Also in 2026 Practice Test B English, question 5.
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
The phrases “clings to life” and “stripped of bark” in paragraph 6 are used to highlight
- Athat the tree is fragile and needs help to avoid becoming extinct.
- Bhow the tree can be misunderstood because of its appearance.
- Chow the tree interests observers with its unusual appearance.
- Dthat the tree manages to survive even when partially fossilized.
Show the answer
Correct answer: D
The question asks what the phrases “clings to life” and “stripped of bark” in paragraph 6 are used to emphasize.
A. Incorrect. While these two phrases are suggestive of the tree’s fragility, nothing in this paragraph suggests that the tree needs help to avoid extinction.
B. Incorrect. While the tree may be misunderstood to be dead because it is “stripped of bark,” the phrase “clings to life” emphasizes the fact that the tree is not dead but manages to survive.
C. Incorrect. The paragraph says that far from being interested in the tree’s unusual appearance, “most people march past it without giving it a second glance” (paragraph 6).
D. CORRECT. The phrase “clings to life” emphasizes that the tree is still surviving even though it is partially fossilized, as shown by its “marbled hulk stripped of bark” (paragraph 6).
Question analysis
This word meaning question asks what the phrases “clings to life” and “stripped of bark” highlight in paragraph 6 of an article about a forty-five-hundred-year-old bristlecone pine. Students must interpret figurative and descriptive language in context, read the phrases against the rest of the paragraph, and find the idea the author uses them to stress.
- Grade level
- Grade 7 reading and task
- Compared with grade 7
- At grade 7 Explaining what figurative phrases emphasize is everyday grade 7 work. Both phrases sit in one short paragraph of concrete description and the choices are brief, so the demand is typical, though vocabulary such as “unprepossessing” adds some load.
- 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
- Figurative or literary language moderate
- Reading between the lines minor
- Evidence
- Answered from one paragraph or stanza
- Reading level
- Passage: about grade 8, 851 words; question and choices: about grade 7, 56 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
One phrase points to death and the other to life, and the question asks what the pair stresses together. The strongest lure explains only the bark phrase: paragraph 6 does say the tree may look dead, so a choice about being misunderstood seems well grounded. Students who give “clings to life” equal weight see a tree that survives even as its trunk turns to fossil.
Figurative or literary language moderate Understanding the question
“Clings to life” personifies the tree as holding on by a thread, and “stripped of bark” belongs to the image of a “marbled hulk” like driftwood, so the pair sets death beside survival. (Graesser, Singer & Trabasso, 1994; Kintsch, 1998)
Reading between the lines minor Working it out
The key’s “partially fossilized” is never said of this tree; it comes from linking “stripped of bark” to the paragraph’s earlier statement that “Entire branches, even the trunk itself, become fossils.” (Graesser, Singer & Trabasso, 1994; Kintsch, 1998)
Strategy: Decide what each phrase suggests by itself, then what the two say when read together within paragraph 6, and choose the idea that both phrases support.
Traps
- True but not the answer: A choice says something accurate about the text that does not answer this question.
- Half right: One half of a two-part choice is right and the other is not.
- 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 Half right (King et al., 2004; Thissen, Steinberg & Fitzpatrick, 1989)
Hears fragility in “clings to life,” which the phrase does suggest, but adds a need for help against extinction that paragraph 6 never mentions and paragraph 7 plays down.
B True but not the answer (King et al., 2004; Embretson & Wetzel, 1987)
Rests on a real point of paragraph 6, that the tree “may look dead” at first glance, but “clings to life” stresses its survival, not how people misjudge it.
C Twists what the text says (King et al., 2004)
Assumes an odd-looking tree draws attention, reversing the paragraph, which says “most people march past it without giving it a second glance.”
Working it out, step by step
Figure out what the question asks
This asks about two phrases in paragraph 6, “clings to life” and “stripped of bark.” You need to see what they point out when you read them together. Look for the idea that both phrases support.
Find the phrases in paragraph 6
In very old bristlecones, “Entire branches, even the trunk itself, become fossils” (paragraph 6). Next the author describes one 4,500-year-old tree “that clings to life near the tourist path” (paragraph 6). Its “trunk is a marbled hulk stripped of bark,” like driftwood. Still, “A ribbon of live bark runs up one side,” carrying water and nutrients to green needles high above.
Work out what each phrase means
To cling to life is to hold on to it hard, like gripping a rope. A fossil here is wood so old and dead that it has hardened, almost like stone. A hulk is a big, empty shell. Stripped of bark means the bark is gone. So one phrase shows a bare, fossil-like trunk, and the other shows a tree that is still alive. Together they show a tree that survives even though much of it has turned to fossil.
Check each choice
- A does not fit. The phrase “clings to life” does hint that the tree is fragile. But nothing in paragraph 6 says it needs help to avoid dying out.
- B does not fit. The paragraph says the tree “may look dead.” But “clings to life” stresses that it survives, not that people misjudge it.
- C does not fit. Paragraph 6 says the opposite: “most people march past it without giving it a second glance.”
- D fits. The bare, fossil-like trunk and the tree’s grip on life together show survival.
Choose the answer
The two phrases set a dead-looking trunk beside a tree that refuses to die. So the answer is D.
Why this answer and not the closest wrong one
B is the closest trap, because the tree really can look dead. But B explains only the bark phrase. The phrase “clings to life” tells you the tree is still living. D uses both phrases: a trunk that has turned to fossil, and a tree that survives anyway.
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)
