ISEE practice, Grade 8

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Scholar Tests · Set 3

ISEE practice test, Grade 8

Name ______________________ Date ____________

Verbal Reasoning

Circle the letter of the best answer. About 5 minutes.

  1. 1.

    FEASIBLE

    Which word means most nearly the same as the word in capital letters?

    1. Apossible
    2. Bhungry
    3. Cimpractical
    4. Dfestive
  2. 2.

    The two historians reached ______ conclusions, so their books are often read side by side as a debate.

    Which word best completes the sentence?

    1. Amatching
    2. Bsimilar
    3. Copposing
    4. Didentical
  3. 3.

    INSOLENT

    Which word means most nearly the same as the word in capital letters?

    1. Awealthy
    2. Brude
    3. Ccurious
    4. Dlazy
  4. 4.

    The ______ manager rarely changed her mind, yet even she was ______ by the team's new proposal.

    Which pair of words best completes the sentence?

    1. Astubborn . . . unmoved
    2. Bstubborn . . . persuaded
    3. Cbusy . . . bored
    4. Dflexible . . . unconvinced
  5. 5.

    DELETERIOUS

    Which word means most nearly the same as the word in capital letters?

    1. Abeneficial
    2. Bharmful
    3. Cdelicious
    4. Dcareless
  6. 6.

    His apology seemed ______, since he repeated the same insult the very next day.

    Which word best completes the sentence?

    1. Aearnest
    2. Binsincere
    3. Cheartfelt
    4. Dgenuine
  7. 7.

    AMELIORATE

    Which word means most nearly the same as the word in capital letters?

    1. Aworsen
    2. Bimprove
    3. Cannounce
    4. Dborrow
  8. 8.

    EQUIVOCAL

    Which word means most nearly the same as the word in capital letters?

    1. Adefinite
    2. Bambiguous
    3. Cgenerous
    4. Danxious
  9. 9.

    Because the evidence was ______, the detective refused to ______ anyone until she learned more.

    Which pair of words best completes the sentence?

    1. Aincomplete . . . suspect
    2. Boverwhelming . . . release
    3. Cincomplete . . . accuse
    4. Dhidden . . . help
  10. 10.

    The speaker's ______ remarks wandered so far from the topic that the audience lost interest.

    Which word best completes the sentence?

    1. Apointed
    2. Bdigressive
    3. Cconcise
    4. Drelevant

Quantitative Reasoning

Circle the letter of the best answer. About 9 minutes.

  1. 1.

    How many multiples of 11 are there from 37 to 116, including 37 and 116?

    1. A10
    2. B6
    3. C7
    4. D8
  2. 2.

    A shop rents bikes for $6 for the first 3 hours, plus $2 for each hour after the first 3. How much does it cost to rent a bike for 6 hours?

    1. A$6
    2. B$18
    3. C$12
    4. D$14
  3. 3.

    A taxi ride costs a starting fee plus the same amount for each mile. A 5-mile ride costs $20, and a 9-mile ride costs $32. How much does a 13-mile ride cost?

    1. A$52
    2. B$49
    3. C$39
    4. D$44
  4. 4.

    Column A: |9 − (−4)|
    Column B: |9| − |−4|

    Compare the quantity in Column A with the quantity in Column B.

    1. AColumn A is greater.
    2. BColumn B is greater.
    3. CThe two quantities are equal.
    4. DIt cannot be decided from the information given.
  5. 5.

    x + y = 10 and x − y = 4
    Column A: x
    Column B: y

    Compare the quantity in Column A with the quantity in Column B.

    1. AColumn A is greater.
    2. BColumn B is greater.
    3. CThe two quantities are equal.
    4. DIt cannot be decided from the information given.
  6. 6.

    A bicycle helmet costs $360. Its price is raised by 20% and the new price is then reduced by 25%. What is the final price?

    1. A$324
    2. B$270
    3. C$342
    4. D$36
  7. 7.

    A bag holds 6 red marbles and 3 blue marbles. How many red marbles must be added to the bag so that the probability of picking a red marble at random is 3/4?

    1. A1
    2. B9
    3. C2
    4. D3
  8. 8.

    A line passes through the points (−4, 5) and (−3, 11).
    Column A: The slope of the line
    Column B: 2

    Compare the quantity in Column A with the quantity in Column B.

    1. AColumn A is greater.
    2. BColumn B is greater.
    3. CThe two quantities are equal.
    4. DIt cannot be decided from the information given.
  9. 9.

    x < 0
    Column A: −x
    Column B: x

    Compare the quantity in Column A with the quantity in Column B.

    1. AColumn A is greater.
    2. BColumn B is greater.
    3. CThe two quantities are equal.
    4. DIt cannot be decided from the information given.
  10. 10.

    At a picnic there are 6 people, and 4 of them are members of one family. Each person shakes hands once with every other person, except that the family members do not shake hands with each other. How many handshakes take place?

    1. A11
    2. B9
    3. C1
    4. D15

Reading Comprehension

Circle the letter of the best answer. About 10 minutes.

  1. Grace Hopper and the Language of Machines

    In the 1940s, the few computers in existence were enormous, temperamental machines, and giving them instructions was a specialist's ordeal. Programs had to be written as long strings of numeric codes, each tied to the hardware of one particular machine, and a single misplaced digit could ruin hours of work. Grace Hopper, a mathematician who spent much of her career in uniform, became convinced that this arrangement had things backward. People, she argued, should not have to think like machines; machines should be made to understand something closer to the way people write.

    Hopper was born in New York City in 1906. She studied mathematics and physics at Vassar College and earned a doctorate in mathematics from Yale in 1934, an unusual achievement for anyone at the time and a rare one for a woman. During World War II she joined the Navy Reserve and was assigned to Harvard University, where she became one of the first people to write instructions for the Mark I, an electromechanical calculator about fifty feet long that carried out calculations for the war effort.

    Her name is often attached to a famous story from that period. In 1947, operators working on a later Harvard machine, the Mark II, traced a malfunction to a moth trapped in one of its relays. They taped the insect into the logbook with a note calling it the first actual case of a bug being found. Engineers had used "bug" to mean a defect long before then, so the moth did not invent the term, but Hopper enjoyed telling the story, and it helped make the word part of everyday computing language.

    Her more lasting contribution came after the war, when she joined the company building the UNIVAC, one of the first commercial computers. There, in the early 1950s, she developed a program called A-0, which is widely regarded as one of the earliest compilers. A compiler is a program that translates instructions written in a more convenient form into the numeric code a machine actually runs. Many colleagues were skeptical. Computers, they insisted, could do arithmetic; they could not write programs. Hopper later recalled hearing that objection even after her compiler was already working.

    She pressed further, arguing that business programs should be written in words resembling ordinary English. Her team's FLOW-MATIC language put that idea into practice, and it strongly influenced COBOL, a language designed in 1959 for business data processing. COBOL spread so widely that programs written in it still handle banking and government records today.

    Hopper kept serving in the Navy for decades, retiring in 1986 as a rear admiral at the age of seventy-nine. In lectures she liked to hand out pieces of wire about a foot long, the distance light travels in a billionth of a second, to show audiences why every fraction of time mattered inside a computer. She died in 1992, and in 2016 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

    1.

    What is the passage mainly about?

    1. AHow Grace Hopper made computers easier to program by translating humanlike instructions into machine code
    2. BHow Grace Hopper discovered the first computer bug and gave the word its technical meaning
    3. CHow Grace Hopper spent her career making computers physically smaller and lighter
    4. DHow Grace Hopper proved to her colleagues that computers could perform only arithmetic
  2. 2.

    According to the passage, what is a compiler?

    1. AA program that turns instructions in a convenient form into a machine's numeric code
    2. BA length of wire showing how far light travels in a moment
    3. CA logbook in which operators record every malfunction they discover
    4. DA relay that halts a computer when an insect becomes trapped inside it
  3. 3.

    The passage suggests that Hopper's colleagues doubted her compiler mainly because they

    1. Athought the UNIVAC was far too slow to run any program at all
    2. Bworried that the Navy would forbid her from sharing the idea
    3. Cobjected to programs being written in languages other than English
    4. Dbelieved computers were suited to calculation, not to producing programs
  4. 4.

    As it is used in the passage, the word "pressed" most nearly means

    1. Asqueezed for juice
    2. Bpushed on persistently
    3. Cflattened with weight
    4. Dcrowded in closely
  5. 5.

    Why does the author explain that engineers used "bug" before 1947?

    1. ATo suggest that the story of the moth was entirely made up
    2. BTo correct the common belief that the moth incident created the term
    3. CTo argue that the Mark II was poorly maintained by its operators
    4. DTo explain why insects were attracted to early computer relays
  6. 6.

    How is the passage mainly organized?

    1. AIt compares Hopper's career point by point with the careers of other early computer pioneers.
    2. BIt explains step by step how a compiler works, mentioning Hopper only in passing.
    3. CIt follows Hopper's life roughly in time order, emphasizing her work on programming languages.
    4. DIt presents a single problem and then lists several unsuccessful attempts to solve it.

  7. Snowfall in the Dark

    Far below the reach of sunlight, in water only a few degrees above freezing, it is always snowing. The flakes are not ice. They are clumps of dead and dying matter: the remains of microscopic algae, the shed shells of tiny animals, waste pellets and grains of dust blown off distant deserts, all bound together by a sticky film of mucus that many sea creatures produce. Ocean scientists call this steady drift "marine snow," and although a single flake is hardly worth noticing, the snowfall as a whole is one of the planet's most important means of moving carbon.

    The process begins at the sunlit surface. Phytoplankton, single-celled organisms that float near the top of the sea, absorb carbon dioxide and use sunlight to turn it into living tissue, much as land plants do. Phytoplankton multiply quickly and die quickly, and they are eaten by small grazing animals that in turn release compact waste pellets. Each of these fragments contains carbon that was, not long before, dissolved in the water and in contact with the air above it.

    Most of that material never travels far. Bacteria break much of it down long before it leaves the upper ocean, releasing the carbon back into the water, where it can return to the atmosphere. But some particles collide, stick together and grow heavy enough to sink faster than they can be consumed. A clump may spend weeks falling, and along the way it serves as a moving meal. Animals of the deep, from small crustaceans to the vampire squid, which gathers drifting particles with long, sticky filaments, depend on this rain from above in a place where almost nothing grows.

    Only a small fraction of the original carbon reaches the deep ocean or the seafloor. That fraction matters enormously, however. Carbon carried into the deep can remain isolated from the atmosphere for centuries, and some of it is buried in sediment for far longer. Scientists refer to this whole chain, from surface growth to deep storage, as the "biological pump." Without it, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air would be considerably higher than it is.

    Researchers study marine snow with sediment traps, which are containers anchored at various depths to catch what falls, and increasingly with cameras and robotic floats that can count particles as they pass. Their measurements remain uncertain, partly because the ocean is vast and the snowfall varies with season and place. A spring bloom of phytoplankton can send down a heavy burst; a nutrient-poor stretch of open ocean may produce only a thin drizzle.

    What the research makes clear is that the deep sea, often imagined as remote and unchanging, is closely tied to the surface world. The carbon in a flake drifting past a vampire squid may have been in the air above the waves only a season earlier.

    7.

    Which choice best states the central idea of the passage?

    1. AScientists have now measured exactly how much carbon the ocean removes from the air each year.
    2. BSinking particles called marine snow carry carbon from the ocean's surface into the deep, where some of it is stored for a long time.
    3. CThe vampire squid is the most important link in the ocean's carbon cycle.
    4. DPhytoplankton are the only organisms able to survive in the deep, dark parts of the ocean.
  8. 8.

    According to the passage, what happens to most of the material that forms near the surface?

    1. AIt forms flakes that fall to the bottom within hours.
    2. BIt sinks to the seafloor and is buried in sediment.
    3. CIt is eaten by vampire squid in the deep ocean.
    4. DIt is broken down by bacteria before it can sink very far.
  9. 9.

    Based on the passage, a sediment trap placed beneath a spring phytoplankton bloom would most likely

    1. Acollect nothing, since all of the material is eaten near the surface
    2. Bshow that the biological pump stops working in spring
    3. Ccollect more falling material than a trap beneath a nutrient-poor area
    4. Dcollect the same amount as any other trap at that depth
  10. 10.

    As it is used in the passage, the word "bound" most nearly means

    1. Aleaped
    2. Bcertain
    3. Cheaded
    4. Dheld

Mathematics Achievement

Circle the letter of the best answer. About 9 minutes.

  1. 1.

    What is the volume of the cylinder? Use 3.14 for π.

    1. A219.8 cubic inches
    2. B439.6 cubic inches
    3. C1,099 cubic inches
    4. D350 cubic inches
  2. 2.

    What value of x makes 5(x − 3) = −7x − 75 true?

    1. A30
    2. B−7 1/2
    3. C−5
    4. D−6
  3. 3.

    The two lines with arrowheads on them are parallel. What is the measure of the angle marked with a question mark?

    1. A95°
    2. B53°
    3. C105°
    4. D115°
  4. 4.

    Which expression is equivalent to x/2 + x/9?

    1. Ax/9
    2. B11x/18
    3. C2x/11
    4. D7x/18
  5. 5.

    What is the sum of the two solutions of the equation (x − 9)² = 64?

    1. A17
    2. B18
    3. C16
    4. D−18
  6. 6.

    Two fair number cubes, each numbered 1 to 6, are rolled. X is the larger of the two numbers rolled (when both show the same number, X is that number). What is the probability that X is 3 or less?

    1. A5/36
    2. B1/9
    3. C1/2
    4. D1/4
  7. 7.

    The price of a ticket went from $50 to $70. By what percent did the price increase?

    1. A140%
    2. B20%
    3. C400%
    4. D40%
  8. 8.

    A bag holds 7 red and 5 blue marbles. Two marbles are picked without looking, one after the other, and the first is not put back. What is the probability that both are red?

    1. A7/12
    2. B49/144
    3. C7/22
    4. D6/11
  9. 9.

    A trapezoid has vertices at (−5, −2), (2, −2), (0, 5), and (−2, 5). What is the area of the trapezoid, in square units?

    1. A49
    2. B31 1/2
    3. C14
    4. D63
  10. 10.

    In a video game, 5 zebs equal 1 kip, and 2 kips equal 1 morv. How many morvs equal 20 zebs?

    1. A10
    2. B2
    3. C4
    4. D200

Written by Scholar Tests in the style of the published ISEE question types. Not a real ISEE test, and a practice score is not a real score.