Nonfiction on the test
About three quarters of the reading passages on the GED Language Arts test are nonfiction: true writing about the world. Some explain a topic in science, history or everyday life. Some make an argument. Some are documents from work or daily life, like a memo, a letter or a notice. Each passage is 450 to 900 words long and has six to eight questions.
The questions ask the same few things again and again:
- The main idea, and the details that support it.
- How the ideas are put together. What caused what, what came first, and how one part of the article connects to another.
- What a word means in the sentence where it sits.
- What the writer wants you to think, and how well the evidence supports it.
How each article page works
- Before you read. What the article is about, and the hard words, listed by paragraph.
- The article, with every paragraph numbered, so the questions can point to places in it.
- Questions like the test’s. Press Check after each one. If your answer is wrong, the page tells you why it was tempting, and you can try again.
- For talking it over. Questions with no single right answer, for class or for thinking about on your own.
- Write about it. A choice of things to write, and a box that saves your writing under your code, so you can come back to it and send it to Myles.
Every page prints cleanly, article and questions together, with the answers on the last page. Each article ends with a note on where its facts come from.
The articles
- 1A Party on Sedgwick Avenue
Start herePopular cultureIn August 1973, a teenager in the Bronx threw a back-to-school party to raise money for clothes. Her brother played the records. What happened that night became hip hop.
- 2Dug by Hand
HistoryHow New York’s first subway was paid for and dug, from 1900 to 1904, by at least 7,700 workers with picks and shovels, and what it changed about where New Yorkers could live.
- 3The Clock Inside
ScienceThe body keeps time over a day, and light sets its clock. What happens to the nurses, bus operators and bakers who work while the city sleeps, and what helps.
- 4Explaining How Vaccines Work
HealthA real documentA page from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in its own words: how a vaccine teaches the body to defend itself, why some vaccines take more than one dose, and what the agency recommends.
- 5The Floor
Government and historyHow New York got a minimum wage: a factory fire in 1911, a laundry in Brooklyn, a chambermaid in Washington State, two Supreme Court cases, and a strike by fast-food workers in 2012.
- 6My Faith in the Constitution Is Whole
Government and historyA real documentOn July 25, 1974, Representative Barbara Jordan of Texas spoke to the House committee deciding whether to impeach President Nixon. Her statement, in her own words: what the Constitution meant to her, and what impeachment is for.
- 7A Program Reads Your Application
Work and technologyTwo argumentsShould employers let computer programs screen job applicants? Two short arguments, one on each side, each with real studies and real cases. Practice for the essay on the test, which asks you to weigh two arguments.
- 8An Offer to Renew
Daily lifeA documentA sample renewal notice for a rent-stabilized apartment in New York City, and what it means: the deadline, the two choices, and the arithmetic of each.
- 9The Time Eater
ScienceHistoryA strange clock in Cambridge, England, with a metal creature that seems to eat the minutes. From there, how people have measured time: the day, the year, the atom, and the age of the universe.