PSAT PSAT-Reading echte frage : Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test - Reading

Farmlands, wetlands, forests, and deserts that composed the American landscape in the early twentieth
century have frequently been transformed during the past thirty years into mushrooming metropolitan
areas as urbanization spreads across the country. Many metropolitan areas in the United States are
growing at extraordinary rates. "Urban growth is a vital issue that requires our careful attention from local
to global scales," said Barbara Ryan, USGS Associate Director of Geography.
"It is not until we begin to take a broad census of the land itself--tracking landscapes from a spatial
perspective in a time scale of decades--that we can grasp the scale of the changes that have already
occurred and predict the impact of changes to come."
On average, between 1984 and 2004, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, Memphis,
Minneapolis-St. Paul, Orlando, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Raleigh-Durham, Reno-Sparks, Sacramento,
Seattle-Tacoma, and Tampa-St. Petersburg averaged 173 square miles of additional urban land over the
two decades, with Houston, Orlando, and Atlanta as the top three regions by area. The growth leaders by
percentage change were Las Vegas (193 percent), Orlando (157 percent), and Phoenix (103 percent).
The tone of this passage is best described as

• A. dour
• B. restrained ardor
• C. neutral
• D. fanatical
• E. biased

In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the East, I called on good-natured,
garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired after my friend's friend, Leonidas W. Smiley, as requested to
do, and I hereunto append the result. I have a lurking suspicion that Leonidas W. Smiley is a myth; that
my friend never knew such a personage; and that he only conjectured that, if I asked old Wheeler about
him, it would remind him of his infamous Jim Smiley, and he would go to work and bore me nearly to
death with some infernal reminiscence of him as long and tedious as it should be useless to me. If that
was the design, it certainly succeeded. I found Simon Wheeler dozing comfortably by the barroom stove
of the old, dilapidated tavern in the ancient mining camp of Angel's, and I noticed that he was fat and
bald-headed, and had an expression of winning gentleness and simplicity upon his tranquil countenance.
He roused up and gave me good-day. I told him a friend of mine had commissioned me to make some
inquiries about a cherished companion of his boyhood named Leonidas W.
Smiley--Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley--a young minister of the Gospel, who he had heard was at one time a
resident of Angel's Camp. I added that, if Mr. Wheeler could tell me anything about this Rev. Leonidas W.
Smiley, I would feel under many obligations to him.
What information does the narrator relate prior to the retelling of the meeting of Simon Wheeler?

• A. The story likely to be heard would feasibly be boring and long.
• B. Any story he might hear from Wheeler would likely be long.
• C. Somehow there might be a story about Jim Smiley to be perhaps told by Wheeler.
• D. The information he might hear would be of no general interest to him.
• E. It was a fact that all his suspicions regarding Wheeler proved true.

This passage discusses the work of Abe Kobo, a Japanese novelist of the twentieth century.
Abe Kobo is one of the great writers of postwar Japan. His literature is richer, less predictable, and
wider-ranging than that of his famed contemporaries, Mishima Yukio and Nobel laureate Oe Kenzaburo. It
is infused with the passion and strangeness of his experiences in Manchuria, which was a Japanese
colony on mainland China before World War II.
Abe spent his childhood and much of his youth in Manchuria, and, as a result, the orbit of his work would
be far less controlled by the oppressive gravitational pull of the themes of furusato (hometown) and the
emperor than his contemporaries'.
Abe, like most of the sons of Japanese families living in Manchuria, did return to Japan for schooling. He
entered medical school in Tokyo in 1944--just in time to forge himself a medical certificate claiming ill
health; this allowed him to avoid fighting in the war that Japan was already losing and return to Manchuria.
When Japan lost the war, however, it also lost its Manchurian colony. The Japanese living there were
attacked by the Soviet Army and various guerrilla bands. They suddenly found themselves refugees,
desperate for food. Many unfit men were abandoned in the Manchurian desert. At this apocalyptic time,
Abe lost his father to cholera.
He returned to mainland Japan once more, where the young were turning to Marxism as a rejection of the
militarism of the war. After a brief, unsuccessful stint at medical school, he became part of a Marxist group
of avant-garde artists. His work at this time was passionate and outspoken on political matters, adopting
black humor as its mode of critique. During this time, Abe worked in the genres of theater, music, and
photography. Eventually, he mimeographed fifty copies of his first "published" literary work, entitled
Anonymous Poems, in 1947. It was a politically charged set of poems dedicated to the memory of his
father and friends who had died in Manchuria. Shortly thereafter, he published his first novel, For a
Signpost at the End of a Road, which imagined another life for his best friend who had died in the
Manchurian desert. Abe was also active in the Communist Party, organizing literary groups for
workingmen.
Unfortunately, most of this radical early work is unknown outside Japan and underappreciated even in
Japan. In early 1962, Abe was dismissed from the Japanese Liberalist Party. Four months later, he
published the work that would blind us to his earlier oeuvre, Woman in the Dunes. It was director
Teshigahara Hiroshi's film adaptation of Woman in the Dunes that brought Abe's work to the international
stage. The movie's fame has wrongly led readers to view the novel as Abe's masterpiece. It would be
more accurate to say that the novel simply marked a turning point in his career, when Abe turned away
from the experimental and heavily political work of his earlier career. Fortunately, he did not then turn to
furusato and the emperor after all, but rather began a somewhat more realistic exploration of his
continuing obsession with homelessness and alienation. Not completely a stranger to his earlier
commitment to Marxism, Abe turned his attention, beginning in the sixties, to the effects on the individual
of Japan's rapidly urbanizing, growthdriven, increasingly corporate society.
The author's attitude toward Marxism can best be described as

• A. skeptical tolerance.
• B. reverent espousal.
• C. restrained impatience.
• D. respectful interest.
• E. contemptuous derision.

This passage discusses the work of Abe Kobo, a Japanese novelist of the twentieth century.
Abe Kobo is one of the great writers of postwar Japan. His literature is richer, less predictable, and
wider-ranging than that of his famed contemporaries, Mishima Yukio and Nobel laureate Oe Kenzaburo. It
is infused with the passion and strangeness of his experiences in Manchuria, which was a Japanese
colony on mainland China before World War II.
Abe spent his childhood and much of his youth in Manchuria, and, as a result, the orbit of his work would
be far less controlled by the oppressive gravitational pull of the themes of furusato (hometown) and the
emperor than his contemporaries'.
Abe, like most of the sons of Japanese families living in Manchuria, did return to Japan for schooling. He
entered medical school in Tokyo in 1944--just in time to forge himself a medical certificate claiming ill
health; this allowed him to avoid fighting in the war that Japan was already losing and return to Manchuria.
When Japan lost the war, however, it also lost its Manchurian colony. The Japanese living there were
attacked by the Soviet Army and various guerrilla bands. They suddenly found themselves refugees,
desperate for food. Many unfit men were abandoned in the Manchurian desert. At this apocalyptic time,
Abe lost his father to cholera.
He returned to mainland Japan once more, where the young were turning to Marxism as a rejection of the
militarism of the war. After a brief, unsuccessful stint at medical school, he became part of a Marxist group
of avant-garde artists. His work at this time was passionate and outspoken on political matters, adopting
black humor as its mode of critique.
During this time, Abe worked in the genres of theater, music, and photography. Eventually, he
mimeographed fifty copies of his first "published" literary work, entitled Anonymous Poems, in 1947. It
was a politically charged set of poems dedicated to the memory of his father and friends who had died in
Manchuria. Shortly thereafter, he published his first novel, For a Signpost at the End of a Road, which
imagined another life for his best friend who had died in the Manchurian desert. Abe was also active in the
Communist Party, organizing literary groups for workingmen.
Unfortunately, most of this radical early work is unknown outside Japan and underappreciated even in
Japan. In early 1962, Abe was dismissed from the Japanese Liberalist Party. Four months later, he
published the work that would blind us to his earlier oeuvre, Woman in the Dunes. It was director
Teshigahara Hiroshi's film adaptation of Woman in the Dunes that brought Abe's work to the international
stage. The movie's fame has wrongly led readers to view the novel as Abe's masterpiece. It would be
more accurate to say that the novel simply marked a turning point in his career, when Abe turned away
from the experimental and heavily political work of his earlier career. Fortunately, he did not then turn to
furusato and the emperor after all, but rather began a somewhat more realistic exploration of his
continuing obsession with homelessness and alienation. Not completely a stranger to his earlier
commitment to Marxism, Abe turned his attention, beginning in the sixties, to the effects on the individual
of Japan's rapidly urbanizing, growthdriven, increasingly corporate society.
The author refers to "the orbit" of Abe's work (2nd paragraph) to emphasize that

• A. conventional themes can limit an author's individuality.
• B. Abe's travels were the primary themes in his work.
• C. the emperor is often compared to a sun.
• D. his work covers a wide range of themes.
• E. Abe's work is so different from his contemporaries' that it is like another solar system.

Once the newspaper ______ their sources were flawed, they ______ the target of their article by issuing a
full retraction.

• A. suspected. . .blasted
• B. realized. . .exonerated
• C. disproved. . .comforted
• D. rejected. . .issued
• E. understood. . .haranged