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AP English Language: Reasoning and Organization (Drill 2)

Drill 2 · Reading · Reasoning and Organization

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About This Drill

AP English Language: Reasoning and Organization (Drill 2) is a Reading practice drill covering Reasoning and Organization. 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. This drill uses a passage with a more complex structure, one that qualifies its central claim rather than advancing it directly, with questions focused on how concession and counterargument function within the overall argument.

Passage

The following text is adapted from a modern essay on the history and social uses of IQ testing. The IQ test was not invented to measure intelligence. It was invented to identify children who needed additional support in French schools, a practical tool for a practical problem, designed by Alfred Binet with the explicit warning that the scores should not be interpreted as a fixed measure of innate ability. Binet died in 1911. By the 1920s, his warning had been almost entirely discarded, and IQ had become, in the hands of American psychologists, a number that supposedly captured the totality of a person's intellectual potential, heritable, immutable, and rankable across racial groups. This transformation, from diagnostic tool to definitive measure, did not happen because the science demanded it. It happened because the culture wanted it. The early twentieth century was a period of intense anxiety about immigration, urbanization, and the perceived dilution of Anglo-Saxon dominance. IQ testing arrived at exactly the right moment to provide a scientific veneer for conclusions that had already been reached on other grounds. The tests did not produce the hierarchy. They laundered it. None of this invalidates the observation that IQ scores correlate with certain outcomes, academic performance, job performance in cognitively demanding roles, even longevity in some studies. These correlations are real and have been replicated across many populations. The question is not whether the scores predict anything. The question is what they measure, and whether what they measure is the fixed, heritable property that the early testing movement claimed it to be. The evidence on this question has accumulated slowly and uncomfortably. Flynn effect research, which documents consistent generational increases in raw IQ scores across dozens of countries, demonstrates that whatever IQ tests measure, it responds to environmental conditions far more dramatically than a fixed genetic property would. Children adopted from low-income to high-income families show substantial IQ gains. Interventions targeting nutrition, lead exposure, and early education produce measurable score increases. If IQ were primarily a measure of innate capacity, none of this should be possible. What IQ tests measure, the best current evidence suggests, is a combination of cognitive skills that are genuinely useful and genuinely trainable, shaped by genetics, yes, but also by nutrition, education, stress, environmental toxins, and accumulated cultural practice. This is a far more useful and far more honest understanding than the one Binet's successors promoted. It is also one that carries different moral implications: if cognitive capacity is partly a product of conditions, then conditions are partly a moral responsibility.

Questions & Explanations

Question 1. The primary purpose of the essay is to

  • A) argue that IQ testing should be abolished entirely from educational, clinical, and employment settings.
  • B) trace how IQ testing was distorted from a limited diagnostic tool into a pseudoscientific measure of fixed innate ability, and reframe what it actually measures. ✓
  • C) summarize the Flynn effect research and its implications for understanding generational changes in intelligence.
  • D) defend Alfred Binet's original conception of intelligence testing against its misuse by American psychologists.

Explanation: Choice B is correct. The author moves from the historical distortion of Binet's tool (paragraphs 1–2), through the acknowledgment of what scores do correlate with (paragraph 3), to the evidence that IQ is environmentally responsive (paragraph 4), and concludes with a reframing of what IQ actually measures and what that implies morally (paragraph 5). Choice A overstates his position; he does not call for abolition. Choice C is too narrow; the Flynn effect is one piece of evidence within a larger argument. Choice D misidentifies the purpose; the author is not primarily defending Binet but reframing the whole enterprise.

Question 2. The second paragraph's claim that IQ testing 'did not produce the hierarchy' but 'laundered it' primarily serves to

  • A) introduce a counterargument about the value of IQ testing that the author will refute in the next paragraph.
  • B) establish that American psychologists in the 1920s were motivated by financial incentives rather than scientific curiosity as the passage notes.
  • C) argue that the cultural embrace of IQ as a racial ranking tool preceded and shaped the science, rather than following from it. ✓
  • D) concede that early IQ research contained genuine scientific insights despite its cultural misapplication.

Explanation: Choice C is correct. 'Laundered' implies that the racial hierarchy existed before IQ testing and that the tests provided a respectable-seeming scientific cover for conclusions already held. The author argues the culture drove the interpretation, not the data. Choice A misidentifies the structure; the paragraph is making a claim, not introducing a counterargument. Choice B introduces a financial motive not mentioned in the passage. Choice D is a concession the author makes in paragraph three, not in this paragraph.

Question 3. The third paragraph, which acknowledges that IQ scores 'correlate with certain outcomes,' functions primarily as

  • A) a concession that prevents the essay's critique from being dismissed as a denial of all predictive value in IQ scores. ✓
  • B) a transition from the essay's historical argument to a new argument about the policy uses of cognitive testing within this argument.
  • C) evidence that the early IQ movement's claims about fixed innate ability were essentially correct after all.
  • D) an introduction to the Flynn effect research that the author will present in the following paragraph.

Explanation: Choice A is correct. By acknowledging that IQ scores do predict some outcomes, the author preempts the most obvious objection to his critique, that he is simply denying that IQ measures anything real. This makes his subsequent argument (that the scores don't measure what early testers claimed) more credible. Choice B is incorrect: the paragraph does not pivot to policy. Choice C misreads the function; the correlation acknowledgment is a concession, not a vindication of the early movement. Choice D misidentifies the role; the Flynn effect is introduced in paragraph four, and paragraph three sets up the question that the Flynn effect answers.

Question 4. The author's observation that 'if IQ were primarily a measure of innate capacity, none of this should be possible' refers to which of the following as evidence?

  • A) The consistent cross-population replication of correlations between IQ scores and job performance.
  • B) The historical decision by American psychologists in the 1920s to rank IQ scores across racial groups.
  • C) Binet's original warning that scores should not be interpreted as fixed measures of innate ability.
  • D) Generational score increases, IQ gains in adopted children, and improvements from nutrition and education interventions. ✓

Explanation: Choice D is correct. The sentence follows a list of findings, the Flynn effect, adoption studies, and intervention results, all of which show IQ responding to environmental changes. The author's point is that these changes are incompatible with a purely genetic, fixed model of intelligence. Choice A describes correlations acknowledged in paragraph three, not the environmental evidence discussed here. Choice B refers to historical misuse, not scientific evidence about malleability. Choice C refers to Binet's caution, not to the empirical findings the author is summarizing.

Question 5. The final sentence, 'if cognitive capacity is partly a product of conditions, then conditions are partly a moral responsibility', functions primarily as

  • A) a transition to a new section of the essay that will propose specific policy interventions to improve cognitive outcomes.
  • B) a conclusion that connects the essay's scientific reframing to an ethical implication about social obligation. ✓
  • C) a concession that acknowledges the limits of environmental interventions in improving IQ scores.
  • D) an appeal to the reader's emotions designed to override the scientific evidence presented earlier in the essay.

Explanation: Choice B is correct. The final sentence draws out the moral consequence of the scientific reframing: if IQ is shaped by conditions, then society bears some responsibility for those conditions. This connects the empirical argument to an ethical claim, giving the essay its concluding force. Choice A is incorrect: no policy proposals follow; this is the essay's final sentence. Choice C misreads the tone; the sentence is an implication of the evidence, not a concession about its limits. Choice D mischaracterizes the move; the ethical claim follows from the scientific argument rather than replacing it.