Practice test 1

Practice Test

In this section, you will read five passages and then answer reading comprehension questions about each passage.

Most questions are worth one point, but the last question in each set is worth more than one point. The directions indicate how many points you may receive.

You will have 100 minutes to read all of the passages and answer the questions.

Some passages include a word or phrase that is underlined in purple. For those words, you will see a definition or an explanation below the passage.

You can skip questions and go back to them later as long as there is time remaining.

When you are ready to continue, press Continue to go to the next page.

01 Psychology

Forgetful Brains

Humans have always had trouble remembering certain details. One person has the unique experience of recalling an almost exact detail a memory from his childhood, but he cannot remember what he ate for lunch yesterday.

Another cannot recall names of people she met five minutes ago, but she remembers the names of people she met from an hour before.

Psychologists have searched for answers to the memory phenomena to better understand how the brain functions and what triggers memory or causes forgetfulness.

After extensive research over the past century, they have come up with some basic theories to help explain memory loss.

There are times when an individual loses all recollection of an event.

This is referred to as the decay theory, which states that if memories are not recalled from time to time, they fade and then gradually dropped from a person’s memory.

Decay is proven to occur with sensory memories, or short-term memories, if they are not recalled or rehearsed.

Decay of long-term memory is harder to explain because these memories last through the passage of time.

In fact, some knowledge can be accessed many years after his first learned.

Research on students who took Spanish courses in high school revealed that they still remembered a great deal of Spanish fifty years later, even though they hardly use the language.

While some memories tend to decay, others remain burned into the recesses of the brain, causing psychologists to further ponder the workings of memory.

Another explanation made by researchers concerning memory loss is known as interference.

Under this theory, an individual forgets a memory when similar information enters the mind and interferes with the original memory in either the storage or retrieval area of the brain.

The information is somewhere in the person’s memory, but it gets confused with other details.

This occurs in both short-term and long-term memory and is most common when a person tries to recall isolated facts.

For instance, a woman goes to a party and meets a man named Joe at the front door.

Half an hour later, she was introduced to Jason. When she sees Joe again, she accidentally calls him Jason. This is retroactive interference.

The newest information input replaces the old information, causing the woman to mistakenly call the first man by the wrong name.

Additionally, people may suffer from proactive interference. A new student meets his first professor, Dr. Mack, in his English class.

When he has History, he meets Dr. Miller. However, he frequently calls both teachers Dr. Mack, since that is the first name he had learned.

Remembering the first set of information not remembering the next is proactive interference.

The old information interfered with the student’s ability to recall the newer information.

When a person needs to remember something, he frequently relies on cues, or reminders, to help them retrieve a specific memory.

When he lacks the cute recall the memory, the person suffers from cue-dependent forgetting.

This may be the most common type of forgetfulness.

Psychologist Willem Wagenaar did a year-long study during which he recorded events from his life daily.

After a year’s time, he could not remember twenty percent of the critical details, and after five years, he had forgotten sixty percent.

However, he compiled cues from ten witnesses of some events in his past that he believed he had forgotten, and he was able to recall pieces of information about all ten.

Thus, when he had the cues to help him retrieve his memories, he could remember his experiences, illustrating that he was somewhat cue-dependent.

Cognitive psychologist believe that these specific cues help direct the person to the area of the brain where the memory is stored or they match up with information linked to the actual memory the person is seeking.

Whether forgetfulness is from years of decay, replacement of old memories, or lack of cues, researchers continue working to locate the source of people’s forgetfulness.

The answers are becoming clearer with each additional study. As brain research advances, psychologists are sure to connect many different factors that link people back to their memories.