Tap your teacher's name to begin.
| Student | ID | Teacher | Period | Date | Time | G1 | G2 | G3 | G4 | Total |
|---|
Four grades per student, one per selection (multiple choice only): G1 Crossing Cedar Creek (Q1–6) · G2 Give Bats a Chance (Q7–11) · G3 Revision: Growing Something (Q13–16) · G4 Editing: Guardians of the Beach (Q17–22) · Total = all 21 MC questions. The written Q12 is graded by you and not counted in any of these.
How the filtered group answered each multiple-choice question. The green bar is the correct answer. Question 12 is a written response — read it in each student's report.
Mateo is spending the summer at his grandmother’s ranch outside Dry Springs, a small town in the Texas Hill Country.
1The rain started on a Tuesday and did not let up for three days. From Abuela’s porch I watched the sky turn the color of a bruise and the road turn to soup. Abuela said a storm like this came through the Hill Country maybe once every ten years.
2On the fourth morning the clouds finally broke apart. That was the same morning Abuela’s pill bottle rattled with nothing but air.
3“It’s all right, mijo,” she said, settling into her chair by the window. “Your tío will drive out this weekend.” But her voice sounded thin, and I noticed her hands trembling in her lap. The phone had been dead since the first night of the storm, and the weekend was three whole days away.
4I found the spare bicycle in the barn and pumped up its tires before Abuela could argue. “Town is only four miles,” I told her. “I can be back before lunch.” She looked at me for a long moment. “The road crosses Cedar Creek,” she said. “You remember my rule.”
5I remembered.
6The summer I turned eight, Abuela walked me down to the low-water crossing after a spring rain. She dropped a mesquite branch as thick as my arm into the current, and we watched the water snatch it away like it weighed nothing at all. “Water that is moving is stronger than it looks,” she told me. “The creek decides when you cross. Not you.”
7Four years later, standing in the barn with the bicycle, I could still hear her saying it.
8The first two miles were slow and sloppy, my tires slicing through ribbons of mud. Then the road dipped between two limestone hills, and I heard Cedar Creek before I saw it — a low, steady roar, like a crowd in a gymnasium.
9The concrete slab I had ridden across all summer was gone. In its place raced a sheet of brown water, wide as a highway, dragging whole branches past me like toys. The warning sign at the edge of the crossing was bent, and the water was still climbing it.
10I stood at the edge with my heart pounding. I thought of Abuela’s trembling hands. I thought of the mesquite branch. The creek decides, I reminded myself — and then I remembered something else. The creek was not the only way across. I turned my bike around, but not toward home.
11A half mile upstream, hidden behind cedar and prickly pear, hung the old footbridge from the ranch days — two steel cables and a line of weathered planks, strung high above the narrows.
12I left the bicycle in the brush and stepped onto the first plank. The bridge swayed with every step. I wrapped one hand around the cable, counted my steps out loud, and did not look down at the churning water below. At the middle, where the bridge sagged lowest, the wind pushed at my back like a hand, and I stopped counting and just held on. Then I made myself take the next step, and the one after that, until my shoes hit solid rock.
13The last two miles to town were on foot, but I hardly felt them.
14At the pharmacy, Mr. Herrera read the label on Abuela’s empty bottle, filled a new one, and then flipped the sign on his door to CLOSED in the middle of a workday. “Nobody drives through Cedar Creek today, either,” he said, grabbing his keys. “We’ll take the county road the long way around.”
15On the drive back, I asked him why he shut the whole pharmacy just to give one person a ride. He was quiet for a second. “Out here, we are each other’s weather report and each other’s ambulance,” he said. “Your abuela has checked on half this county in her time. Today it was her turn.”
16By the time the last storm clouds drifted east, Abuela had taken her pill and was working on her second cup of coffee. She squeezed my hand hard. “The creek decides when you cross,” she said. “But you decided everything else, and you decided well.” Outside, the sun was drying the road. For the first time since the rain started, my hands were perfectly steady.
1At sunset in Austin, Texas, a crowd gathers on the Congress Avenue Bridge and stares at the sky. Suddenly they appear: more than a million bats, pouring out from under the bridge like a river of smoke. Some visitors shiver. They have heard that bats are scary, dirty, or dangerous. The truth is exactly the opposite. Texans should welcome bats into their neighborhoods by putting up simple wooden bat houses.
2A single bat can eat hundreds of insects in one hour — mosquitoes, moths, and beetles that bite people and attack crops. The numbers grow astonishing quickly. Scientists estimate that the bats of Bracken Cave, near San Antonio, eat about 100 tons of insects every single night. That is roughly the weight of twenty school buses, gone by morning.
3All that free pest control adds up. Researchers who study bats estimate that they save American farmers more than three billion dollars a year in crop damage and pesticide costs. A colony’s feeding range can stretch fifty miles in a single night, which means one group of bats can protect fields, gardens, and backyards across an entire county. As wildlife biologist Elena Vasquez puts it, “Bats are the hardest-working farmhands in Texas, and they work for free.”
4Many people avoid bats because of stories they have heard. But bats are not blind — most see quite well, and they also use sound to fly with amazing precision in the dark. They have no interest in tangling in anyone’s hair. And while no one should ever touch a wild animal, scientists point out that the vast majority of bats never carry disease. Most fears about bats come from movies, not from science.
5Helping bats does not require a cave or a bridge. A bat house is a flat wooden box, about the size of a backpack, mounted on a pole or a building in a sunny spot. Groups such as Bat Conservation International share free building plans, and a family can put one together in a weekend for less than the cost of a pizza dinner.
6The advantages start almost immediately. A single bat house can shelter dozens of bats, and each one goes to work at sundown eating the mosquitoes that ruin summer evenings. Gardens near bat houses suffer less damage from moths and beetles. Fewer pests also means families can spray fewer chemicals on their yards.
7There is one more advantage: wonder. Children who watch bats spiral out of a backyard bat house at dusk are watching one of nature’s great performances — no ticket required.
8Bats already share our cities, our farms, and our summer skies, and they ask for almost nothing in return. The next time a bat flickers past your porch light, don’t duck. Say thank you — and then think about hanging up a little wooden house of your own.
Ava wrote this essay about a school challenge that taught her a lesson. Read Ava’s paper and look for revisions she should make. Then answer the questions that follow.
(1) Last spring my science teacher announced a classroom growing challenge. (2) Anyone who wanted to could raise a vegetable plant from seed and keep a journal about how it grew. (3) The student with the healthiest plant in May would win a gift card to the garden store. (4) I signed up right away, mostly because I thought it sounded easy. (5) I was about to learn that growing something takes more than luck.
(6) I live in an apartment, so my garden had to fit on our balcony. (7) My mom helped me carry home a bag of potting soil and a packet of tomato seeds. (8) For a planter, we used a five-gallon bucket from the hardware store. (9) I drilled holes in the bottom so extra water could drain out.
(10) At first I treated my seedling like a science experiment. (11) I measured it every morning and wrote the number in my journal. (12) I checked the soil with my finger, just like the seed packet said. (13) I even turned the bucket a little each day so every leaf got sunlight. (14) My cousin in El Paso grows peppers in his backyard. (15) By the end of April, my plant stood taller than the bucket.
(16) Then came the week of our class trip. (17) I was away from home for five days. (18) In all the excitement, I forgot to ask anyone to water my plant. (19) When I came home, the leaves were yellow and droopy, and the soil was as dry as chalk. (20) I felt terrible. (21) I gave it water, and I also gave it plant food, and I moved it into the shade, I hoped I was not too late. (22) Little by little, new green leaves appeared.
(23) I did not win the gift card in May. (24) My tomato plant was not the tallest or the greenest in the class. (25) But in June, something better than a prize happened. (26) I picked eight small red tomatoes and shared them with my family at dinner. (27) Caring for something every day taught me more than winning ever could. (28) Next spring, I am planting two buckets.
Diego wrote this paper about a volunteer group that protects sea turtles. Read Diego’s paper and look for corrections he should make. Then answer the questions that follow.
(1) Every summer on Padre Island, tiny sea turtles hatch from eggs buried in the warm sand. (2) These hatchlings are called Kemp’s ridleys, and they are the most endangered sea turtles in the world. (3) Last July my family joined a volunteer group that helps protect them. (4) The experience teaches me more than any book about the ocean ever has.
(5) Before sunrise, patrol teams drive slowly along the beach and look for turtle tracks. (6) The tracks of a nesting mother looks like tire marks in the sand. (7) When volunteers find a nest, they call the scientists at the padre island national seashore. (8) The scientists carefully move the eggs to a protected area called a corral. (9) There the eggs can develop safely, away from predators, high tides, and beach traffic.
(10) One morning our team spotted fresh tracks near the dunes. (11) We followed them to a nest while the sun came up. (12) Everyone stayed back so the biologist could do her work. (13) She counted 104 eggs and recorded the number in her notebook. (14) Which she said was a healthy nest for a Kemp’s ridley.
(15) The best part of the summer came in August, when the eggs hatched. (16) Rangers announced a public release at dawn, and hundreds of people lined up behind a rope to watch. (17) The hatchlings scrambled across the sand toward the waves. (18) Each one flipped sand with it’s tiny flippers as it raced the others to the water. (19) A ranger reminded us that only about one hatchling in four hundred survives to adulthood. (20) That fact made the whole crowd quiet for a moment.
(21) Because so few hatchlings survive every volunteer hour matters. (22) Our group has already signed up for next summer. (23) If you ever visit the Texas coast in July, look for the patrol trucks at sunrise. (24) You might just see a turtle’s first steps toward the sea.