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AP English Language: Mixed Skills II (Drill 6)

Drill 6 · Reading · Mixed Skills II

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About This Drill

AP English Language: Mixed Skills II (Drill 6) is a Reading practice drill covering Mixed Skills II. It contains 5 original questions created by Brian Stewart, a Barron's test prep author with over 20 years of tutoring experience.

Mixed Skills II drills feature more challenging passages, historical documents, speeches, and complex argumentative prose. This drill uses a contemporary argumentative essay, with questions drawing on the full range of AP English Language skills, rhetorical situation, claims and evidence, reasoning, organization, and style.

Passage

The following text is adapted from a modern essay on light pollution and the loss of the night sky. On a clear night in the mountains above the town where I grew up, you can see the Milky Way. I know this because I have stood there and seen it. I also know that most of the children growing up in that town have never seen it, because most of them do not go to the mountains, and from the valley below the light never gets dark enough. This is not, properly speaking, a metaphor. It is a description of what light pollution has done to the night sky, and to the relationship between human beings and the universe they inhabit. Light pollution is the only form of pollution that is simultaneously deliberate, reversible, and almost entirely unaddressed by the major environmental movements of the past century. We do not choose to emit carbon dioxide as an end in itself; it is a byproduct of doing things we value. We do not choose to contaminate water; it is a consequence of industrial processes we have failed to adequately regulate. But we do choose to illuminate the night. We choose it every time a parking lot is lit to one hundred times the level necessary for safety, every time a skyscraper leaves its lights on all night, every time a suburban street is lit by fixtures designed to cast light in every direction including upward. The light is intentional. The waste is a choice. What we lose is harder to quantify than carbon emissions or parts per billion of arsenic in drinking water, but it is not nothing. Ecologists have documented the disruption of nocturnal species whose navigation, reproduction, and predator avoidance depend on darkness. Migrating birds, drawn to lit buildings, die by the hundreds of millions each year. Sea turtle hatchlings, orienting toward the brightest horizon, which should be the ocean's reflected starlight, crawl instead toward beach resorts and parking lots and die. The darkness is not empty. It is habitat. There is another loss that is harder to put in an ecological report. Human beings evolved under skies that were dark at night, and they used those skies. They navigated by them, organized their calendars by them, told stories about them, and looked at them in a way that produced, across every culture and every century, the same recognizable response: a sense of scale, of smallness, of connection to something larger than the immediate. This is not mysticism. It is a description of what the night sky has historically done to human attention and human imagination. We have turned it off. I am not arguing for the extinguishing of cities or the end of nighttime safety. I am arguing that the loss is real, that it was chosen, that it is largely reversible, and that its reversibility has barely registered in the environmental conversation. The stars are still there. We have simply decided, without quite deciding, that we no longer need to see them.

Questions & Explanations

Question 1. The primary purpose of the essay is to

  • A) document the specific ecological damage caused by light pollution to migrating birds and sea turtle populations.
  • B) argue that environmental movements have failed because they have focused on pollution that is difficult to reverse.
  • C) make a case that light pollution represents a significant and reversible loss, ecological, cultural, and perceptual, that deserves greater environmental attention. ✓
  • D) propose a specific package of legislative measures to reduce light pollution across urban and suburban areas.

Explanation: Choice C is correct. The author argues that light pollution causes real losses, ecological disruption, the erasure of a culturally and perceptually significant human experience, and that its reversibility makes the failure to address it especially notable. Choice A is too narrow; ecological damage is one piece of evidence within a larger argument. Choice B mischaracterizes the essay's critique; the author does not argue that environmental movements have failed generally. Choice D is not supported; the author makes no specific legislative proposals.

Question 2. In the second paragraph, the author's comparison of light pollution to carbon emissions and water contamination primarily serves to

  • A) argue that light pollution is more harmful than carbon emissions or water contamination because it is entirely deliberate.
  • B) introduce counterarguments from environmentalists who have prioritized other forms of pollution over light pollution.
  • C) concede that light pollution is less serious than other environmental problems because its effects are harder to quantify.
  • D) distinguish light pollution as uniquely intentional among major environmental problems, heightening the moral accountability of those who produce it. ✓

Explanation: Choice D is correct. The author uses the comparison to establish that unlike carbon emissions (a byproduct) or water contamination (a regulatory failure), light pollution is chosen directly, 'every time a parking lot is lit to one hundred times the level necessary for safety.' This makes it morally distinctive: the waste is not incidental but a decision. Choice A overstates the comparative claim; the author does not rank the harms. Choice B is not supported; no environmentalist counterarguments are introduced. Choice C misreads the function; the comparison heightens light pollution's accountability, not its comparative severity.

Question 3. The third paragraph's final sentence; 'The darkness is not empty. It is habitat.', is best understood as

  • A) a metaphor suggesting that darkness represents the full richness of human experience that artificial light has suppressed.
  • B) a reframing that challenges the cultural assumption that darkness is mere absence by showing it has ecological function and value. ✓
  • C) a concession that the ecological damage from light pollution is more severe than the cultural losses the author describes in the following paragraph.
  • D) an appeal to the reader's emotions intended to replace the scientific evidence presented earlier in the paragraph.

Explanation: Choice B is correct. 'The darkness is not empty' directly counters the implicit assumption that darkness is simply the absence of light, a neutral void. By declaring it 'habitat,' the author reframes darkness as something with positive ecological content and function. Choice A interprets it as metaphor about human experience, but in context the sentence concludes the ecological evidence paragraph and refers to literal darkness. Choice C is not supported; the author does not rank the ecological and cultural losses against each other. Choice D mischaracterizes the sentence; it is a crisp argumentative reframing, not primarily an emotional appeal.

Question 4. The author's acknowledgment in the fourth paragraph that the response produced by looking at the night sky 'is not mysticism' primarily serves to

  • A) preempt dismissal of the cultural and perceptual loss as sentimental or unscientific by grounding it in a historical and anthropological claim. ✓
  • B) concede that the experience of the night sky has more spiritual than practical value for modern people.
  • C) signal a shift in the essay's tone from empirical analysis to personal reflection on the meaning of the natural world.
  • D) introduce a new argument that the loss of the night sky is more serious than the ecological losses described in the previous paragraph within the described scenario.

Explanation: Choice A is correct. By saying 'this is not mysticism,' the author anticipates the objection that valuing the night sky's effect on human attention and imagination is merely sentimental. She reframes it as a historical and cross-cultural observation; this is what night skies have done to human attention across all cultures and centuries. Choice B misreads the function; she is not conceding spiritual-over-practical value but defending the loss's legitimacy. Choice C misidentifies the shift; the paragraph remains analytical throughout. Choice D is not supported; the author does not rank the two types of loss.

Question 5. The final paragraph's phrase 'without quite deciding' is best understood as

  • A) a concession that individual consumers bear no moral responsibility for light pollution because the decisions are made at the institutional level.
  • B) an acknowledgment that the author herself has contributed to light pollution despite knowing its costs.
  • C) a critique suggesting that the cumulative loss of the night sky has occurred through countless small, unconsidered choices rather than a single deliberate decision. ✓
  • D) an argument that the reversibility of light pollution depends on a single coordinated decision by governments and industry.

Explanation: Choice C is correct. 'Without quite deciding' captures the way that the collective erasure of the night sky happened through diffuse, incremental choices, each parking lot, each skyscraper, each suburb, rather than through a single policy or moment of deliberate decision. This reflects the essay's broader argument that the loss was chosen but not consciously recognized as a choice. Choice A misreads the phrase as exculpatory; the author is not assigning or removing blame. Choice B introduces personal confession not present in the passage. Choice D introduces a prescription about future decisions that the phrase does not support.