📐 SAT
📝 ACT
🎓 AP Exams
About Contact Blog Privacy Policy

AP English Language: Mixed Skills I (Drill 2)

Drill 2 · Reading · Mixed Skills I

0 / 5
Next drill
Drill 3
→
More Ap English Language Mixed Skills I drills
Drill 2 — current you are here
Drill 3 5 questions →

About This Drill

AP English Language: Mixed Skills I (Drill 2) is a Reading practice drill covering Mixed Skills I. It contains 5 original questions created by Brian Stewart, a Barron's test prep author with over 20 years of tutoring experience.

Read the passage carefully, then answer all five questions. Mixed Skills drills combine question types from across the exam, purpose, evidence, organization, style, and rhetoric, as they appear together on the actual AP English Language and Composition Exam.

Passage

The following text is adapted from a modern personal essay on food writing and cultural translation. My mother made dosas on Sunday mornings in a kitchen that smelled of fermented batter and coconut oil, and when I try to describe this to people who did not grow up in a South Indian household, I find myself immediately translating, crêpe-like, savory, crispy at the edges, as if the dosa needs a passport to enter the conversation. What I have come to understand is that this translation is not neutral. Every time I reach for the familiar to explain the unfamiliar, I am doing something to the unfamiliar. I am making it smaller. The food writing that shaped me was written almost entirely by people who did not grow up eating what I grew up eating. The canon of American food writing, from M.F.K. Fisher to Ruth Reichl to the waves of farm-to-table journalism that followed, centers a particular palate: European in its lineage, anxious about authenticity, and deeply comfortable with the premise that certain foods are universal and others require explanation. When I read about 'exotic' ingredients or 'adventurous' flavor profiles, I know which direction the adventure is running in. The word authentic is the one that troubles me most in discussions of immigrant food. It is used, almost always, by people who are not from the culture in question, to describe a restaurant or dish that conforms to their expectations of what that culture should taste like. Authentic Thai food. Authentic Mexican. What these phrases often mean, on close inspection, is food that signals foreignness without being too foreign, that performs cultural identity for a comfortable outside observer. The immigrant family cooking for themselves, making substitutions because the right chile is unavailable, adjusting spice levels for aging parents, mixing cuisines because that is what their actual lives contain, this family is rarely described as authentic. What food can do, what it does, actually, constantly, without being asked, is hold memory and transmit it. The dosa is not a crêpe. It is a Sunday morning, a particular light through a particular window, a mother's hands moving with the confidence of ten thousand repetitions. When I reach for the translation, I am not being hospitable. I am being efficient. And efficiency, in the transmission of culture, is a kind of loss. I am not arguing that food writing should become inaccessible or that explanation is always a betrayal. I am arguing that the direction of translation matters, that a food culture deserves to be understood on its own terms before it is explained in someone else's. And I am arguing that the assumption of a universal palate, against which all others are measured as exotic or adventurous or authentic, is an assumption worth naming and examining, even, especially, by those of us who have spent years making our food legible to it.

Questions & Explanations

Question 1. The primary purpose of the essay is to

  • A) celebrate the dosa and other South Indian foods as superior to the European-lineage dishes that dominate American food writing.
  • B) critique the assumptions embedded in American food writing's treatment of immigrant cuisines, particularly the concepts of translation, authenticity, and the universal palate. ✓
  • C) argue that immigrant food writers should avoid mainstream publications and create their own independent critical tradition.
  • D) provide a chronological historical account of how South Indian cuisine came to be misrepresented in American media.

Explanation: Choice B is correct. The author's essay examines three related problems in food writing: the distorting effect of translation, the appropriative use of 'authentic,' and the assumption of a universal (European-lineage) palate against which other foods are measured. Choice A misreads the tone; the author is not arguing for the superiority of South Indian food but critiquing the framework that requires it to be explained at all. Choice C is a prescription the author does not make. Choice D misidentifies the mode; the essay is critical and reflective, not historical.

Question 2. In the first paragraph, the author's statement that translation 'makes the dosa smaller' primarily functions to

  • A) argue that culinary terms should never be translated across any cultural or linguistic contexts whatsoever.
  • B) establish that the dosa is a more complex dish than European crêpes and cannot be accurately compared.
  • C) introduce a nostalgic tone that the rest of the essay will develop through personal memories of her mother's cooking within the passage's framing.
  • D) suggest that the act of explaining one culture's food in terms of another's framework diminishes its particularity and meaning. ✓

Explanation: Choice D is correct. 'Making it smaller' captures the idea that translation, reaching for familiar equivalents, reduces the dosa to a subset of something already known, stripping it of the specific cultural weight it carries. The author is not making an argument about culinary complexity but about the cost of framing. Choice A overstates the claim; the author does not argue that translation should never occur. Choice B introduces a comparison of culinary complexity not present in the passage. Choice C misidentifies the primary function; nostalgia is present but secondary to the argumentative claim about translation.

Question 3. The author's description of the immigrant family 'making substitutions because the right chile is unavailable' and 'mixing cuisines because that is what their actual lives contain' primarily serves to

  • A) contrast the lived reality of immigrant cooking with the static, performance-based version that 'authentic' labels reward. ✓
  • B) argue that immigrant families should resist cultural assimilation by preserving their original culinary traditions unchanged.
  • C) provide evidence that immigrant cooking is inferior to the cuisine of the country of origin because it requires substitution.
  • D) introduce a counterargument that the author will ultimately concede, that some adaptation undermines cultural authenticity.

Explanation: Choice A is correct. The immigrant family's actual practice, adaptive, improvisational, mixed, is the living version of a food culture, while 'authentic' as used by outsiders describes a frozen, performative version that conforms to external expectations. The contrast defines the problem the author is identifying. Choice B inverts her argument; the author is critiquing the demand for static authenticity, not endorsing it. Choice C is not supported and contradicts the essay's tone. Choice D misidentifies the function; this is not a counterargument but a core piece of evidence.

Question 4. The fourth paragraph's claim that 'efficiency, in the transmission of culture, is a kind of loss' is best understood as

  • A) an acknowledgment that food writing must sometimes sacrifice accuracy in order to reach a wider audience.
  • B) an argument that food writers should avoid using metaphors and comparisons when describing unfamiliar dishes.
  • C) a reframing of translation as a practice that prioritizes accessibility over fidelity to the cultural meaning being transmitted. ✓
  • D) a concession that the author's own food writing has frequently been too difficult for general readers to follow.

Explanation: Choice C is correct. The author distinguishes between being 'hospitable' (open, culturally generous) and being 'efficient' (quickly making something accessible by reducing it). Efficiency in translation gets the information across but loses the particularity, the Sunday morning, the light, the mother's hands, that is the actual content of the culture. Choice A misreads 'efficiency' as a value the author is endorsing; she is critiquing it. Choice B is too narrow and prescriptive; the author is not prohibiting metaphors. Choice D is not supported; the author does not describe her own writing as inaccessible.

Question 5. The final paragraph's acknowledgment that 'explanation is not always a betrayal' primarily serves to

  • A) signal that the author has changed her position from the one she developed in the preceding paragraphs.
  • B) prevent the essay from being read as an argument against all cross-cultural explanation, while sharpening the specific critique she is actually making. ✓
  • C) introduce a new claim about food writing's role in building genuine cross-cultural understanding.
  • D) concede that the American food writing canon the author criticized earlier is more inclusive than she initially suggested.

Explanation: Choice B is correct. By acknowledging that explanation is not inherently a betrayal, the author protects her argument from being misread as a blanket rejection of cross-cultural food writing. This allows her to sharpen the actual target: the assumption of a universal palate and the directionality of translation. Choice A misreads the function; this is a qualification, not a reversal. Choice C is not supported; no new argument follows. Choice D is not supported; the canon critique is maintained and extended in the final paragraph.