TExES History 7-12 (233)

1. Question 1 · World History

   The following is a paraphrase of a royal inscription from an ancient Middle Eastern empire.

   "The people of the rebel city I uprooted from their homeland, men, women and children, with their cattle and their goods. I carried them off to a distant province and settled them there, and in their place I brought captives from the far mountains. I appointed my own officials over the land and counted its people as subjects of my kingdom."

   The policy described in the inscription is most characteristic of which empire?
   • A.The Phoenician city-states of Tyre, Sidon and Byblos
   • B.The Old Kingdom of Egypt during the age of pyramid building
   • C.The Neo-Assyrian Empire, ruled from its capital at Nineveh
   • D.The Achaemenid Persian Empire under Cyrus and his successors
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: C. The Neo-Assyrian Empire, ruled from its capital at Nineveh

   Mass deportation and resettlement of conquered peoples to break local resistance was a hallmark of Assyrian rule. Cyrus and the Persians are known for the opposite approach, allowing exiled peoples such as the Jews in Babylon to return home. Old Kingdom Egypt and the Phoenician trading cities did not build multiethnic empires governed through forced population transfers.

2. Question 2 · World History

   A museum label, paraphrased: Painted in the early nineteenth century, this canvas shows a lone traveler seen from behind, standing on a rocky peak above a sea of fog. Jagged mountains fade into the mist. The artist leaves out any sign of farms, towns or machines and invites the viewer to share the wanderer's awe, solitude and longing before the vastness of nature.

   The painting most directly reflects which artistic response to its era?
   • A.An Impressionist study of shifting light painted quickly in the open air
   • B.A Romantic stress on emotion and nature in reaction to rationalism and industry
   • C.A Realist effort to portray the hard working conditions of ordinary laborers
   • D.A Baroque use of drama to inspire Catholic devotion after the Council of Trent
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: B. A Romantic stress on emotion and nature in reaction to rationalism and industry

   Awe before untamed nature, a solitary individual, intense feeling and the deliberate absence of towns and machines are hallmarks of Romanticism, which reacted against Enlightenment rationalism and industrialization. Realism would show laborers and social conditions, not a sublime landscape. Baroque religious drama belongs to the seventeenth century, and Impressionism came later in the nineteenth century with its focus on fleeting light rather than emotional symbolism. Two ancient accounts, paraphrased. Account 1: In our city, a citizen's wife stays mostly within the house, manages the household slaves and stores, and does not attend the Assembly or the courts. A male guardian handles her property and arranges her marriage. Account 2: In this city, girls exercise and race in public, and wives manage the family's land and helots while their husbands live in barracks. Women here are said to own a large share of the land and to speak boldly to men.

3. Question 3 · U.S. History

   Paraphrased from an appeal issued by several antislavery members of Congress: We denounce this bill as a gross violation of a sacred pledge, as a criminal betrayal of precious rights, and as part of a plot to exclude immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own states from a vast unoccupied region, and to turn it into a dreary land of despotism inhabited by masters and slaves.

   The sacred pledge that the authors accused the bill of violating was most likely
   • A.the Wilmot Proviso ban on slavery in lands taken from Mexico
   • B.the promise to admit California to the Union as a free state
   • C.the Northwest Ordinance ban on slavery in lands north of the Ohio River
   • D.the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery north of the 36°30′ line
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: D. the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery north of the 36°30′ line

   The Kansas-Nebraska Act opened land north of 36°30′ to slavery through popular sovereignty, so opponents accused it of breaking the Missouri Compromise, long treated as a sectional pledge. The Wilmot Proviso never became law and so pledged nothing. The Northwest Ordinance covered the Old Northwest, not the Kansas and Nebraska country, and California had already been admitted as a free state.

4. Question 4 · U.S. History

   During World War I, a Socialist Party official mailed thousands of leaflets urging drafted men to resist conscription and was convicted under the Espionage Act. In upholding the conviction, the Supreme Court reasoned that
   • A.the First Amendment protects only spoken words, so printed leaflets fall outside its guarantee of free expression
   • B.expression may be limited only if it would materially and substantially disrupt the work of a public institution
   • C.the government may not block publication in advance except where it proves a grave and immediate threat to forces
   • D.speech may be punished when, in its circumstances, it creates a clear and present danger of evils Congress may prevent
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: D. speech may be punished when, in its circumstances, it creates a clear and present danger of evils Congress may prevent

   In Schenck v. United States, Justice Holmes held that wartime circumstances could make antidraft leaflets punishable because they posed a clear and present danger. The substantial disruption standard comes from Tinker v. Des Moines about student speech, the prior restraint standard comes from cases such as the Pentagon Papers case, and the First Amendment has always covered the press and printed matter.

5. Question 5 · U.S. History

   Paraphrase of a U.S. Supreme Court opinion: The primary is part of the machinery the state has created for choosing its officials. When a party conducts that primary under state law, it acts as an agent of the state, and its decision to exclude voters because of race is the action of the state itself. We therefore conclude that our earlier ruling upholding such an exclusion as the private choice of a party convention can no longer stand.

   This ruling was significant chiefly because it
   • A.ordered the University of Texas law school to admit a Black applicant for the first time
   • B.abolished the poll tax as a requirement for voting in Texas state and local elections
   • C.ended the Texas white primary by applying the Fifteenth Amendment to party primaries
   • D.struck down a state statute that had barred Black voters from the Democratic primary
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: C. ended the Texas white primary by applying the Fifteenth Amendment to party primaries

   Smith v. Allwright overruled Grovey v. Townsend, which had upheld the party convention's white-only rule, and held that excluding Black voters from the primary violated the Fifteenth Amendment. Striking down a state statute describes the earlier case Nixon v. Herndon, and the law school admission was Sweatt v. Painter; the poll tax fell through a later amendment and court rulings.

6. Question 6 · World History

   Darius I divided his empire into provinces governed by satraps, sent royal inspectors to check on them, built the Royal Road with relay stations and issued standardized coins. These measures were primarily designed to
   • A.hold together a vast, diverse empire while allowing local customs to continue
   • B.replace the languages and religions of all conquered peoples with Persian culture
   • C.strengthen the city-state system that the Persians inherited from Sumer
   • D.prepare the empire for an invasion of the Indus Valley's Harappan cities
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: A. hold together a vast, diverse empire while allowing local customs to continue

   The Achaemenid system of satrapies, inspectors, roads and common coinage helped administer a huge multiethnic empire, while Persians generally tolerated local languages, laws and religions. Forced cultural replacement was not Persian policy, the Harappan cities had declined more than a thousand years earlier, and Sumerian city-states had long since disappeared.

7. Question 7 · World History

   A linguistic map shades a huge area of central, eastern and southern Africa where hundreds of closely related languages are spoken, with their greatest variety near the border of today's Nigeria and Cameroon. Symbols for early iron-smelting sites and early farming villages appear first near that border region and progressively later to the east and south.

   The pattern shown on the map is best explained by which development?
   • A.The introduction of ironworking along the coast by Arab and Persian merchants
   • B.The forced resettlement of coastal peoples inland during the Atlantic slave trade
   • C.The conquest of central and southern Africa by a single empire based in the Sahel
   • D.The gradual spread of iron-using farmers from West-Central Africa over many centuries
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: D. The gradual spread of iron-using farmers from West-Central Africa over many centuries

   Greatest language diversity near the homeland, related languages across a vast area and iron and farming sites that appear later the farther they lie from that homeland point to the Bantu migrations. No Sahel empire ruled central and southern Africa, and the Indian Ocean trade with Arab and Persian merchants came later and touched mainly the east coast, so it cannot explain a spread that begins in West-Central Africa.

8. Question 8 · U.S. History

   Paraphrased from a resolution adopted at a public meeting in a Northern city: Resolved, that the recent law for returning persons claimed as fugitives, which denies them a jury trial, pays the commissioner a larger fee for sending a man into bondage than for setting him free, and commands every citizen to aid in the capture, is a law we cannot and will not obey. We pledge ourselves to protect any person in our community from the slave catcher, whatever the penalty.

   The resolution was most likely adopted in response to legislation that was part of
   • A.the compromise that admitted California to the Union as a free state
   • B.the Wilmot Proviso that sought to bar slavery from the Mexican Cession
   • C.the Missouri Compromise that admitted Maine as a free state
   • D.the Kansas-Nebraska Act that applied popular sovereignty to Kansas
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: A. the compromise that admitted California to the Union as a free state

   The strengthened Fugitive Slave Act, with its commissioners' fees, denial of jury trial and duty to assist, was the South's main gain in the compromise that admitted California as a free state. The Missouri Compromise contained no such enforcement law, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act concerned slavery in the territories. The Wilmot Proviso was an antislavery proposal that never became law.

9. Question 9 · U.S. History

   Gideon v. Wainwright and Miranda v. Arizona were similar in that each
   • A.held that speech creating a clear and present danger to the war effort could be prosecuted by federal authorities
   • B.applied Bill of Rights protections for people accused of crimes to state governments through the Fourteenth Amendment
   • C.excluded from trial physical evidence that police had seized during a search conducted without a valid warrant
   • D.was decided by a Court led by Chief Justice John Marshall during the early growth of federal judicial power
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: B. applied Bill of Rights protections for people accused of crimes to state governments through the Fourteenth Amendment

   Gideon required states to provide counsel to poor felony defendants and Miranda required warnings before custodial interrogation; both were Warren Court decisions incorporating rights of the accused against the states. Excluding illegally seized evidence describes Mapp v. Ohio, the clear and present danger test comes from Schenck, and John Marshall led the Court more than a century earlier.

10. Question 10 · U.S. History

    Paraphrase of a U.S. Supreme Court opinion: The state argues that because persons of Mexican descent are classified as white, no discrimination against a race has occurred. But equal protection is not limited to a two-class theory of white and Negro. In this county no person with a Spanish surname has served on a jury in a quarter century, and residents of Mexican descent are treated as a separate class. Excluding them from juries denies the petitioner equal protection.

    The ruling was significant chiefly because it
    • A.held that equal protection covers Mexican Americans and other groups facing proven bias
    • B.ended the use of literacy tests to keep Spanish-speaking citizens from registering to vote
    • C.declared that segregating Mexican American children in public schools violated federal law
    • D.required Texas to fund property-poor districts at the same level as property-wealthy ones
    Show answer and explanation

    Answer: A. held that equal protection covers Mexican Americans and other groups facing proven bias

    Hernandez v. Texas rejected the argument that only Black-white distinctions mattered and extended Fourteenth Amendment protection to Mexican Americans as a group subject to proven discrimination in jury selection. School segregation of Mexican American children was addressed in Delgado v. Bastrop ISD, and school-finance equalization came through Edgewood ISD v. Kirby.

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