Also in 2024 Test B English, question 11; 2026 Practice Test D English, question 42.
Passage Moving through Mountains
Moving through Mountains
(1) An age-old proverb says that necessity is the mother of invention. (2) Centuries of human ingenuity in the face of obstacles prove this to be true. (3) For many years the Swiss Alps, a mountain range spanning southern Switzerland and northern Italy, were such an obstacle. (4) Roads and railways had to navigate around the mountains or through winding tunnels inside the mountains, making the transportation of people and goods difficult and time consuming. (5) In 2016 these burdens were eased with the completion of the Gotthard Base Tunnel.
(6) Construction of the high-speed railway tunnel began in 1996. (7) The tunnel was created through the use of tunnel-boring machines, which are giant drills with a flat rotating head called a cutter head. (8) Each of the tunnel-boring machines used during the construction of the tunnel was about the length of four football fields arranged end-to-end. (9) During the seventeen-year construction period, 28 million tons of rock were removed, enough to rebuild the Great Pyramid of Giza five times. (10) This massive construction project is reported to have cost $12 billion. (11) After that, 4 million cubic meters of concrete, or enough concrete to build eighty-four Empire State Buildings, were used to construct and support the tunnel.
(12) By 2020 the high-speed railway will carry more than 250 freight trains and 55 passenger trains a day, with most traveling at speeds of around 100 to 125 miles per hour. (13) It will be faster for people to travel between northern and southern Europe. (14) The travel time between the European cities of Zurich, Switzerland, and Milan, Italy, will be reduced by an hour. (15) Many European leaders compare the Gotthard Base Tunnel to the Channel Tunnel, a 33-mile underwater tunnel that connects the United Kingdom and France. (16) While there is no roadway in the Channel Tunnel, people can drive their cars onto special trains that will carry vehicles through to the other side.
(17) Just as traffic congestion in major cities led to the construction of underground local transportation, natural formations, such as mountain ranges, have also sent people underground for faster, easier, and cheaper methods of transportation across larger areas. (18) There is renewed interest in constructing innovative methods of transportation that will help eliminate problems associated with traveling to and from certain areas.
Question
Which sentence should be added to follow and support sentence 7?
- AThe tunnel-boring machine is helpful to tunnel builders in the modern era and has been an improvement over dynamite.
- BThese enormous tunnel-boring machines function somewhat like a cheese grater, with the cutter head grinding slowly through rock and stone.
- CEngineers had considered making a tunnel under the mountains for many years, but it was impossible to do without modern tunnel-boring machines.
- DDifferent types of cutter heads are used with tunnel-boring machines depending on the geology of the area where the tunnel is being created.
Show the answer
Correct answer: B
This is the answer (B)
The question asks for a sentence that provides additional details about the tunnel-boring machines used to build the Gotthard Base Tunnel in order to support the description of the machines in sentence 7.
Option B is correct because it offers specific details about how tunnel-boring machines, such as the ones used to create the Gotthard Base Tunnel, drill through rock.
Option A is incorrect because it offers information about how tunnel-boring machines were an improvement over previous methods but does not include information about how the machines work.
Option C is incorrect because it presents the idea that the tunnel could not be built until advances were made in tunnel-boring machine technology and does not describe how the machines function.
Option D is incorrect because, though it explains that there are different types of cutter heads used for different geologies, the geology of the tunnel area is not discussed in sentence 7, nor in the rest of the paragraph.
Question analysis
This revising question asks which new sentence should follow and support a description of the tunnel-boring machines used to dig the Gotthard Base Tunnel. Every choice is about the machines, so students must decide which one actually develops the sentence before it rather than drifting to a related topic.
- NYS standards
- 7W2b developing a topic
- Grade level
- Grade 7 reading and task
- Compared with grade 7
- At grade 7 Adding a detail that supports a given sentence is a regular grade 7 writing task. The demand is typical: a short paragraph, plain vocabulary, and wrong choices that stay on the subject of the machines but serve other purposes.
- Estimated difficulty
- Moderate: several steps, or a close reading with one strong distractor.
- Thinking it demands
- Depth of knowledge 2, skills and concepts · mainly evaluate
- What makes it hard
- How sentences fit together moderate
- Evidence
- Answered from one paragraph or stanza
- Reading level
- Passage: about grade 11, 362 words; question and choices: about grade 11, 94 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
All four choices are about tunnel-boring machines, so topic alone settles nothing. The right sentence shows how the machines work and leads into their size in sentence 8, while the strongest wrong one wanders into geology. Some students also distrust the cheese-grater comparison as too casual, though a vivid analogy is exactly the kind of support a definition needs.
How sentences fit together moderate Working it out
The new sentence sits between sentence 7, which defines the machines, and sentence 8, which gives their size, so it has to keep describing the machines that dug this tunnel. (Halliday & Hasan, 1976)
Strategy: Reread sentence 7 and note exactly what it describes, then test each choice by asking whether it tells the reader more about that same thing or starts a new point.
Traps
- Off the point: Adds or keeps something that does not support the paragraph's or the passage's focus, or an introduction or conclusion that misses the main point.
- Wordy, vague or informal: A revision is grammatical but wordy, imprecise or too casual for the passage.
The wrong answers, classified
A Wordy, vague or informal (Connors & Lunsford, 1988)
Accepts a general claim that the machine is “helpful to tunnel builders in the modern era”, which praises it without adding any detail about how it works.
C Off the point (Halliday & Hasan, 1976)
Explains why the tunnel could not be built earlier, turning from what the machines are to the project's history, a topic the paragraph never takes up.
D Off the point (Halliday & Hasan, 1976)
Builds on the term “cutter head” from sentence 7, but varying heads for different geology starts a new subject that the paragraph never returns to.
Working it out, step by step
Figure out what the question asks
You need a sentence to go right after sentence 7. It must support sentence 7. That means it should tell more about the same thing sentence 7 is about.
Read sentence 7 closely
Sentence 7 says: “The tunnel was created through the use of tunnel-boring machines, which are giant drills with a flat rotating head called a cutter head.” So sentence 7 is about the machines and how they dig. Now look ahead. Sentence 8 tells how long each machine was. So the new sentence sits between two sentences about the machines.
Make sense of the key words
To bore means to drill a hole. A tunnel-boring machine is a huge drill that digs a tunnel. The cutter head is the spinning front part that cuts the rock. A good supporting sentence will help you picture how this machine works.
Check each choice
- B compares the machine to a cheese grater, “with the cutter head grinding slowly through rock and stone.” It shows how the machine works.
- A says the machine is “helpful to tunnel builders in the modern era.” That is praise, with no detail about how it works.
- C is about why the tunnel could not be built earlier. That is a new topic.
- D is about different cutter heads for different kinds of rock. The paragraph never talks about kinds of rock.
Watch out: D repeats the words “cutter heads,” so it seems connected. But it starts a subject the paragraph never comes back to.
Pick the answer
Choice B keeps describing the machines from sentence 7 and leads well into sentence 8. So the answer is B.
Why this answer and not the closest wrong one
D is the closest wrong answer, because it uses the term “cutter heads” from sentence 7. But it is about choosing heads for different rock, which the paragraph drops at once. B explains how the cutter head of these machines works, and that is exactly what sentence 7 set up.
More questions like this
The original DOE question
The passage “Moving through Mountains” as printed (page 48)
