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One of the tests you may need to take before high school is the High School Placement Test, or HSPT. The test has multiple-choice questions that cover five subjects. The HSPT has reading, math, language, verbal, and quantitative sections. Anyone will tell you that the key to passing a major test is through preparation before you take the test. If you’re looking for free HSPT Reading section test practice, Varsity Tutors’ Learning Tools have your back! You can choose from several different free practice options, including the Question of the Day. Every day, you can answer a free random question that pertains to the HSPT Reading section.
The Question of the Day changes on a daily basis. Each question is pulled from a massive collection of free HSPT Reading section practice tests. When you are registered with the website and you answer the question each day, you get a full assessment based on how you did, including any past questions that you may have answered. You are given key information that can provide valuable insight into your learning needs. You can see what concepts you most frequently get incorrect, and where you are at your strongest, allowing you to focus your studies on that particular area through other Learning Tools, such as Learn by Concept, flashcards, or full-length practice tests.
The Question of the Day provides further intelligence into your HSPT Reading section test preparedness, such as what percentile you would be placed by ranking you among anyone else that answered the question, and how long you took to answer the question. The information is further able to be used to help you create a specific study plan based on your individual needs, allowing you to use your study time on materials that you need to study. Through the randomization, you reap the benefits of rotating through different topics, such as ensuring the information is fresh in your mind, and preventing boredom related to sticking to the same topic.
With Varsity Tutors’ Learning Tools, you have the ability to study a wide range of different HSPT Reading section concepts. The Question of the Day covers them all at random, allowing you to have a quick refresher on a daily basis. You’ll be asked questions pertaining to the following HSPT Reading section topics: contemporary life, natural science, humanities, and social science. These may focus on comparison, contrast, main ideas, passage reasoning, authorial purpose, implied characteristics, inferring, predicting, concluding, cause and effect, fact and fiction, and details. In addition, there are questions for defining vocabulary words, finding the meaning among multiple possible meanings, and using context clues to determine word choice.
Before it’s time for you to take the HSPT, take the time to review the Question of the Day and other Learning Tools. They offer a valuable combination of focused study on core concepts, as well as free practice testing to determine how ready you really are. Rather than simply memorizing different ideas and facts, you can use your study time to test yourself on your true knowledge.
Question of the Day: HSPT Reading
Adapted from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1890)
The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
From the corner of the divan of Persian saddlebags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-colored blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.
In the center of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.
As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.
Based on its context in the passage, what does the bolded and underlined word "laburnum" refer to?
A type of low shed
A rare songbird
A woodland creature
A popular style of nineteenth-century architecture
A tree or shrubbery
All HSPT Reading Resources
