Version A — Grade 3 ELA Practice Test

Marcus had been saving his allowance for six weeks to buy the remote-control car in the toy store window. He had almost enough. But on Saturday morning, his little brother Owen dropped his peanut butter sandwich face-down on the carpet. "I'm sorry," Owen said, staring at the peanut butter smeared into the rug. Their mom was at work. Their dad was fixing the car in the garage. Marcus looked at the sandwich, then at Owen's face, which was starting to crumple. "It's okay," Marcus said. He got the carpet cleaner from under the sink and read the directions carefully. He sprayed it on, waited two minutes, then pressed an old towel into the stain. When he lifted the towel, the peanut butter was mostly gone. "How did you know how to do that?" Owen asked. "I read the bottle," Marcus said. Owen helped him rinse the towel. When their dad came in to check on them, the carpet was clean and both boys were making new sandwiches together. "Nice work," his dad said, looking at the carpet. Marcus realized his allowance didn't feel as important as it had that morning. Some things were worth more than remote-control cars.

Honeybees are excellent at finding food, and they share what they learn with the rest of the hive. When a worker bee discovers a good patch of flowers, she does not keep it to herself. She returns to the hive and performs a special movement called the waggle dance to tell the other bees exactly where to go. The waggle dance works like a map. The bee waggles her body in a straight line, then loops around and does it again. The direction of the waggle line tells the other bees which direction to fly. If the bee waggles straight up, it means fly toward the sun. If she waggles at an angle, the bees should fly at that same angle from the sun. The length of the dance matters too. A longer waggle means the flowers are farther away. A shorter waggle means they are close. The more excited the dance is, the more valuable the food source. Bees that watch the dance are able to fly to the exact flower patch, even if it is more than a mile away. Scientists discovered this by watching bees carefully and changing where flowers were placed. They found that the bees always arrived near the location the dance described. The waggle dance is one of the most remarkable forms of communication in the animal kingdom. It shows that animals can share very specific information without using words at all.

Destiny had never been good at anything that took a long time to learn. She quit guitar after three lessons. She quit swimming after two weeks. When her mother signed her up for a coding class, Destiny was already planning what she would tell her teacher on the last day. But the first project was making a name tag light up on the screen. Destiny typed her name, changed the color three times, and made the letters blink. It was ugly, but it worked, and she had made it do that. "You can make the font bigger," said the boy next to her, whose name was Diego. He showed her how. Destiny spent the rest of class making her name bigger, smaller, and then a deep orange. She missed the bus and had to call her mom for a ride. In the car, her mother looked at the phone where Destiny was still adjusting the color. "I thought you were going to quit." "I might quit tomorrow," Destiny said. She did not quit tomorrow. She also did not quit the day after that. By the end of the month, Destiny's name tag blinked in three colors and had a small animated star that she had figured out herself. She did not think about the guitar or the swimming anymore. She thought about what the star could do next.

If you look up on a clear day, the sky appears bright blue. But the sky has no blue paint in it. So why does it look that way? The answer has to do with sunlight and tiny particles in the air. Sunlight looks white or yellow, but it is actually made up of all the colors of the rainbow mixed together. When sunlight enters Earth's atmosphere, it crashes into tiny particles of gas. Different colors of light travel in different wavelengths. Red light has long wavelengths, and blue light has short wavelengths. When light hits a gas particle, the short wavelengths scatter more than the long ones. Blue light bounces in all directions across the whole sky. Red and yellow light passes more directly to your eyes without scattering as much. Because the blue light is scattered everywhere, when you look up, blue light is coming at your eyes from every part of the sky. That is why the whole sky looks blue, not just the area near the sun. This same effect explains why sunsets are red and orange. In the evening, the sun is lower in the sky, so sunlight must travel through more atmosphere to reach your eyes. Most of the blue light scatters away before it arrives. Only the long-wavelength red and orange light reaches you, painting the sky those warm colors.

Ellie found the photograph in a box of her grandmother's things. It showed a girl about her own age standing next to a bicycle, squinting into the sun. "That's me," said Grandma Bea, coming to stand beside her. "You were my age?" "Younger, maybe. Eight or nine." Grandma Bea sat down on the edge of the bed. "That was the summer my father finally got enough money for a second-hand bicycle. He bought it from the neighbor's son for five dollars." Ellie studied the girl in the photograph. She had the same gap between her two front teeth that Ellie had. "What happened to the bike?" "I rode it every day until I left for college. Then I gave it to the family next door." Grandma Bea smiled. "The youngest girl used to wait on the porch for me every morning. Couldn't wait to get her hands on it. I figured it was already more hers than mine." Ellie looked from the photograph to her grandmother's face and back again. There was something about the way the girl in the picture was gripping the handlebars—like she was never going to let go—that made Ellie feel like she was looking at someone she already knew.

Every year, hundreds of billions of plastic bags are used around the world. Most are used for just a few minutes to carry groceries or take-out food. After that, they are thrown away. The problem is that plastic bags do not break down easily in nature. A paper bag might decompose in about a month. A plastic bag can take up to 1,000 years. In the meantime, plastic bags end up in oceans, forests, rivers, and parks. Marine animals are among the most affected. Sea turtles often mistake plastic bags for jellyfish, one of their favorite foods. When a turtle eats a plastic bag, it can block its digestive system. Seabirds sometimes feed plastic pieces to their chicks, mistaking them for fish. Some countries and cities have responded by banning plastic bags or charging a fee for each one used. When Ireland added a tax on plastic bags in 2002, bag use dropped by 90 percent within weeks. Similar programs have had strong results in countries from Kenya to Canada. Many people have switched to reusable bags made from cloth or other materials. These can be used hundreds of times before wearing out. One reusable bag can replace thousands of plastic bags over its lifetime. Reducing plastic bag use does not solve all of the world's plastic pollution problems. But it is a change that individuals, businesses, and governments can make immediately, with clear results.