Question 35 - High School English I: Reading Practice Test for the STAAR test

Passage 1

The following passage is adapted from the opening of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina.

[1] Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

[2] Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.

[3] Three days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky—Stiva, as he was called in the fashionable world—woke up at his usual hour, that is, at eight o’clock in the morning, not in his wife’s bedroom, but on the leather-covered sofa in his study. He turned over his stout, well-cared-for person on the springy sofa, as though he would sink into a long sleep again; he vigorously embraced the pillow on the other side and buried his face in it; but all at once he jumped up, sat up on the sofa, and opened his eyes.

[4] “Yes, yes, how was it now?” he thought, going over his dream. “Now, how was it? To be sure! Alabin was giving a dinner at Darmstadt; no, not Darmstadt, but something American. Yes, but then, Darmstadt was in America. Yes, Alabin was giving a dinner on glass tables, and the tables sang, Il mio tesoro—not Il mio tesoro though, but something better, and there were some sort of little decanters on the table, and they were women, too,” he remembered.

[5] Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes twinkled gaily, and he pondered with a smile. “Yes, it was nice, very nice. There was a great deal more that was delightful, only there’s no putting it into words, or even expressing it in one’s thoughts awake.” And noticing a gleam of light peeping in beside one of the serge curtains, he cheerfully dropped his feet over the edge of the sofa, and felt about with them for his slippers, a present on his last birthday, worked for him by his wife on gold-colored morocco. And, as he had done every day for the last nine years, he stretched out his hand, without getting up, towards the place where his dressing-gown always hung in his bedroom. And thereupon he suddenly remembered that he was not sleeping in his wife’s room, but in his study, and why: the smile vanished from his face, he knitted his brows.

[6] “Ah, ah, ah! Oo!…” he muttered, recalling everything that had happened. And again every detail of his quarrel with his wife was present to his imagination, all the hopelessness of his position, and worst of all, his own fault.

Passage 2

The following passage is adapted from the opening of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice.

[1] It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

[2] However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

[3] “My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?”

[4] Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.

[5] “But it is,” returned she; “for Mrs. Long has just been here, and she told me all about it.”

[6] Mr. Bennet made no answer.

[7] “Do you not want to know who has taken it?” cried his wife impatiently.

[8] “You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.”

[9] This was invitation enough.

[10] “Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much delighted with it, that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately; that he is to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be in the house by the end of next week.”

[11] “What is his name?”

[12] “Bingley.”

[13] “Is he married or single?”

[14] “Oh! Single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!”

[15] “How so? How can it affect them?”

[16] “My dear Mr. Bennet,” replied his wife, “how can you be so tiresome! You must know that I am thinking of his marrying one of them.”

[17] “Is that his design in settling here?”

[18] “Design! Nonsense, how can you talk so! But it is very likely that he may fall in love with one of them, and therefore you must visit him as soon as he comes.”

[19] “I see no occasion for that. You and the girls may go, or you may send them by themselves, which perhaps will be still better, for as you are as handsome as any of them, Mr. Bingley may like you the best of the party.”

[20] “My dear, you flatter me. I certainly have had my share of beauty, but I do not pretend to be anything extraordinary now. When a woman has five grown-up daughters, she ought to give over thinking of her own beauty.”

[21] “In such cases, a woman has not often much beauty to think of.”

[22] “But, my dear, you must indeed go and see Mr. Bingley when he comes into the neighbourhood.”

[23] “It is more than I engage for, I assure you.”