Version A — Grade 4 ELA Practice Test

Every Saturday morning, Nadia spread her father's old maps across the kitchen floor and memorized them. Not because anyone asked her to—her father was gone, and the maps were just rolled in a cabinet under the stairs—but because when she traced the mountain ranges with her finger, she felt close to him.

Her father had been a cartographer, a maker of maps. He had traveled to places Nadia had never heard of: the Ferghana Valley, the Wakhan Corridor, the Roof of the World. He had drawn rivers by hand with a crow-quill pen and painted elevations in careful washes of brown and green. His maps were not just accurate—they were beautiful.

One Saturday, Nadia found a map she had never noticed before. It was smaller than the others, rolled inside a larger one like a secret. The paper was cream-colored and slightly stiff, and when she unrolled it she saw it was a map of their own town—Millhaven—but drawn differently than any map she had seen. Buildings had names she didn't recognize. A river ran through a part of town that was now just a parking lot. There was a neighborhood called "The Willows" where the highway now was.

She brought it to her mother, who was grading papers at the kitchen table.

"Oh," her mother said softly. "I haven't seen this in years." She ran her thumb along the river. "That was the Millhaven Creek. They redirected it when they built Route 9, back in the seventies."

"Did you know him when he made it?"

"He made this before I met him. He was seventeen." Her mother smiled. "He told me once this was the map that made him a cartographer. He said maps don't just show what is—they show what was, and sometimes what could be."

Nadia looked at the town she knew through her father's young eyes. The creek that wasn't there anymore. The willows that were now a highway. She picked up a pencil.

"Can I add to it?"

Her mother hesitated, then nodded. "I think he'd like that."

Nadia drew carefully, fitting new streets around old ones, letting the past and the present exist together on the same small square of cream-colored paper.

At first glance, a tide pool looks like a small puddle trapped among rocks. Look closer, and it becomes one of the most crowded and competitive places on Earth.

Tide pools form along rocky coastlines where the ocean meets the shore. Twice a day, the tide rises and floods these rocky basins, then retreats, leaving pools of trapped seawater. The animals and plants there must survive crashing waves, blazing sun, evaporating water, and plummeting temperatures—sometimes all in a single afternoon.

Organisms are divided into zones based on how much time they spend underwater. The splash zone is only reached by sea spray. Here, periwinkle snails cling to bare rock, surviving long periods without water. Their shells are thick and tightly sealed to prevent drying out.

Below is the high intertidal zone, covered only during the highest tides. Acorn barnacles dominate here. These crustaceans cement themselves to rock and seal their plates shut when the tide retreats. When the tide returns, feathery legs sweep microscopic food from the water.

The middle and low intertidal zones contain the greatest variety of life. Sea stars prey on mussels by pulling their shells apart with powerful suction arms. The mussel's only defense is to anchor itself with byssal threads, creating colonies that crowd out competitors. Where sea stars are removed, mussels rapidly take over, reducing biodiversity—a finding that helped scientists understand the concept of a "keystone species," one whose presence keeps the entire community in balance.

Tide pools also indicate ocean health. Rising temperatures and increasing acidity are already affecting tide pool communities. Scientists monitor them closely as an early warning system for broader ocean changes.

Jonah had been assigned to Mr. Okafor's science class because there was no room anywhere else. He did not want to be there. He wanted to be in Mr. Rivera's class with his friends, where apparently they were doing rockets.

Mr. Okafor's class was doing birds.

On the first day, Mr. Okafor handed out field journals—small notebooks with blank pages—and took the class outside to the school's back garden. He did not say anything. He just waited.

Jonah stood next to the garden fence and looked at his blank journal. After a while, he noticed a small brown bird on the fence post. It was just sitting there, looking at him with one eye.

He wrote: "Brown bird. Small. Staring at me. Kind of rude."

Mr. Okafor walked past, glanced at the journal, and said nothing. But later, Jonah saw him smile.

Over the next weeks, Jonah filled his journal. Not because he liked birds—he still wasn't sure he did—but because he had started to notice things he couldn't stop noticing. The way the mockingbird changed its song every few minutes. The way the sparrow tilted its head before it flew. The way there were always at least three kinds of birds in the garden if you waited long enough.

On the last day of the unit, Mr. Okafor asked everyone to read one entry from their journals. Jonah read: "Today I saw a red-tailed hawk land on the school roof. Nobody else in the courtyard looked up. I don't understand how people can walk around under something like that and not notice it."

The class was quiet after he read it.

"That," said Mr. Okafor, "is the beginning of a scientific mind."

Jonah walked home that afternoon carrying his field journal, still not entirely sure if he liked birds. But he looked up at the sky the whole way home.

The Arctic Ocean covers 5.4 million square miles and is covered by sea ice for most of the year. For centuries, this ice cap was considered a barrier—inhospitable and largely unexplored. In recent decades, as the ice has begun to shrink, scientists have discovered the Arctic Ocean is far from empty.

Beneath the ice, light filters down in ways that support surprising amounts of life. Algae grow on the underside of sea ice in dense mats. These ice algae are the foundation of the Arctic food web, consumed by tiny crustaceans called copepods, which in turn feed fish, seabirds, and whales.

The sea ice also regulates global climate. Its white surface reflects solar energy back into space—a property called albedo. When sea ice melts, it exposes dark ocean water, which absorbs rather than reflects heat, warming the ocean further and causing more ice to melt. This is called a positive feedback loop.

Arctic sea ice is shrinking at roughly 13 percent per decade. Scientists predict the Arctic Ocean could see its first ice-free summer before 2050.

The consequences extend far beyond the Arctic. Melting Arctic ice does not raise sea levels directly—floating ice displaces water equal to its own mass—but the warming it accelerates affects glaciers and ice sheets on land, which do raise sea levels when they melt. It also disrupts the jet stream, making extreme weather events more frequent.

Scientists describe a system in rapid transition. What was once a frozen, static landscape is becoming dynamic, unpredictable, and deeply connected to the rest of the planet.

Maya had been digging in the same creek bed for two summers and found exactly nothing useful. Pebbles. Roots. Once, the rusted wheel of a bicycle. Her older brother Nico called it "the world's most boring hobby."

"You're looking for something that's been underground for millions of years," he said. "The odds are—"

"I know the odds," Maya said.

She kept digging anyway.

On a Tuesday in late August, her trowel clicked against something hard and smooth and shaped like nothing she had seen in that creek. She dug around it carefully, the way the guide she'd ordered said to do. It took two hours. When she pulled it free, it was gray and heavy and curved like a blade.

She brought it to Dr. Ellis at the natural history museum. He put it under a magnifying glass for a long time. Then he put it down and looked at her over his glasses.

"Do you know what this is?"

"I have some guesses," Maya said.

"It's a tooth," he said. "Mosasaur, I believe. Late Cretaceous. One hundred million years old, give or take."

Maya looked at the tooth. One hundred million years. The creek she had been digging in—the same creek she had crossed on her bike a thousand times—was once the floor of a shallow inland sea.

"Can I ask what made you keep digging when you weren't finding anything?" Dr. Ellis said.

Maya thought about it. "I guess I figured it was there whether I found it or not. I just wanted to be the one who did."

Dr. Ellis smiled. "That," he said, "is exactly what paleontologists say."

When you look at a rainbow, you are seeing only a small part of a much larger picture. The rainbow's colors—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet—are visible light, the narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum that human eyes can detect. The spectrum extends far beyond what we can see.

Electromagnetic radiation is energy that travels in waves. The waves differ in wavelength—the distance between one wave peak and the next. Visible light has wavelengths from about 380 to 700 nanometers. Beyond each end lie forms of radiation we cannot see but use every day.

Just beyond violet is ultraviolet radiation (UV). With shorter wavelengths, UV carries more energy. Bees can see ultraviolet light, which reveals patterns on flower petals invisible to humans—a kind of secret map directing them to nectar. Too much UV exposure can damage human skin and DNA, which is why sunscreen matters.

On the other end, just beyond red, is infrared radiation. We experience infrared as heat, not light. Thermal cameras detect it to show temperature differences. Firefighters use thermal cameras to see through smoke. Astronomers use infrared telescopes to observe objects too cool or distant to emit visible light.

Beyond these lie radio waves (used in communication), microwaves (used in cooking and radar), X-rays (used in medical imaging), and gamma rays (produced by nuclear reactions).

Every type of electromagnetic radiation is part of the same family. What separates them is wavelength—and whether our eyes happen to detect them. What we call "light" is just the part the universe has let us see.

For thirty-one years, Augusto kept the lighthouse at Punta Negra running. He wound the clockwork mechanism that rotated the light. He cleaned the Fresnel lens—four feet across—with a soft cloth and distilled water. He kept the log of every ship, every storm, every morning he watched the fog lift.

When the maritime authority told him the lighthouse would be automated, he was given six months to prepare. He found a small cottage on the mainland and began boxing up thirty-one years of life in the tower.

His granddaughter Camila came to help him pack. She was fourteen and had visited every summer of her life. She had grown up knowing the exact angle at which morning light entered the watch room window in January, the precise sound of the foghorn at different distances. The lighthouse was the most permanent thing she had known.

"Aren't you sad?" she asked, wrapping the log books in paper.

Augusto looked out the watch room window. A container ship was making its way along the horizon. "I kept ships from hitting the rocks," he said. "That's what a lighthouse is for."

"But you."

"A lighthouse doesn't mourn when the ships sail past," he said. He paused. "Though I think it would be allowed to."

Camila stopped wrapping. She thought about that for a long time.

When the books were packed, she took out a notebook and began writing down everything she could remember about the lighthouse—the sounds, the light, the smell of the lens oil—so that what her grandfather had tended for thirty-one years would not be entirely lost when the machines took over.