Version B — Grade 4 ELA Practice Test

When Delia's grandmother moved in, she brought three suitcases and an obsession with tomatoes.

Within a week, the garage had become a greenhouse. Shelves lined every wall, each holding seedlings in plastic cups labeled in her grandmother's small, precise handwriting. Beefsteak. San Marzano. Black Krim. Cherokee Purple. Names Delia had never heard, varieties her grandmother had been growing since she was a girl in Portugal.

"Why do you need so many kinds?" Delia asked one afternoon, holding a cup labeled Brandywine as her grandmother pressed seeds into the soil.

"Because each one tastes like a different thing," her grandmother said without looking up. "A tomato is not just a tomato."

Delia looked at the rows of cups, trying to understand. At the grocery store, tomatoes were just tomatoes—red, round, and identical in their plastic containers. But her grandmother talked about them the way Delia's father talked about music: with specific names and precise emotions. This one was good for sauce. That one you ate warm from the vine, like fruit. This variety came from seeds a neighbor had saved for thirty years.

"What happens if you plant all the seeds from the same kind every year?" Delia asked.

"Then you only know one thing," her grandmother said. She handed Delia a small trowel. "Now plant."

By June, the garage-greenhouse had become something else: a place Delia came to after school, not because she was asked to, but because the warm smell of soil and leaves had become the smell of her grandmother's voice. She learned the names. She learned the differences. She began to understand what her grandmother meant—that variety was not just practical but personal, a kind of memory you could grow and eat.

Beneath your feet, a single teaspoon of healthy soil contains more living organisms than there are people on Earth. Soil is not simply dirt—it is one of the most complex ecosystems on the planet, and nearly all terrestrial life depends on it.

Soil forms over thousands of years as rock is broken down by weather, water, and living organisms. As plants and animals die, their remains are decomposed by bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms, releasing nutrients that feed future plants. This cycle of growth and decay is what makes soil fertile.

Healthy soil has four main components: minerals (from broken-down rock), organic matter (from decomposed plants and animals), water, and air. The spaces between soil particles hold both water and air, which roots need to survive. Soil that is compacted—for example, from heavy machinery or foot traffic—loses these spaces, making it harder for plants to grow.

Different types of soil have different properties. Sandy soil drains quickly but doesn't hold nutrients well. Clay soil holds water but can become waterlogged. Loam—a mixture of sand, silt, and clay—is considered ideal for most plants because it drains well while retaining moisture and nutrients.

Soil also takes an extraordinarily long time to form. It can take up to 1,000 years to build just one inch of topsoil. Yet topsoil—the richest, uppermost layer—can be lost to erosion in a fraction of that time, particularly when land is left bare after farming or construction.

Scientists who study soil are called pedologists. They warn that soil degradation is one of the most serious threats to global food security. Protecting and restoring soil health is increasingly seen as essential to feeding the planet.

Every year Marcus ran the 400 meters at the district championship, and every year he told himself the same thing: he was not nervous. He was ready.

This year he was nervous.

His best competitor, a boy named Deshaun from Jefferson Middle, had run a 54.2 in the regional qualifier. Marcus's personal best was 54.8. The difference was six-tenths of a second—less than the time it took to blink—but in a 400-meter race it might as well have been a wall.

Coach Reyes found him sitting on the infield grass forty minutes before the race.

"You're spiraling," Coach Reyes said.

"I'm fine," Marcus said.

"You're doing math in your head. Stop doing math."

Marcus looked up. "He ran a 54.2."

"I know," Coach Reyes said. She sat down beside him. "Tell me what happens in the first hundred meters."

"I hold back. Build."

"Then?"

"Back straight. Push through the curve."

"And the last hundred?"

"Everything I have left."

"That's your race," she said. "Not his. You don't run against a number. You run your race as well as you possibly can, and the result is the result."

Marcus ran. At the gun, Deshaun went out hard. At two hundred meters, he was ahead by four steps. At three hundred, three steps.

In the last hundred meters, Marcus ran his race.

The finish was close enough that they both stopped and looked at the scoreboard. Deshaun had won by two-tenths of a second.

Marcus stood there breathing hard. He looked at his own time: 54.1.

He had run a personal best—faster than Deshaun's qualifier—and still lost.

He thought about what Coach Reyes had said: the result is the result. He didn't feel great about it. But somewhere underneath the disappointment, he understood.

In the 1940s, an Austrian zoologist named Karl von Frisch made a discovery that would earn him a Nobel Prize: honeybees communicate the location of food sources through a form of movement called the waggle dance.

When a forager bee finds a rich patch of flowers, it returns to the hive and performs the dance on a vertical surface inside the hive wall. The dance has two parts. In the waggle run, the bee moves in a straight line while vibrating its abdomen. It then circles back to the starting point, alternating the return on the left and right to form a figure-eight pattern.

The direction of the waggle run encodes the direction of the food source relative to the sun. If the bee runs straight up the comb, the food is in the direction of the sun. If it runs 30 degrees to the left of vertical, the food is 30 degrees to the left of the sun.

The duration of the waggle run encodes distance. A one-second waggle run corresponds to a food source roughly 1 kilometer away. The longer the run, the farther the flowers.

Other bees observe the dance, often following along physically, and use the information to navigate directly to the food source. Researchers have been able to decode these dances and predict where bees will fly—then confirm it by watching them.

What makes the waggle dance remarkable is not just its complexity but what it represents: a non-human species using symbolic communication—a system where movements stand for something they do not physically resemble. Until von Frisch's discovery, most scientists believed this kind of abstract signaling was unique to humans.

Priya had been working on the same story for three weeks. It was about a girl who discovers her grandmother's old letters and reads them in secret. Priya thought it was the best thing she had ever written. Her teacher, Ms. Osei, handed it back with a note: "The idea is strong. The writing is telling me what to feel instead of showing me."

Priya read that sentence four times. She didn't know what it meant.

She stayed after class. "What's wrong with it?" she asked.

"Nothing is wrong with it," Ms. Osei said. "But look at this sentence." She pointed: 'Elena was very sad when she found the letters.' "You're telling me Elena is sad. Show me instead. What does Elena do? What does she notice? What does she not do?"

Priya went home and stared at the sentence for an hour. Then she crossed it out and wrote: 'Elena sat on the floor of the attic for a long time without opening the second envelope.'

She brought it back to Ms. Osei.

"That's it," Ms. Osei said. "That's the whole story in one sentence."

Priya looked at the two versions. The first told her what to feel. The second made her feel it without being told. She had known, in some distant way, that good writing worked like this—but she hadn't known she could do it herself.

She went back to the beginning of the story.

The Rocky Mountains, the Alps, the Himalayas — every major mountain range on Earth is the result of forces so slow they are nearly invisible, yet so powerful they reshape continents.

The Earth's outer shell is divided into large plates of rock called tectonic plates. These plates float on a layer of hot, semi-molten rock called the mantle and move — very slowly — driven by heat from deep within the Earth. Most tectonic movement occurs at rates of just a few centimeters per year, about the speed at which your fingernails grow.

When two tectonic plates collide, the result depends on what kind of plates they are. When two continental plates collide, neither can sink beneath the other — both are too buoyant. Instead, they crumple upward, forming fold mountains. The Himalayas formed this way when the Indian subcontinent crashed into Asia roughly 50 million years ago. The range is still rising today.

When an oceanic plate collides with a continental plate, the denser oceanic plate sinks beneath the continental one in a process called subduction. As it descends, the plate melts and can generate magma that pushes up through the crust, forming volcanic mountains. The Cascades in the Pacific Northwest are an example.

Mountains also form from faults, where rock breaks and one block is pushed upward relative to another. The Sierra Nevada in California formed largely this way.

Mountains influence weather, define borders, direct rivers, and shape the history of civilizations. They are among the most permanent features of the Earth's surface — and they are still moving.

When Leila's family moved from Tehran to Cleveland, she was seven years old. By the time she was eleven, she was fluent in English. Her parents were not.

It became normal: at the doctor's office, at parent-teacher conferences, at the bank, Leila translated. She learned words she shouldn't have needed to know at eleven — "deductible," "liability," "co-pay" — because someone had to.

Her parents were not helpless. Her father was an engineer. Her mother had run a business. They were competent, careful people who happened not to speak the language of the country they had moved to. But when the school principal talked about Leila's performance, it was Leila who had to translate the compliments about herself, which felt strange — like standing outside your own life and watching it.

One afternoon her mother had an appointment with a doctor Leila had never met. The doctor spoke quickly and used terms Leila didn't know. She translated what she could. On the way home, her mother asked a question, and Leila wasn't sure she had gotten the answer right.

That night she looked up the words she hadn't known. She wrote them in a small notebook she started keeping — not just English words, but Farsi words she hadn't known either, words that existed in one language and not the other.

She would become a professional translator twenty years later. She always said the notebook was where it started — not the language, but the understanding that something important can be lost in the space between words.