmer painted the shed dark brown. The question on the board read: Did the moths change color because of the paint?

Ms. Adeyemi explained what the records showed. Before the painting, most moths were pale, but a few were dark gray. Birds snatched the moths that stood out against the wall. When the wall was pale, the dark moths were easy to see and were eaten. After the shed was painted dark, the pale moths stood out, and birds ate more of them. The dark moths, already present, survived and had young more often. Selection acts on variation that is already there; it does not create the variation.

A student named Jasper raised his hand. “What if we shut pale moths in a dark box so they try to grow darker wings?” Ms. Adeyemi smiled. A trait gained by use or effort, she said, is not passed on. The young receive the colors their parents already carried. Moths kept in a dark box would still have pale wings, and their offspring would be pale too.

By the end of class, the board had a new sentence in Jasper's handwriting: The paint did not make dark moths. It changed which moths lived to have young.

The Marietta Neighborhood Association held its yearly meeting in the fire hall on a drizzly Tuesday. The question on the table was whether to spend the association's savings on new lights for the riverside ball field. Secretary Priya Nandakumar stood at the front with the roll book, which listed 128 members.

After forty minutes of debate, Chairman Elwood Park called for a show of hands. Priya counted carefully, then counted again. There were 51 hands for yes and 35 hands for no. Adding them, she announced that 86 people had voted. The other 42 people on the roll had not come to the meeting, so they were part of neither number.

“The motion passes,” Elwood said, “but it is not unanimous. Thirty-five of you disagreed, and that matters.” He asked the lights committee to meet with the no-voters and hear their worries about the cost and about glare on the nearby homes.

Some members grumbled that a quiet room can hide a lot of opinions. Priya wrote in the minutes: 51 yes, 35 no, 42 absent. Then she closed the book.

At the Lorain harbor open house, a guide named Mrs. Okafor-Brandt showed visitors a model of a lake freighter. “Today's word is draft,” she said. “You may know it as a cold breeze in a room or a rough copy of an essay. On a ship, it means something else. Draft is how deep the bottom of the hull sits below the water.”

She explained why the number mattered. A harbor channel has a limited depth. If a loaded freighter's draft is greater than the depth of the channel, the ship scrapes the bottom. Crews therefore check the numbers painted on the bow, which show the draft in feet, before entering the channel.

A boy named Tavian asked whether an empty ship has a smaller draft. Mrs. Okafor-Brandt nodded. “An empty ship rides high, like an empty bucket in a tub. Load it with iron ore or stone, and it sinks lower, so its draft grows.” On the model, the waterline sat at the 9 mark when the ship was loaded lightly and at the 21 mark when it was full.

Tavian said he would never hear the word the same way again. Mrs. Okafor-Brandt laughed and told him that sailors say a ship “draws” 21 feet when its draft is 21 feet.

During peak leaf season, the state park near Logan runs a shuttle between the visitor center and the trailheads, because the small parking lots fill by ten o'clock. Ranger Dabney Quill printed the day's plan on a card and read it aloud to a group of seventh graders on a field trip.

“The shuttle leaves the visitor center at 9:00, 11:00, 1:00, and 3:00,” he said. “The ride to Old Man's Cave takes 15 minutes. The ride on to Ash Cave takes another 25 minutes. The last bus back from Ash Cave leaves at 5:30 p.m., and it does not wait.” He added that the 1:00 shuttle is usually the busiest, because families finish lunch and head out together.

Mr. Fenwick's class planned to take the 11:00 shuttle so they could eat lunch in the visitor center first. Imani worked out that they would reach Old Man's Cave at 11:15 and Ash Cave at 11:40.

Ranger Quill reminded the group that the shuttle is free, but they should check the card twice. A class that missed the 5:30 bus back from Ash Cave, he said, would have a long walk ahead of them.

On the roof of an apartment building in Cincinnati, a group of neighbors kept twelve planter boxes. In early July, the tomato leaves in the boxes along the south edge started to curl and brown, while the plants along the north edge stayed green. Gardener Beatrix Lowell wanted to know why.

She checked the obvious things first. The water tank was full, and the soil in every box was damp an inch down, which ruled out thirst. Then she noticed that the south boxes sat on a strip of black rubber roofing. On a sunny afternoon she pressed her palm against the strip to test it and pulled it back quickly. The roof under the south boxes was too hot to touch, and the heat was baking the roots, which cannot take up water well when they overheat.

Beatrix and her neighbor Cormac slid wooden pallets under the south boxes so air could flow beneath them, and they hung a strip of cloth overhead to cast afternoon shade. Within two weeks, the new leaves on those plants came in green, though the curled ones did not recover.

The group wrote their findings on a card to share with other roof gardeners: Heat at the roots can harm a plant even when the soil is wet.

Last spring, the Whitcomb Branch Library in Columbus set up a bike bench in its side yard, where volunteers help teenagers fix flat tires and loose chains. A teen named Raelynn Dobbs wrote a short report for the library board about how the program went in its first six months.

Raelynn gathered numbers. Before the bench opened, the branch counted about 40 visits a week from people aged thirteen to eighteen. During the program, the count averaged 65 visits a week. Volunteers also logged 212 repairs. She reported that the library began handing out free granola bars at the bench in the third month, and visits kept rising after that.

In her conclusion, Raelynn wrote that visits by teenagers rose after the bench opened. She did not claim to know exactly why. A few teens told her they came for the repairs, and others said they came to see friends who were there. The granola bars may have helped, she noted, but she had no way to test them separately, since they were handed out only after the bench was already busy.

She asked the board to keep the bench running another year and to count visits the same way, so the next report could compare the two years.

Soledad and her lab partner Caspian were growing bean seeds for a science fair at a Bowling Green middle school. They wanted to see how many days passed between each stage, so they kept a notebook and wrote down the date of each change.

On Monday, they soaked twelve seeds overnight in a jar of water. On Tuesday morning, they wrapped the seeds in damp paper towels, slid them into a plastic bag, and taped it to a sunny window. On Friday, the first seed split its coat, and a small white root poked out. By the next Wednesday, the root was as long as a pencil eraser, and a bent green stem had started to rise. On the Sunday after that, the first leaves unfolded.

Caspian suggested planting the seeds in soil as soon as the roots appeared. Soledad wanted to wait until the stem rose, because she had read that rough handling could snap a young root. They settled on a plan: they planted the seedlings in cups of soil on the day the stem appeared, using a spoon to lift each one.

At the fair, their poster listed the order: soak, wrap, root, stem and plant, leaves. A judge asked why they had not planted sooner, and Soledad explained that they had waited so the roots would be strong enough.

The small museum in Youngstown that tells the story of local steel mills keeps careful counts. Curator Ignatius Bell posts a sheet by the door each January showing how many people came through in the year before. The sheet has helped the museum decide when to hire guides.

Last year the museum welcomed 18,400 visitors. School groups accounted for 6,900 of them, and the rest came as families, tourists, or retired mill workers. The busiest month was October, with 2,300 visitors, and the quietest was February, with 700. The museum is open 6 days a week and closes on Mondays.

Ignatius also tracks ticket prices. Adult tickets cost 9 dollars, and children under twelve pay 5. School groups pay a flat rate of 3 dollars a student, so the museum earns less per visit from them, but Ignatius says the groups matter more than money because the stories reach new listeners.

Next year the museum plans to hire two more guides for October, since last year's October visitors, 2,300 of them, were more than three times the 700 who came in February.

On a windy Friday, Dalton Okeke's science class in Akron went to the gym balcony with two balls: a heavy steel ball and a light rubber ball. Dalton predicted that the heavy ball would hit the floor first, because heavy things seem to want to fall faster.

Ms. Varga let him test it. Two students released both balls at once from the railing, and the class watched. The thud of the steel ball and the bounce of the rubber one sounded at the same instant. The balls had landed together. Ms. Varga explained that when air pushes back very little, heavier and lighter objects fall together. Gravity speeds up every object at the same rate, no matter its weight.

“Then why does a feather float down so slowly?” asked Dalton. Ms. Varga held up a sheet of notebook paper and dropped it beside the steel ball. The paper drifted. Then she crumpled the sheet into a tight wad and dropped it again. Now the wad and the steel ball landed together. The wide, flat sheet had caught more air, and the air pushed up against it. The pull of gravity had not changed. Only the push of the air had.

Dalton crossed out his prediction and wrote a new line: Weight doesn't decide how fast things fall. Air does when an object is big and light.

At the Toledo planetarium's winter open house, a volunteer named Mr. Achterberg asked the crowd a question: “Is Earth closest to the Sun in summer or in winter?” Most hands rose for summer. Mr. Achterberg smiled and said, “Earth is closest to the Sun in January.” A murmur ran through the room.

A girl named Winnie frowned. “But January in Ohio is freezing,” she said. “If we're closest then, why do I need two scarves?” Mr. Achterberg held up a globe tilted on a stand and a flashlight. Seasons, he explained, do not come from distance. They come from Earth's tilt. In January, the Northern Hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun. Sunlight strikes Ohio at a low angle and spreads over more ground, and the days are short.

He carried the globe halfway around the flashlight. In July, he said, the Northern Hemisphere leans toward the Sun, the light is more direct, and the days are long. Earth is actually a bit farther from the Sun in July, yet Ohio is hot. The difference in distance is small compared with the effect of the tilt.

Winnie unwound one of her scarves and nodded. The tilt, she said, was the real reason for the cold, and being nearer to the Sun in January did not rescue Ohio from winter.

Every January, if the cold holds, a village of small shanties rises on the frozen water off Sandusky. Ravenna Kowalczyk, twelve years old, went out with her uncle Boyd to drill a hole and drop a line. Solid things usually sink, she thought, as they walked from shore. “So why is the ice on top and not on the bottom?” she asked.

Boyd set down his auger. He explained that ice floats because it is less dense than liquid water. When water freezes, its molecules lock into a pattern with a bit more space between them, so a chunk of ice takes up more room than the same amount of liquid. The same weight spread over more space is less dense, and less dense things float on denser ones.

That, he said, is why fish survive the winter. Ice forms a lid on top of the bay instead of piling up on the bottom. Beneath the lid, the water stays liquid, and the fish can swim there until spring. If ice sank, the bay could freeze from the bottom up and turn solid.

Ravenna tapped the ice with her boot. It was about eight inches thick, Boyd said, thick enough to hold a person but not a truck. She dropped her line through the hole and waited, thinking about the lid she was standing on.

For years, the long brick wall behind the Chillicothe hardware store was a gray stretch of peeling paint and spray-painted scribbles. Shop owner Gustavo Pell kept a bucket under the downspout, a stack of old tarps near the door, and little hope that the wall would ever look better.

Then a group of eighth graders from a nearby school asked if they could paint a mural. They sketched a design that showed the Scioto River, a canal boat, and a row of hills. Over three weekends, they scraped the wall, primed it, and painted in the colors. Neighbors who walked past began to stop and talk. A baker brought rolls. A retired teacher held the ladder.

When the mural was finished, Gustavo noticed that something else had changed. Fewer people left trash by the alley, and the spray paint stopped. He said the paint was not magic. A wall that people had worked on felt like theirs, so they looked after it.

The students signed the lower corner with their first names. Gustavo says he hardly needs the tarps by the door anymore, but he does keep a small brush there to touch up chips in the paint.

Hollis Brandt had been the slowest runner on the Kent Middle School cross-country team all season. At each meet, he crossed the line when the cheering had thinned and the officials were stacking cones. His teammates were kind about it, which, to Hollis, was almost worse.

Before the final meet, Coach Ibarra handed each runner a card and asked them to write one goal. Most wrote things like “win” and “top ten.” Hollis wrote: “Run the last mile without walking.” He had walked the last mile of every race, hands on his hips, eyes on the ground.

On race day, the course wound along a creek. Hollis kept a pace that felt foolishly slow in the first two miles. When he reached the last mile, his legs burned, and he felt the old urge to stop. He counted fence posts instead, saying the numbers under his breath. He did not walk. He finished in thirty-one minutes and ten seconds, the slowest time on the team. Coach Ibarra, who had waited at the line, grinned and said only, “You wrote it down, and you did it.”

That night, Hollis taped the card above his desk. He did not mind that other runners had finished long before him. The race he had won was against the Hollis of the last meet.

Along the waterfront in a small town on the Ohio River, a concrete floodwall carries a row of painted lines. Each line has a year beside it. The highest, dated 1937, reaches above the head of a tall adult. The lowest, dated 2018, comes up only to a knee. Children who visit like to stand beside the lines and measure themselves.

Nell Prather, who edits the town newsletter, thinks the lines are more than a game. Every few years the river rises, she writes, and every few years some neighbors act surprised. The river does not follow a calendar. A quiet spring can follow a noisy one, and the lines on the wall show that high water is part of life here, not a freak event.

She does not ask readers to be afraid. She asks them to be ready. She suggests three simple steps: keep a flashlight and a battery radio in a high cabinet, store important papers in a waterproof bag, and learn which street the town opens as an evacuation route. These steps cost little, she says, and take one afternoon.

“The wall,” she ends, “tells us what the river has done. It is up to us to remember.”

Every Thursday after school, Cleo Marchetti walked to a Zanesville pottery studio where her aunt Perpetua fired bowls in a brick kiln. The kiln squatted in the back corner like a patient old dog, waiting for whatever came next.

Today the bowls Cleo had shaped for six weeks sat on a shelf in the kiln. She had pressed a leaf pattern into each one. Perpetua warned her that clay holds hidden water, and if the kiln heats too fast, the trapped water turns to steam and can crack a bowl. So the heat must climb slowly, the way a person climbs a long staircase, one step at a time.

Cleo watched the dial creep upward for hours. Her stomach tightened whenever she heard a tick from the brick, because she was sure it was a bowl cracking. Perpetua said the ticking was only the bricks expanding as they warmed. When the dial finally settled, her aunt turned the kiln off, and the two waited a full day before opening the door.

In the morning, when the door swung open, the bowls sat in neat rows, with the leaf patterns glowing under the glaze. Cleo let out a breath she felt she had been holding since Thursday.

A vacant lot sits behind the Mansfield community center, and the center's youth council met to decide what to do with it. Two members offered plans. Bashir Odom proposed a skate area with ramps and a rail. Lucinda Pruitt proposed a vegetable garden with raised beds.

Bashir pointed out that the nearest skate area was across town, which forced many young people to rely on rides. He estimated that forty students would use the ramps every week. He admitted that the ramps cost more, about 6,000 dollars, and would need a fence for safety.

Lucinda said the garden would cost about 900 dollars, mostly for lumber and soil, and could supply the center's weekly dinner. She argued that it would draw fewer people at once, perhaps fifteen volunteers a week, but it would give them something to eat and to learn from. She admitted that a garden needs care every week, even in summer when attendance dips.

The council voted to ask neighbors for their opinions. Both plans agreed on one thing: the empty lot was wasting space. The council director, Mr. Ellery, wrote each plan's cost and expected users on a chart so the neighbors could compare them.