Read the excerpt from "Ellis Island." "We lived there for three days—Mother and we five children, the youngest of whom was three years old,” recalled Angelo Pellegrini, whose family moved from Italy when he was 10. "Because of the rigorous physical examination that we had to submit to, particularly of the eyes, there was this terrible anxiety that one of us might be rejected. And if one of us was, what would the rest of the family do?” Along with everyone else, Angelo’s family was examined for contagious diseases, such as chicken pox, measles, mumps, scarlet fever, and tuberculosis. If an illness could be treated, the sick were hospitalized on the island. About 2 percent were sent back to where they came from. What was the immediate cause of the hospitalization of immigrants at Ellis Island? Immigrants were diagnosed with a disease. Immigrants were rejected and sent back. Immigrants had to take a physical exam. Immigrants were kept for days or weeks.

Read the excerpt from "mother tongue." those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as “even though tom was mary thought he was ” and the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for example, “even though tom was foolish, mary thought he was ridiculous.” well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what tom could have been and what mary might have thought of him. so i never did well on tests like that. how does tan build a central idea of her story in the excerpt? tan discusses the types of questions on achievement tests to support the idea that the tests limit students’ ability to write well. tan explains a question on a language achievement test to support the idea that the tests should include more interesting content. tan gives an example of her experience with achievement tests to support the idea that they are not always accurate measures of language ability. tan considers how her mother might answer a question on a test to support the idea that nonstandard english limits a person’s ability to communicate.