Also in 2026 Practice Test B English, question 3.
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
Read this sentence from paragraph 5.
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.
The sentence contributes to the development of ideas in the excerpt by
- Aemphasizing the bristlecone pine’s precise growth pattern.
- Bsuggesting that things that seem well established face threats.
- Cdescribing the pace of the life cycle of the bristlecone pine.
- Dexplaining the reason for the bristlecone pine’s longevity.
Show the answer
Correct answer: C
The question asks how the first sentence of paragraph 5 contributes to the development of ideas in the excerpt.
A. Incorrect. While “two-hundredths of an inch” is a reference to the bristlecone pine’s growth pattern, the point of the reference—and of the entire sentence—is to emphasize the incredibly slow pace of the pine’s life cycle.
B. Incorrect. While “wars raged” is a threat that empires face, the point of mentioning wars and the rise and fall of empires is to emphasize the bristlecone pine’s slow-paced life cycle by contrasting its slowness with the big, dramatic changes taking place in human history during that life cycle.
C. CORRECT. Making reference to huge changes in human history such as the rise and fall of empires and the raging of wars provides a sharp contrast to the incredibly slow growth of the bristlecone pine.
D. Incorrect. This sentence describes how slowly the bristlecone pine grows in contrast to how dramatically human history changes in the same time span but never explains the reasons for the pine’s longevity.
Question analysis
This text structure question quotes a sentence from paragraph 5 of Alex Ross’s excerpt on bristlecone pines, the one that begins “Empires rose and fell; wars raged.” Students must explain how the sentence contributes to the development of ideas, and the choices offer four plausible readings of its purpose.
- Grade level
- Grade 8 reading and task
- Compared with grade 7
- At grade 7 Grade 7 students regularly explain how a sentence develops an idea. This sentence adds demanding vocabulary such as “implacable” and mixes human history with a botanical detail, but it is printed with the question, so the overall demand stays typical.
- Estimated difficulty
- Moderate: several steps, or a close reading with one strong distractor.
- Thinking it demands
- Depth of knowledge 2, skills and concepts · mainly analyze
- What makes it hard
- How, not what moderate
- Hard words minor
- Evidence
- Answered from one sentence or line
- Reading level
- Passage: about grade 8, 851 words; question and choices: about grade 7, 83 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 sentence sets the rise and fall of empires beside a tree that adds a sliver of trunk each year, and its job is the contrast between those two speeds. Students who stop at the opening clauses read a warning about threats, and those who know the excerpt is about age expect the sentence to explain that age. Holding the whole sentence together shows that it describes how slowly the tree lives.
How, not what moderate Working it out
Students must work out why an article about a tree mentions empires and wars: the human upheavals are a fast-moving backdrop that makes the tree’s “slow-motion existence” look slower still. (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001)
Hard words minor Understanding the question
“Implacable,” meaning relentless and unstoppable, describes the tree’s steady life, and students who do not know it lose part of the contrast the sentence builds. (Perfetti, 2007; Freedle & Kostin, 1993)
Strategy: Ask why an article about a tree mentions empires and wars at all, and what the sentence’s last clause adds; then pick the purpose the whole sentence serves.
Traps
- Reads too much in: A reasonable-sounding conclusion that goes further than the text allows.
- Wrong purpose or structure: Names a purpose, structure or effect that the part does not serve, or describes what a part says when the question asks what it does.
- Twists what the text says: Uses the text's topic and ideas but changes what it says: who did it, how much, when, or why.
The wrong answers, classified
A Twists what the text says (King et al., 2004)
Takes the figure “about two-hundredths of an inch” as a sign of precision, though “about” makes it approximate and the number is there to show how little the trunk grows.
B Wrong purpose or structure (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001)
Treats the falling empires and raging wars as the sentence’s point, a warning that established things are threatened, when they serve as a backdrop of rapid change.
D Reads too much in (Graesser, Singer & Trabasso, 1994)
Joins the tree’s slow growth to its great age and concludes that the sentence explains its longevity, but it only shows the tree outlasting history; paragraph 4 gives the reasons.
Working it out, step by step
Figure out what the question asks
This asks about the job of one sentence, the first one in paragraph 5. You need to decide what it adds to the excerpt’s ideas. Look at both halves of the sentence, the part about people and the part about the tree.
Look at both halves of the sentence
The first half is about human history: “Empires rose and fell; wars raged.” These are huge, fast changes. The second half is about the tree. It “continued its implacable slow-motion existence.” It added “about two-hundredths of an inch to the diameter of its trunk each year.”
Work out what the sentence shows
Implacable means steady and impossible to stop. Slow-motion means extremely slow. Diameter is the distance straight across the trunk. Two-hundredths of an inch is a tiny amount. While whole empires came and went, the tree barely grew. This contrast, a side-by-side difference, makes the tree’s pace of life seem even slower.
Check each choice
- A does not fit. The amount is “about” two-hundredths of an inch, so it is not exact. The number is there to show how little the tree grows.
- B does not fit. Empires and wars are a background of fast change, not a warning about threats.
- C fits. The sentence shows how slowly the tree lives and grows.
- D does not fit. The sentence shows the tree outlasting history but never says why it lives so long. Paragraph 4 gives those reasons.
Choose the answer
The sentence sets fast human history beside the tree’s tiny yearly growth. So the answer is C.
Why this answer and not the closest wrong one
D is tempting, because the sentence does show a very old tree. But showing that something lasts is not the same as explaining why. The sentence gives no cause. It only sets fast human change beside slow growth, and that describes the pace of the tree’s life, as C 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)
