Version C — Grade 4 ELA Practice Test

For six weeks, Theo had learned every line of the lead role in the school play. Not because he was the lead—he wasn't—but because he was the understudy, and an understudy was supposed to know every line in case the lead couldn't go on.

The lead was a sixth-grader named Marcus who had never missed a single rehearsal and showed no sign of getting sick.

Theo sat in the wings every night during dress rehearsal and said Marcus's lines silently to himself. The drama teacher, Ms. Pacheco, sometimes noticed and gave him a small nod. That was all.

On opening night, Theo took his place in the ensemble and did his job—background movement, two spoken lines, and one moment where he carried a prop across the stage. He did it well. No one in the audience noticed him particularly.

After the show, his mother found him backstage.

"You knew every word he said," she told him. "I was watching you."

"Nobody knew that except Ms. Pacheco," Theo said.

His mother looked at him for a moment. "Theo," she said. "That's exactly the point."

He thought about that on the drive home. He had done the whole job—all the preparation, all the knowledge, all the readiness—and none of it had been visible, and none of it had needed to be. The play had been good. It had run without a hitch. And somewhere in that invisible readiness, he had been a part of why.

A glacier is a large, slow-moving mass of ice formed from compacted snow that has accumulated over many years. Unlike the ice in your freezer, glacier ice is under enormous pressure, which causes it to flow — very slowly — downhill under its own weight. The world's glaciers hold about 69 percent of Earth's fresh water.

Glaciers form in regions where more snow falls each year than melts. Over time, the weight of accumulating snow compresses the lower layers into dense, blue ice. The blue color occurs because the ice is so dense that it absorbs red wavelengths of light and reflects blue.

Glaciers move by two mechanisms. Plastic deformation occurs when ice crystals within the glacier slowly rearrange themselves under pressure, allowing the ice to flow. Basal sliding occurs when meltwater at the bottom of the glacier lubricates the contact with rock, allowing the glacier to slide. Mountain glaciers can advance several meters per day; others move only centimeters per year.

As glaciers move, they reshape the land. They carve U-shaped valleys, deposit piles of rock called moraines, and grind bedrock into fine sediment called glacial flour, which clouds rivers with a distinctive milky color.

Glaciers are also climate records. Each year of snowfall traps air bubbles and dust, creating layers like tree rings. Scientists drill ice cores to read these records — analyzing trapped air to measure ancient CO2 levels and temperature changes going back hundreds of thousands of years.

Today, glaciers worldwide are retreating faster than at any time in recorded history. Scientists use satellite data and field measurements to track this change, which has significant implications for freshwater supplies and sea level rise.

For three days after the argument, Mira and her best friend Yolanda did not speak. Not because they had agreed to stop speaking — they hadn't — but because neither of them had figured out what to say.

What had happened was small in the way that important things are sometimes small: Yolanda had shared something Mira told her in confidence, and when Mira found out, she had said something that she couldn't take back.

Mira rehearsed apologies in her head but none of them felt right. They all started with her explaining why she had been hurt, which turned the apology into something else.

On the fourth day, Yolanda left a note in Mira's locker. It said: I'm sorry I told. I knew it was wrong when I did it.

Mira held the note for a long time. The note didn't ask for anything. It didn't explain or justify. It just said the thing.

She wrote back: I shouldn't have said what I said. That's separate from being hurt.

Yolanda read it during lunch, looked up across the cafeteria, and gave a small nod.

That afternoon they walked home together. They didn't talk about the argument. They talked about other things, the way you do when the important thing has already been said.

Mira thought about the note. Yolanda hadn't waited to be forgiven before apologizing. That was the thing she had done right — she had just said the thing without asking for anything back. Mira thought she would try to remember that.

Before Johannes Gutenberg introduced the movable-type printing press in Europe around 1440, books were made entirely by hand. Monks and scribes copied texts letter by letter, a process that took months or years for a single book. As a result, books were extraordinarily expensive and rare. A scholar's library might contain only a handful of volumes.

Gutenberg's press changed this almost immediately. By 1500 — just fifty years after its introduction — printing presses across Europe had produced an estimated 20 million books. The price of books fell dramatically, making them accessible to merchants, students, and craftspeople who could never before have owned them.

The effects were far-reaching. Ideas that once spread slowly from scholar to scholar could now travel across the continent within months. Martin Luther's 95 Theses — a challenge to the Catholic Church — were printed and distributed so rapidly after 1517 that Church authorities were caught off guard. Scientific discoveries could be published and verified by researchers in different countries. Literary and philosophical works reached audiences their authors could never have imagined.

The printing press also standardized language. As printers chose which spelling and grammar to use, regional variations began to consolidate into more uniform written languages. This helped create the national languages we recognize today.

Historians often describe the printing press as one of the most transformative inventions in human history — not because of what it made, but because of what it made possible: the rapid, widespread exchange of ideas that shaped the modern world.

Every Tuesday, Grandpa Osei came for dinner. He sat at the same chair at the corner of the table, the one with the slightly wobbly leg that nobody had ever fixed because it was his chair and he never complained about it.

Then one Tuesday he didn't come, and the next, and the one after. He had moved to a care facility across town where the food was good and there were people his age and someone to check on him at night. Kwame's parents said it was the right thing.

Kwame set the table on the first Tuesday after the move and put a plate at Grandpa's chair without thinking. His mother saw it and didn't say anything. His father quietly removed the extra place setting while Kwame was in the kitchen.

At dinner, the wobbly chair was pushed in against the table, empty. Kwame kept looking at it.

"Can we go see him this week?" Kwame asked.

"We're going Saturday," his mother said.

Kwame nodded. He ate his food. He looked at the chair.

After dinner, he got out his father's tools and tightened the bolt on the chair's leg until it didn't wobble anymore. He didn't know exactly why he did it. Maybe it was because fixing something felt better than leaving it broken. Maybe it was because if Grandpa came back — even just for dinner sometimes — the chair should be ready.

His mother stood in the doorway and watched him work. When he was done, she said, "He'll like that."

Kwame hoped so.

Sleep is not the absence of activity — it is a highly organized state during which the brain performs essential work. Scientists who study sleep have found that during the night, the brain cycles through multiple stages, each with a different function.

Sleep is divided into two main types: non-REM (rapid eye movement) and REM sleep. Non-REM sleep has three stages. In the early stages, the body temperature drops, heart rate slows, and the brain begins to consolidate memories — transferring information from short-term to long-term storage. The deepest stage of non-REM sleep is when the body repairs tissue, builds bone and muscle, and strengthens the immune system.

REM sleep, which makes up about 20–25 percent of a night's sleep in adults, is when most dreaming occurs. During REM sleep, the brain is nearly as active as when awake, but the body's muscles are temporarily paralyzed — a protective mechanism that prevents people from acting out their dreams.

Sleep deprivation — consistently getting less sleep than needed — has serious consequences. Studies show it impairs memory, reduces the ability to focus, slows reaction times, and weakens the immune system. Chronic sleep deprivation has been linked to long-term health problems including obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.

Most children ages 9–12 need 9–12 hours of sleep per night. Teenagers need 8–10 hours. Despite this, surveys show many young people get far less.

Scientists emphasize that there is no substitute for sleep — it cannot be fully recovered after the fact, and no amount of caffeine replaces what the sleeping brain does.

Mr. Ferrante had been collecting old maps for forty years. His apartment was full of them — rolled in tubes, framed on walls, spread under glass on the dining table he no longer used for dining.

He was, in the eyes of his neighbors, an eccentric. He did not disagree.

His niece Sofia visited on Sundays. She was twelve, easily bored by most adult hobbies, but there was something about the maps she couldn't ignore. They were beautiful, first of all. But more than that, they were wrong in interesting ways.

"This one says there's a sea monster here," she said one afternoon, pointing to an expanse of blank ocean on a sixteenth-century chart.

"Sea monster, or unknown," Mr. Ferrante said. "The cartographers drew what they didn't know."

Sofia thought about that. "So the map is a record of what people didn't know yet."

"Yes. And of what they were afraid of. And what they imagined." He paused. "All maps are. Even modern ones."

Sofia looked at the map differently after that. The blank spaces weren't failures. They were honest — someone's admission that the world extended beyond their knowledge and that the edge of what they knew wasn't the edge of what was real.

Later she asked him why he collected them.

"Because," he said simply, "they remind me how much there is still to find out."

Sofia decided she would start a collection of her own. Not maps, necessarily. But something.