SAT English Practice Question

Miss Grace Spivey arrived in Threestep, Georgia, in August 1938. She stepped off the train wearing a pair of thick-soled boots suitable for hiking, a navyblue dress, and a little white tam that rode the wavesof her red hair at a gravity-defying angle. August was a hellish month to step off the train in Georgia, although it was nothing, she said, compared to the 119 degrees that greeted her when she arrived one time in Timbuktu, which, she assured us, was a real 10 place in Africa. I believe her remark irritated some of the people gathered to welcome her on the burned grass alongside the tracks. When folks are sweating through their shorts, they don't like to hear that this is nothing compared to someplace else. Irritated or15 not, the majority of those present were inclined to see the arrival of the new schoolteacher in a positive light. Hard times were still upon us in 1938, but, like my momma said, "We weren't no poorer than we'd ever been," and the citizens of Threestep were in the 20 mood for a little excitement.Miss Spivey looked like just the right person to give it to them. She was, by almost anyone's standards, a woman of the world. She'd gone to boarding schools since she was six years old; she'd 25 studied French in Paris and drama in London; and during what she called a "fruitful intermission" in her formal education, she had traveled extensively in the Near East and Africa with a friend of her grandmother's, one Janet Miller, who was a medical30 doctor from Nashville, Tennessee. After her travels with Dr. Miller, Miss Spivey continued her education by attending Barnard College in New York City. She told us all that at school the first day. When my little brother Ralphord asked what did she study at35 Barnyard College, Miss Spivey explained that Barnard, which she wrote on the blackboard, was the sister school of Columbia University, of which, she expected, we all had heard.It was there, she told us, in the midst of trying to 40 find her true mission in life, that she wandered one afternoon into a lecture by the famous John Dewey, who was talking about his famous book, Democracy and Education. Professor Dewey was in his seventies by then, Miss Spivey said, but he still liked to chat45 with students after a lecture-especially female students, she added-sometimes over coffee, and see in their eyes the fire his words could kindle. It was after this lecture and subsequent coffee that Miss Spivey had marched to the Teacher's College and 50 signed up, all aflame. Two years later, she told a cheery blue-suited woman from the $\mathrm{WPA}^{1}$ that she wanted to bring democracy and education to the poorest, darkest, most remote and forgotten corner of America.55 They sent her to Threestep, Georgia.Miss Spivey paused there for questions, avoiding my brother Ralphord's eye.What we really wanted to know about-all twenty-six of us across seven grade levels in the one 60 room-was the pearly white button hanging on a string in front of the blackboard behind the teacher's desk up front. That button on a string was something new. When Mavis Davis (the only bona fide seventh grader, at age thirteen) asked what it was for, Miss65 Spivey gave the string a tug, and to our astonishment, the whole world-or at least a wrinkled map of it-unfolded before our eyes. Her predecessor, Miss Chandler, had never once made use of that map, which was older than our fathers, and until that70 moment, not a one of us knew it was there.Miss Spivey showed us on the map how she and Dr. Janet Miller had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and past the Rock of Gibraltar into theMediterranean Sea. Using the end of a ruler, she75 gently tapped such places as Morocco and Tunis and Algiers to mark their route along the top of Africa. They spent twenty hours on the train to Baghdad, she said, swathed in veils against the sand that crept in every crack and crevice.80 "And can you guess what we saw from the train?" Miss Spivey asked. We could not. "Camels!" she said. "We saw a whole caravan of camels." She looked around the room, waiting for us to be amazed and delighted at the thought.85 We all hung there for a minute, thinking hard, until Mavis Davis spoke up."She means like the three kings rode to Bethlehem," Mavis said, and she folded her hands smugly on her seventh-grade desk in the back of the 90 room.Miss Spivey made a mistake right then. Instead of beaming upon Mavis the kind of congratulatory smile that old Miss Chandler would have bestowed on her for having enlightened the rest of us, Miss95 Spivey simply said, "That's right."1 The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a government agency that hired people for public and cultural development projects and services. The narrator of the passage can best be described as

1. A.one of Miss Spivey's former students.
2. B.Miss Spivey's predecessor.
3. C.an anonymous member of the community.
4. D.Miss Spivey herself. 2