Also in 2026 Practice Test B English, question 1.
Passage Excerpt from “The Past and the Future of the Earth’s Oldest Trees”
Excerpt from “The Past and the Future of the Earth’s Oldest Trees”
by Alex Ross
About forty-five hundred years ago, not long after the completion of the Great Pyramid at Giza, a seed of Pinus longaeva, the Great Basin bristlecone pine, landed on a steep slope in what are now known as the White Mountains, in eastern California. The seed may have travelled there on a gust of wind, its flight aided by a winglike attachment to the nut. Or it could have been planted by a bird known as the Clark’s nutcracker, which likes to hide pine seeds in caches; nutcrackers have phenomenal spatial1 memory and can recall thousands of such caches. This seed, however, lay undisturbed. On a moist day in fall, or in the wake of melting snows in spring, a seedling appeared above ground—a stubby one-inch stem with a tuft of bright-green shoots.
Most seedlings die within a year; the mortality rate is more than ninety-nine percent. The survivors are sometimes seen growing in the shadow of a fallen tree. The landscape of the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, as this area of the White Mountains is called, is littered with fragments of dead trees—trunks, limbs, roots, and smaller chunks. Pinus longaeva grows exclusively in subalpine regions of the Great Basin, which stretches from the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada to the Wasatch Range, in Utah. Conditions are generally too arid for the dead wood to rot; instead, it erodes, sanded down like rock. The remnants may harbor nutrients and fungi that help new trees grow. Bristlecones rise from the bones of their ancestors—a city within a cemetery.
Coast redwoods and giant sequoias, California’s gargantuan world-record-holding trees, can grow fifty feet or more in their first twenty years. Bristlecones rise agonizingly slowly. After four or five years, the seedling on the steep slope would have been just a few inches higher, sprouting needles in place of the embryonic shoots. The needles are a deep green, tough, resinous, and closely bunched in groups of five. On a mature tree, they live for fifty years or more. Decades may have passed before the tree was human height, and decades more before it resembled a conventional pine. Bristlecone saplings grow straight up, with relatively sparse foliage, looking like undernourished Christmas trees. After a few hundred years—by which time the Old Kingdom of Egypt had fallen—it was probably forty or fifty feet in height.
Many tree species live for hundreds of years. A smaller but not inconsiderable number, including the sequoias and certain yews, oaks, cypresses, and junipers, survive for thousands. Once a bristlecone has established itself in the unforgiving conditions of the White Mountains, it can last almost indefinitely. The trees tend to grow some distance from one another, so fires almost never destroy an entire stand. Because only a few other plant species can handle the dry, cold climate, the bristlecones face little competition. Unlike most plants, they tolerate dolomite soil, which is composed of a chalky type of limestone that is heavily alkaline and low in nutrients. As for insect threats, bristlecone wood is so dense that mountain-pine beetles and other pests can rarely burrow their way into it.
Empires rose and fell; wars raged; . . . and the tree from 2500 B.C. continued its implacable slow-motion existence, adding about two-hundredths of an inch to the diameter of its trunk each year. Minute changes in the tree-ring record make bristlecones an exceptionally useful source of data about changing conditions on Earth. When rains are heavier than normal, the rings widen. When volcanic eruptions cause global cooling, frost rings make the anomaly2 visible. . . .
As the millennia go by, bristlecones become contorted and wraithlike.3 The main stem, or leader, dies back. Entire branches, even the trunk itself, become fossils. At first glance, the tree may look dead. Such is the case of the forty-five-hundred-year-old tree that clings to life near the tourist path that now runs through the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest. Spears of dead wood jut into the air. The trunk is a marbled hulk stripped of bark, like driftwood thrown from a vanished ocean. A ribbon of live bark runs up one side, funneling water and nutrients to clumps of green needles high above. All told, the tree is an unprepossessing specimen; most people march past it without giving it a second glance. . . .
. . . No two super-elderly trees look alike, to the point where they have acquired the characteristics of individuals. Trees are prone to anthropomorphism; we project our dreams and our anxieties onto them. Bristlecones have been called elders, sentinels, sages. The possibility that climate change will cause their extinction has inspired a spate4 of alarmed news stories, although tree scientists tend to discount the idea that the bristlecones are in immediate danger. They have survived any number of catastrophes in the past; they may survive humanity.
From “The Past and the Future of the Earth’s Oldest Trees” by Alex Ross from THE NEW YORKER, January 20, 2020. Copyright © 2020 by Condé Nast. All rights reserved.
1spatial: relating to physical space
2anomaly: oddity
3wraithlike: ghostly
4spate: sudden abundance
Question
What is the effect of comparing groups of bristlecone pines to “a city within a cemetery” (paragraph 2)?
- AIt illustrates that the new tree’s appearance is markedly different from that of mature bristlecone pines.
- BIt emphasizes the new tree’s ability to use resources left by prior generations of bristlecone pines.
- CIt highlights the tree’s capacity for a long life if it is able to survive to maturity.
- DIt reveals that the tree’s dense growth patterns are unusual in arid conditions.
Show the answer
Correct answer: B
The question asks what the effect is of comparing groups of bristlecone pines to “a city within a cemetery” (paragraph 2).
A. Incorrect. The reference to “a city within a cemetery” describes how new trees use the remnants of their “ancestors” (paragraph 2) and makes no comment on the appearance of young versus mature trees.
B. CORRECT. The “cemetery” contains “the bones of their ancestors” (paragraph 2)—“ancestors” being earlier generations of bristlecone pines—which provide some of the nutrients that the new trees need.
C. Incorrect. The reference to “a cemetery” is not a comment on how long bristlecone pines can live; rather, it illustrates that the new pines are using remnants of their “ancestors” (paragraph 2) to grow.
D. Incorrect. Although the climate is mentioned in paragraph 2, it is not the reason for the comparison to “a city within a cemetery.” The comment is intended to illustrate how the new trees use nutrients left behind by the old ones.
Question analysis
This figurative language question on Alex Ross’s article about the bristlecone pine, one of the Earth’s oldest trees, asks what effect the author creates by comparing groups of these trees to “a city within a cemetery.” Students must interpret a metaphor in context, and the choices raise ideas the excerpt discusses elsewhere, so they must stay with what this comparison itself conveys.
- Grade level
- Grade 7 reading and task
- Compared with grade 7
- At grade 7 Interpreting a metaphor from nearby context is standard grade 7 work. The phrase closes a paragraph whose earlier sentences give the needed context, so the demand is typical, though the excerpt’s rich vocabulary adds some reading load.
- Estimated difficulty
- Straightforward: two steps or one careful reading.
- Thinking it demands
- Depth of knowledge 2, skills and concepts · mainly analyze
- What makes it hard
- Figurative or literary language moderate
- Hard words minor
- Evidence
- Answered from one paragraph or stanza
- Reading level
- Passage: about grade 8, 851 words; question and choices: about grade 10, 79 words.
- Students, last 30 days
- Not enough answers yet to show (it takes 10).
Why it is hard, traps and wrong answers (shows the answer)
Why it is hard
The comparison closes paragraph 2, and the sentence just before it explains it: the dead wood may hold nutrients and fungi that help seedlings grow. Students who read the image on its own reach for ideas from elsewhere in the excerpt, such as the trees’ great age, the look of young and old trees, or the dry climate. The question rewards reading the metaphor against its neighbors, which makes it fairly quick.
Figurative or literary language moderate Understanding the question
Both halves of the metaphor need decoding: the “city” is the living bristlecones, and the “cemetery” is the dead trunks, limbs and roots littering the slope, “the bones of their ancestors.” (Graesser, Singer & Trabasso, 1994; Kintsch, 1998)
Hard words minor Understanding the question
The sentence that explains the image, “The remnants may harbor nutrients and fungi that help new trees grow,” depends on “remnants” and on “harbor” in its less familiar sense of hold. (Perfetti, 2007; Freedle & Kostin, 1993)
Strategy: Work out what the “city” and the “cemetery” each stand for by rereading the sentences just before the phrase, then choose the effect that both halves of the comparison support.
Traps
- True but not the answer: A choice says something accurate about the text that does not answer this question.
- Taking figurative language literally: A choice reads a figure of speech or image at face value.
- Wrong part of the text: A choice is true of another paragraph, stanza or speaker than the one asked about.
The wrong answers, classified
A Wrong part of the text (Kirsch & Mosenthal, 1990)
Reads the city and the cemetery as young and old trees that look different, a contrast drawn between paragraphs 3 and 6, though here the cemetery is dead wood.
C True but not the answer (King et al., 2004; Embretson & Wetzel, 1987)
Applies the excerpt’s main idea, the trees’ great age, to this phrase, but a city in a cemetery shows living trees rising from dead ones, not how long they last.
D Taking figurative language literally (Graesser, Singer & Trabasso, 1994)
Takes “city” at face value as crowded growth and pairs it with the paragraph’s “arid” conditions, though paragraph 4 says bristlecones grow some distance apart.
Working it out, step by step
Figure out what the question asks
This asks about a comparison. In paragraph 2, the author calls groups of bristlecones “a city within a cemetery.” You need to figure out what this picture helps the reader understand about the trees.
Read the sentences around it
Paragraph 2 says the forest floor is “littered with fragments of dead trees—trunks, limbs, roots, and smaller chunks.” Next it says, “The remnants may harbor nutrients and fungi that help new trees grow.” Then comes the comparison: “Bristlecones rise from the bones of their ancestors—a city within a cemetery.”
Decode the two halves of the picture
Remnants are leftover pieces. To harbor something here means to hold it. Fungi are living things such as mushrooms and molds. A cemetery is a place for the dead, so it stands for the dead wood. A city is full of life, so it stands for the living trees. Their ancestors are the trees that lived and died before them. So new trees grow out of the old ones’ remains and use what those remains hold.
Check each choice
- A does not fit. The image is about living trees and dead wood. It says nothing about how young and old trees look.
- B fits. New trees use the nutrients and fungi left behind by earlier generations.
- C does not fit. The excerpt does show that bristlecones live long, but this image is about growing from dead wood.
- D does not fit. A city may sound crowded, but paragraph 4 says the trees “grow some distance from one another.”
Choose the answer
The comparison shows living trees rising from, and feeding on, the remains of their ancestors. So the answer is B.
Why this answer and not the closest wrong one
C is tempting, because long life is what the whole excerpt is about. But the sentence just before the comparison explains it: the dead wood may hold nutrients that help new trees grow. The picture is about the living drawing on the dead, which is what B says.
More questions like this
The original DOE question
The passage “Excerpt from “The Past and the Future of the Earth’s Oldest Trees”” as printed (pages 193–194)
