Reading & Writing Practice Test

Passage 1: The Rise of Remote Inspection Technology

For most of the twentieth century, inspecting a bridge, a pipeline, or the inside of a factory boiler meant sending a trained worker into a tight, often dangerous space. Bridge inspectors were lowered on ropes to examine support cables. Pipeline workers crawled through narrow tunnels with flashlights, checking for cracks or corrosion. Boiler inspectors waited for machinery to cool completely before climbing inside, sometimes losing days of production time in the process. The work was necessary, but it was slow, costly, and physically risky.

Beginning in the 1990s, a new option became available: remote-operated inspection tools. Small wheeled or flying robots, equipped with cameras and sensors, could travel into spaces too small or too hazardous for a person. A drone could fly along the underside of a bridge in an afternoon, a task that once took a three-person crew several days. A robotic crawler could move through a pipeline while gas was still flowing, eliminating the need to shut down operations. These tools did not eliminate the need for skilled inspectors; rather, they changed what the job looked like. Instead of climbing into the boiler, an inspector might sit at a monitor, guiding a small robot and analyzing the images it sent back.

The shift created new demands on the workforce. Companies needed inspectors who understood structural engineering and corrosion patterns, but who could also operate cameras, read sensor data, and troubleshoot when a robot's signal failed. Training programs that once focused almost entirely on physical techniques, such as how to rig a harness safely, began adding courses on remote-sensing equipment and basic robotics. Some experienced inspectors who had spent decades doing hands-on work resisted the change at first, arguing that no camera could replace the judgment of a hand run along a suspicious weld. Industry data, however, showed that remote inspection caught certain types of hairline cracks more reliably than the human eye alone, because sensors could detect temperature differences invisible to a visual check.

By the 2010s, most large infrastructure projects required at least some remote inspection as a standard part of routine maintenance. The technology did not replace inspectors; it gave them a new set of tools and, in many cases, kept them out of genuinely dangerous situations. For workers entering the field today, comfort with both traditional inspection skills and remote technology is no longer optional. It is the baseline expectation for the job, and that expectation is likely to keep rising as the tools themselves continue to improve.

Passage 2: Should Job Applications Require a Cover Letter?

Hiring managers disagree sharply about whether cover letters still serve a purpose. Supporters argue that a cover letter reveals things a resume cannot: how clearly a candidate writes, how well they tailor their interest to a specific role, and whether they can explain a gap or transition in their work history. A well-written cover letter, they argue, takes real effort, and that effort itself signals genuine interest in the position rather than a candidate blasting out the same resume to fifty different companies.

Critics respond that cover letters mostly measure something irrelevant to job performance: a person's comfort with a specific, somewhat old-fashioned writing format. A skilled welder, machinist, or warehouse supervisor may be excellent at their job and terrible at composing formal business prose, especially if English is not their first language or if they simply have not written this kind of document before. Critics also point out that many cover letters are now generated with the help of artificial intelligence tools, which undermines the claim that the letter reveals genuine effort or personal voice. If a hiring manager cannot tell whether a human or a chatbot wrote the letter, the argument that it proves "real effort" becomes much weaker.

A middle position has emerged at some companies: making the cover letter optional, but reviewing it carefully when one is submitted. This approach lets candidates who write well showcase that skill, without penalizing candidates whose strengths lie elsewhere. Data from a handful of companies that switched to optional cover letters showed little change in the quality of new hires, though the sample sizes were small and the companies that tried this approach may not be representative of employers generally.

Behind the debate is a larger question about what hiring is supposed to measure in the first place. If a job requires strong writing skills, a cover letter is a reasonable test of that skill. If a job does not require writing, requiring a cover letter anyway may filter out strong candidates for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they can do the work.

Some career counselors have begun advising job seekers to ask, before applying, whether the role itself involves regular written communication. If it does, they suggest treating the cover letter as a genuine writing sample worth the extra time. If it does not, they recommend keeping the letter brief and functional rather than polished, on the theory that a short, clear letter signals respect for the hiring manager's time without pretending the document is the centerpiece of the application. Neither approach guarantees a job offer, but both treat the cover letter as a tool suited to a specific purpose, rather than as a universal requirement that means the same thing in every hiring context.

Passage 3: The Long Way Home (fiction excerpt)

Marisol had taken the same bus route for eleven years, and she could have drawn the stops from memory: the laundromat, the boarded-up diner, the church with the crooked steeple, the school where her daughter now worked as a teacher's aide. Tonight, though, the bus turned left where it should have turned right, and a recorded voice announced a detour for road construction. A ripple of irritation moved through the other passengers -- sighs, a muttered complaint, someone checking a phone for the time.

Marisol did not sigh. She watched the unfamiliar streets slide past the window: a mural she had never noticed, painted across the side of a hardware store; a small park with a fountain that wasn't running; a bakery with its lights still on, flour dust visible on the windows even from the street. She thought about how many times she had taken this exact route without really looking at anything beyond the next stop, the next transfer, the next thing she had to do.

When she was younger, she had wanted to be the kind of person who noticed things -- who could describe a stranger's coat or the exact color of the sky and make it sound like it mattered. Somewhere in the last decade, between two jobs and a daughter to raise alone, that version of herself had quietly gone missing, the way a coat left in a closet is technically still there but might as well not exist.

The bus lurched around a final turn and rejoined its normal route, the church with the crooked steeple rising up ahead, familiar and unremarkable. Marisol almost laughed. Eleven years of the same stops, and it had taken a five-minute detour to remind her that there were still things worth looking at, if she bothered to look. She did not know if she would remember this feeling tomorrow, on the ordinary ride home. But for tonight, at least, she had noticed the mural, the still fountain, the flour dust on the bakery window -- and that, she decided, was not nothing.

When she stepped off at her usual stop, she found herself walking a little slower than she normally did, glancing at the front of the laundromat, the boarded-up diner, the school where her daughter worked -- buildings she had passed thousands of times without truly seeing. None of it looked new. But for the length of the walk home, she let herself look anyway, the way she used to, back when noticing things had still felt like part of who she was.

Grammar and Language Conventions: Editing Passage

Read the passage below. Numbers in parentheses indicate sentence numbers. Some sentences contain errors in grammar, usage, spelling, or punctuation.

(1) Every spring, the maintenance department at Hillcrest Apartments post a notice reminding tenants to clean out their storage units. (2) Last year, the notice went out in March, and most tenants ignored it until the final deadline in May. (3) This year, the property manager tried a new approach: sending three seperate reminders spaced two weeks apart instead of one single notice. (4) The first reminder went out in early March, the second in mid-March, and the third reminder went out at the end of March. (5) By April, nearly eighty percent of tenants having cleaned out their units, compared to only forty percent by the same point last year. (6) The property manager, who has worked at Hillcrest for nine years now believes that breaking a single deadline into smaller steps makes people more likely to act. (7) Whether this approach works as well for other tasks, like rent payments or maintenance requests, it remains to be seen. (8) Either way, the tenants seem to appreciate getting reminders that don't all arrive at once.