Free Practice Test Prep PSAT Exam Questions 2025

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a prominent American writer of the twentieth century. This passage comes from one of his short stories and tells the story of a young John Unger leaving home for boarding school. John T. Unger came from a family that had been well known in Hades a small town on the Mississippi River for several generations. John’s father had held the amateur golf championship through many a heated contest; Mrs. Unger was known “from hot-box to hot-bed,” as the local phrase went, for her political addresses; and young John T. Unger, who had just turned sixteen, had danced all the latest dances from New York before he put on long trousers. And now, for a certain time, he was to be away from home. That respect for a New England education which is the bane of all provincial places, which drains them yearly of their most promising young men, had seized upon his parents. Nothing would suit them but that he should go to St. Midas’s School near Boston – Hades was too small to hold their darling and gifted son. Now in Hades – as you know if you ever have been there the names of the more fashionable preparatory schools and colleges mean very little. The inhabitants have been so long out of the world that, though they make a show of keeping up-to-date in dress and manners and literature, they depend to a great extent on hearsay, and a function that in Hades would be considered elaborate would doubtless be hailed by a Chicago beef-princess as “perhaps a little tacky.” John T. Unger was on the eve of departure. Mrs. Unger, with maternal fatuity, packed his trunks full of linen suits and electric fans, and Mr. Unger presented his son with an asbestos pocket-book stuffed with money. “Remember, you are always welcome here,” he said. “You can be sure, boy, that we’ll keep the home fires burning.” “I know,” answered John huskily. “Don’t forget who you are and where you come from,” continued his father proudly, “and you can do nothing to harm you. You are an Unger – from Hades.” So the old man and the young shook hands, and John walked away with tears streaming from his eyes. Ten minutes later he had passed outside the city limits and he stopped to glance back for the last time. Over the gates the old-fashioned Victorian motto seemed strangely attractive to him. His father had tried time and time again to have it changed to something with a little more push and verve about it, such as “Hades – Your Opportunity,” or else a plain “Welcome” sign set over a hearty handshake pricked out in electric lights. The old motto was a little depressing, Mr. Unger had thought – but now. So John took his look and then set his face resolutely toward his destination. And, as he turned away, the lights of Hades against the sky seemed full of a warm and passionate beauty. The tone of sentence “their darling and gifted son” can best be described as

To tremble in the face of a storm is to ______. 

The following two passages deal with the political movements working for the woman’s vote in America. Passage 1 The first organized assertion of woman’s rights in the United States was made at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848. The convention, though, had little immediate impact because of the national issues that would soon embroil the country. The contentious debates involving slavery and state’s rights that preceded the Civil War soon took center stage in national debates. Thus woman’s rights issues would have to wait until the war and its antecedent problems had been addressed before they would be addressed. In 1869, two organizations were formed that would play important roles in securing the woman’s right to vote. The first was the American Woman’s Suffrage Association (AWSA). Leaving federal and constitutional issues aside, the AWSA focused their attention on state-level politics. They also restricted their ambitions to securing the woman’s vote and downplayed discussion of women’s full equality. Taking a different track, the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA), led by Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, believed that the only way to assure the long-term security of the woman’s vote was to ground it in the constitution. The NWSA challenged the exclusion of woman from the Fifteenth Amendment, the amendment that extended the vote to African-American men. Furthermore, the NWSA linked the fight for suffrage with other inequalities faced by woman, such as marriage laws, which greatly disadvantaged women. By the late 1880s the differences that separated the two organizations had receded in importance as the women’s movement had become a substantial and broad-based political force in the country. In 1890, the two organizations joined forces under the title of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The NAWSA would go on to play a vital role in the further fight to achieve the woman’s vote. Passage 2 In 1920, when Tennessee became the thirty-eighth state to approve the constitutional amendment securing the woman’s right to vote, woman’s suffrage became enshrined in the constitution. But woman’s suffrage did not happen in one fell swoop. The success of the woman’s suffrage movement was the story of a number of partial victories that led to the explicit endorsement of the woman’s right to vote in the constitution. As early as the 1870s and 1880s, women had begun to win the right to vote in local affairs such as municipal elections, school board elections, or prohibition measures. These “partial suffrages” demonstrated that women could in fact responsibly and reasonably participate in a representative democracy (at least as voters). Once such successes were achieved and maintained over a period of time, restricting the full voting rights of woman became more and more suspect. If women were helping decide who was on the local school board, why should they not also have a voice in deciding who was president of the country? Such questions became more difficult for non-suffragists to answer, and thus the logic of restricting the woman’s vote began to crumble Which of the following does the first passage say was the first organized push for woman’s suffrage?

Adapted from “Feathers of Sea Birds and Wild Fowl for Bedding” from The Utility of Birds by Edward Forbush (ed. 1922) In the colder countries of the world, the feathers and down of waterfowl have been in great demand for centuries as filling for beds and pillows. Such feathers are perfect non-conductors of heat, and beds, pillows, or coverlets filled with them represent the acme of comfort and durability. The early settlers of New England saved for such purposes the feathers and down from the thousands of wild-fowl which they killed, but as the population increased in numbers, the quantity thus furnished was insufficient, and the people sought a larger supply in the vast colonies of ducks and geese along the Labrador coast. The manner in which the feathers and down were obtained, unlike the method practiced in Iceland, did not tend to conserve and protect the source of supply. In Iceland, the people have continued to receive for many years a considerable income by collecting eider down, but there they do not “kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.” Ducks line their nests with down plucked from their own breasts and that of the eider is particularly valuable for bedding. In Iceland, these birds are so carefully protected that they have become as tame and unsuspicious as domestic fowls In North America. Where they are constantly hunted they often conceal their nests in the midst of weeds or bushes, but in Iceland, they make their nests and deposit their eggs in holes dug for them in the sod. A supply of the ducks is maintained so that the people derive from them an annual income. In North America, quite a different policy was pursued. The demand for feathers became so great in the New England colonies about the middle of the eighteenth century that vessels were fitted out there for the coast of Labrador for the express purpose of securing the feathers and down of wild fowl. Eider down having become valuable and these ducks being in the habit of congregating by thousands on barren islands of the Labrador coast, the birds became the victims of the ships’ crews. As the ducks molt all their primary feathers at once in July or August and are then quite incapable of flight and the young birds are unable to fly until well grown, the hunters were able to surround the helpless birds, drive them together, and kill them with clubs. Otis says that millions of wildfowl were thus destroyed and that in a few years their haunts were so broken up by this wholesale slaughter and their numbers were so diminished that feather voyages became unprofitable and were given up. This practice, followed by the almost continual egging, clubbing, shooting, etc. by Labrador fishermen, may have been a chief factor in the extinction of the Labrador duck, that species of supposed restricted breeding range. No doubt had the eider duck been restricted in its breeding range to the islands of Labrador, it also would have been exterminated long ago. The tone of the third paragraph of the passage __________.

What is the greatest value of x that makes

 a true statement?