Reading Comprehension Success in 20 Minutes a Day, 3rd Edition

a. Someone he or she interviewed for the story
used these words.
b. These words make the author sound smarter.
c. These words have a positive connotation that
help the author make his or her case.
d. These words have a powerful negative conno-
tation that add to the author’s arguments
about the downfalls of leasing.
13. From the context, it can be determined that the
word “upmarket” in the third paragraph means
a. safer.
b. bigger.
c. expensive.
d. dependable.
14. Why did the author choose the second-person
point of view for this passage? 
a. The second-person point of view puts readers
into the action of the writing.
b. The second-person point of view makes
readers imagine themselves in the situation.
c. The second-person point of view makes
readers pay more attention.
d. all of the above
15. When this author says that “most people want
to lease because they can then drive a more
upmarket car,” he or she is
a. making a generalization that requires evidence
before it can be confirmed.
b. making an obvious generalization that needs
no evidence.
c. reaching an unreasonable conclusion based on
evidence provided.
d. reaching a reasonable conclusion based on
evidence provided.
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P O S T T E S T
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1 5 6

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“The Weekly Visit”
(short story excerpt)
The requisite visit happened typically on sunny Saturdays, when my child spirits were at their highest and could
be most diminished by the cramped interior of her house. My mother, accustomed to the bright, spacious farm-
house that was once Grandma’s seemed no less susceptible to the gloom. She would set her jaw as Grandma
described the many ailments attendant on age and would check her watch—an hour being the minimum she
expected herself to withstand. Her barely contained impatience and my grandmother’s crippling age radiated out
around me. We were the women of the Carlson clan, each throbbing with agitation, like concentric, blinking cir-
cles on a radar screen.
I would sit at the white and red metal table with the pull-out leaves and built-in silverware drawer, crack-
ing almonds. This was the one good thing at Grandma’s house, the almonds, which she kept in a green Depres-
sion glass bowl. I would lift the lid carefully and try to set it down on the metal table quietly, then attempt to crack
the nuts without scattering the shell crumbs. It was not good to draw attention to myself at Grandma Carlson’s.
Sounding angry, she would call to me in her croupy drawl. When I failed to understand her, she would reach out
to me with her palsied, slick, wrinkled hand and shout, “Here!” She would be offering some of her horehound
candy, which tasted like a cross between butterscotch and bitter sticks.
There was this lamentable air in the dim house with its itchy mohair furniture and its dark colors, an
awareness—Grandma’s—underlying the mentholatum, that her age scared her grandkids. I would yearn during
the dutiful visit to get outside into the yard, where Grandma had transplanted a few flowers when she moved from
the farm. But even the yard, with its overgrown hedges and rusted metal lawn chairs, seemed dreary. When I came
back inside, light and air bursting in with me, Grandma, her hair up in a gray bun, would rock a little and smile.
I would lean then against my mother’s chair, Grandma’s fond eyes peering at me, and whisper out of the corner
of my mouth, “Mom, can we go?”