Virginia Communication and Literacy Assessment
Virginia Communication and Literacy Assessment is a trademark of its owner, which is not affiliated with and does not endorse Test Treasure Publication or TTP Prep.
Virginia Communication and Literacy Assessment is a trademark of its owner, which is not affiliated with and does not endorse Test Treasure Publication or TTP Prep.
10 sample questions for the Virginia Communication and Literacy Assessment, with the correct answer and an explanation for each. No account needed. Try each one before you open the answer.
Sections covered on the exam: Reading Comprehension and Analysis (Subtest 091), Writing Knowledge and Proficiency (Subtest 092): Multiple Choice.
Question 1 · Reading Comprehension and Analysis (Subtest 091)
Questions 1 to 5 refer to the following passage.
Long before towns built free libraries, readers who could not afford books of their own had few places to turn. College collections were usually closed to outsiders, and the private libraries of wealthy families opened only to friends and guests. In the eighteenth century, groups of merchants, craftsmen, and professionals found a workaround: they pooled their money to form social libraries. Each member bought a share, paid yearly dues, and in return could borrow from a collection that no single member could have afforded alone. Booksellers soon offered a commercial version, the circulating library, which rented popular novels and travel books by the week to anyone willing to pay a small fee.
These arrangements widened access, but only so far. A laborer who could not spare the price of a share was simply left out, and women were often admitted to circulating libraries more readily than to the social libraries their husbands controlled. Because shareholders chose the books, the collections reflected the tastes of a narrow group, leaning heavily toward sermons, history, and practical manuals. Many social libraries also proved short-lived. When members lost interest or moved away, dues went unpaid, the books were sold off, and the library disappeared.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, a new argument was gaining ground. Reformers pointed out that communities were already taxing themselves to teach children to read in public schools. What, they asked, was the point of that investment if young people left school with no access to books for the rest of their lives? A library open to every resident, paid for by the public, would complete the work the schools had begun. Some cities and towns adopted the idea, and state legislatures passed laws allowing local governments to levy a small tax for library support.
The early free libraries, however, did not look much like the libraries familiar today. Most kept their books in closed stacks. A patron consulted a printed catalog, filled out a slip, and waited at a counter while an attendant fetched the volume. Toward the end of the century, a younger generation of librarians challenged this practice and opened the shelves so that readers could browse. Skeptics predicted that books would be stolen or damaged in large numbers. Losses did rise somewhat, but borrowing rose far faster, and open shelves became the norm. The same librarians added neighborhood branches, reading rooms for children, and story hours designed to draw in families.
The shift from paid membership to public support rested on a principle that is easy to take for granted: access to knowledge should not depend on a person's ability to pay for it. That principle is one of the wisest commitments a community can make. It also explains why debates about library budgets can grow so heated. Arguments over branch hours and staffing are, at bottom, the same question the shareholders and reformers once faced: who should pay for books, and who deserves to read them?
Answer: B. showed or expressed
Paragraph 2 says the collections "reflected the tastes of a narrow group" because shareholders chose the books, so the collections showed those tastes. Sending back light and thinking carefully are real meanings of reflect, but neither fits a collection of books, and nothing suggests the books brought discredit on anyone.
Question 2 · Reading Comprehension and Analysis (Subtest 091)
Questions 21 to 25 refer to the following passage.
A new memory is surprisingly fragile. Information learned during the day can fade quickly or become tangled with similar information learned later. For more than a century, researchers have noticed that sleep seems to protect against this loss, and modern experiments have confirmed the effect. In a typical study, volunteers learn a list of word pairs in the evening and are tested the next morning. Compared with volunteers who learn the same list in the morning and are tested after an equal number of waking hours, the sleepers usually remember more. Sleep, it appears, does not merely pause forgetting; it actively strengthens and reorganizes what was learned.
Much of this work seems to happen during deep, slow-wave sleep. When people learn facts and events, a structure called the hippocampus holds the new information temporarily, a bit like a notepad. During deep sleep, the hippocampus appears to replay the day's experiences, sending bursts of activity to the outer layer of the brain, the cortex, where long-term memories are stored. In rats that have learned to run a maze, nerve cells that fired in a particular order during the run fire in the same order during later sleep, only many times faster. Brief bursts of brain activity called sleep spindles seem to time this transfer, and people whose spindle activity increases after learning tend to show larger memory gains.
The dreaming stage known as REM sleep may play a different role. Some studies link it to the processing of emotional memories and to the discovery of patterns. In one experiment, volunteers practiced a number task that contained a hidden shortcut. Those who slept before returning to the task were far more likely to discover the shortcut than those who stayed awake for the same length of time, suggesting that sleep helps the brain not only keep information but also rearrange it into new insights.
These findings carry practical weight for anyone who studies. Students who stay up all night before an exam may squeeze in extra hours of review, but they cut short the very process that would have stabilized the material. Timing matters as well. In several studies, people deprived of sleep on the first night after learning still performed worse days later, even after they had caught up on rest. Short daytime naps that include deep sleep have also produced measurable benefits, though usually smaller ones than a full night.
Researchers are careful not to overstate the case. Not every kind of memory benefits equally, and the precise roles of the different sleep stages are still debated. Sleep also does more than strengthen; it appears to weaken less important connections, a kind of pruning that may keep the brain's networks efficient. Above all, sleep cannot consolidate what was never learned. It works best as a partner to careful study, not a substitute for it.
Answer: B. trimming away weaker connections so the important ones work better
Just as a gardener cuts back weak branches, sleep "appears to weaken less important connections" so that networks stay efficient. The passage does not say old memories are erased, that deep sleep is shortened, or that memories are divided into parts.
Question 3 · Reading Comprehension and Analysis (Subtest 091)
Questions 41 to 45 refer to the following passage.
Customers who buy a coffee, a bottle of water, or a pastry at a counter are now often greeted by a tablet that swivels toward them with suggested tips of 20, 25, or 30 percent. Requests for tips have spread from sit-down restaurants to takeout windows, self-service kiosks, and online orders, a trend some observers have nicknamed tip creep. Many customers tap a button out of awkwardness rather than gratitude. The spread of these screens is a good moment to ask whether the tipping system makes sense at all.
Tipping is often defended as a tradition, but its history is less admirable than its defenders suggest. The custom spread in this country after the Civil War, and some employers embraced it because it let them hire workers, including many formerly enslaved people, without paying them a wage; customers paid the workers instead. That arrangement survives in a weaker form today. In many states, employers may pay tipped workers a base wage far below the standard minimum, as long as tips bring the total up to the minimum. Employers are supposed to make up any shortfall, but enforcement is uneven, and workers who complain risk losing their best shifts.
The system also asks tips to do a job they do poorly. Tips are meant to reward good service, yet research on restaurant tipping has found that the amount customers leave varies with the weather, the size of the bill, and the server's appearance far more than with the quality of service. A server's income can swing widely from one week to the next for reasons that have nothing to do with effort. Meanwhile, cooks and dishwashers, whose work matters just as much to a meal, are often excluded from tips entirely.
Defenders of tipping raise a fair point: servers at busy, expensive restaurants can earn more under the current system than they would at a flat hourly wage, and some restaurants that eliminated tipping returned to it after experienced servers left for competitors. But those servers are the exception. For every server at a crowded steakhouse, many more work at diners, counters, and chain restaurants where tips are small and unpredictable. A policy should be judged by how it treats most workers, not by how it treats its best-paid few.
The better model is the one already used in much of the world: menu prices that include the cost of service, a full wage paid by the employer, and tips left only for truly exceptional service. Prices would rise somewhat, but customers would see the real cost of a meal up front, and workers could count on a predictable paycheck. If nothing changes, the screens will keep multiplying, and before long shoppers will be asked to tip a vending machine for dispensing a soda.
Answer: A. the gradual spread of tip requests into new kinds of businesses
The phrase names the trend just described, in which tip requests "have spread from sit-down restaurants to takeout windows, self-service kiosks, and online orders." Creep suggests slow, steady movement into new places; the passage says nothing about rising base wages, shrinking tips, or customers sneaking away.
Question 4 · Writing Knowledge and Proficiency (Subtest 092): Multiple Choice
Answer: C. Sleep-deprived students have trouble concentrating, are more likely to feel depressed, and get into more car accidents.
Items in a series should share the same grammatical form. The best revision uses three parallel verb phrases: "have trouble," "are more likely," and "get into." The other versions mix verb phrases with a participle ("feeling," "getting") or with a full clause ("they are"), which breaks the parallel structure.
Question 5 · Writing Knowledge and Proficiency (Subtest 092): Multiple Choice
Answer: A. Research suggests that a finance course changes how young adults handle money.
The third paragraph presents evidence that students who take the course manage money better, and the first sentence announces that idea. The history of credit cards is off topic, the sentence about electives introduces an objection the paragraph never addresses, and the last sentence is vague and repetitive.
Question 6 · Reading Comprehension and Analysis (Subtest 091)
Questions 1 to 5 refer to the following passage.
Before cities had public transportation, most urban residents lived within walking distance of their jobs. Clerks, dockworkers, and shopkeepers crowded into dense neighborhoods near markets and workshops, and the size of a city was limited by how far a person could comfortably walk in about half an hour. Wealthy families kept private carriages, but for nearly everyone else the daily commute happened on foot, in every kind of weather.
The first step toward public transit was the omnibus, a large horse-drawn coach that followed a fixed route and picked up any passenger who paid a small fare. Its name came from a Latin word meaning "for all," and the idea was revolutionary precisely because it was so ordinary: anyone with a few coins could ride. Yet omnibuses were slow and uncomfortable. Their iron-rimmed wheels jolted over cobblestones, and a heavily loaded coach could exhaust a team of horses within a few hours.
Engineers soon realized that laying iron rails in the street would ease the strain. A horse could pull a car along smooth rails with far less effort than it took to drag a coach over rough pavement, so the horsecar carried more passengers at a lower cost. Horsecar lines spread to hundreds of American cities. The system still had serious drawbacks, however. Each horse could work only a few hours a day, companies had to feed and house enormous herds, and the streets filled with manure that drew flies and spread disease. A single outbreak of horse influenza could halt service across an entire city.
Electricity solved most of these problems. Electric streetcars, often called trolleys after the pole that drew current from an overhead wire, were faster, cleaner, and cheaper to operate than horsecars, and within a single generation most horsecar lines had been electrified. The change reshaped the city itself. Because a trolley could travel several miles in the time a walker covered one, developers built "streetcar suburbs" along the lines, and middle-class families moved outward to quieter neighborhoods while still working downtown. Some transit companies even built amusement parks at the ends of their routes to fill the cars on weekends.
The streetcar's dominance did not last. Motor buses needed no rails or overhead wires and could change their routes as neighborhoods grew, while private automobiles offered a freedom that no timetable could match. Many cities paved over their tracks, and the riders who remained found their buses sharing crowded roads with cars.
In recent decades, a number of cities have built new streetcar and light-rail lines, sometimes on the very streets where tracks were once removed. Supporters argue that rail lines attract investment because they signal a permanent commitment to a neighborhood, while critics point out that buses can provide similar service at a fraction of the cost. Either way, the modern debate echoes the insight behind the first omnibus: a city works best when ordinary people can move through it cheaply.
Answer: A. leading position
Paragraph 5 describes how buses and automobiles replaced the streetcar, so the streetcar's "dominance" was its position as the leading form of city transit. The word can mean harsh control over others, but the passage is describing market position, not anyone's power over people.
Question 7 · Reading Comprehension and Analysis (Subtest 091)
Questions 21 to 25 refer to the following passage.
Every day, the human body encounters countless microbes, and most are harmless. A few, however, can cause serious illness. The immune system's job is to tell the difference and respond to the dangerous ones. It does this remarkably well, but it has one important limitation: the first time it meets a particular germ, it needs time to mount a strong, targeted defense. Vaccines are designed to give the immune system that experience in advance, without the risk of the disease itself.
To understand how vaccines work, it helps to know what the immune system recognizes. Germs carry distinctive molecules on their surfaces, called antigens, that act something like a uniform. When the body detects an unfamiliar antigen, specialized white blood cells capture it, break it into pieces, and display those pieces to other immune cells. This display is the alarm that starts a targeted response.
Two kinds of cells then go to work. B cells produce antibodies, proteins shaped to fit a specific antigen and mark the germ for destruction or block it from entering healthy cells. T cells help coordinate the response, and some of them destroy body cells that have already been infected. During a first encounter, building up enough of the right B cells and T cells can take a week or more, and in that time a fast-moving germ may make a person very sick.
After the threat is cleared, most of these cells die off, but a smaller group of memory cells remains, sometimes for many years. If the same germ appears again, memory cells recognize it quickly and launch a stronger response within days or even hours. Often the germ is defeated before the person notices any symptoms at all. This is why someone who recovers from certain illnesses rarely catches them a second time.
A vaccine takes advantage of this memory. Instead of exposing the body to a dangerous germ, it presents the antigen in a safe form. Depending on the vaccine, that might be a weakened version of the germ, an inactivated germ, a harmless piece of its surface, or genetic instructions that let the body's own cells make that piece briefly. The immune system responds as though it were facing a real infection and forms memory cells. Mild soreness or a low fever afterward is usually a sign that this training is under way. Some vaccines require more than one dose, because a later booster strengthens and extends the memory the first dose created.
Vaccines also protect people who cannot be vaccinated themselves, such as newborns or patients with weakened immune systems. When most members of a community are immune, a germ has fewer chances to spread from person to person, and outbreaks become smaller and less frequent. In this way, an individual's training becomes part of a shared defense.
Answer: C. identify a germ as a particular kind of invader
A uniform shows which group a person belongs to, and the passage calls antigens "distinctive molecules" that the immune system recognizes, so the comparison means antigens mark a germ's identity. The comparison does not suggest protection, and calling antigens distinctive contradicts the idea that they look the same on every germ.
Question 8 · Reading Comprehension and Analysis (Subtest 091)
Questions 41 to 45 refer to the following passage.
Walk into almost any high school classroom and you will see the same scene: students glancing at phones hidden under desks, a notification buzzing in a backpack, a teacher pausing a lesson to ask for attention one more time. Schools have tried polite requests, honor systems, and rules that phones stay silent. These half-measures have not worked. It is time for schools to require that phones be stored away for the entire school day.
The first reason is attention. Learning requires sustained focus, and a phone is designed to interrupt it. Even when a phone is silent and face down, many people find their thoughts drifting toward it, and every glance at a message pulls a student out of the lesson. Teachers report spending a significant portion of class time redirecting students who have been distracted by their devices. Students themselves often admit that they find it hard to ignore a vibrating phone, even when they truly want to concentrate.
The second reason is social. When phones come out at lunch and between classes, students talk to each other less. A phone-free day gives students room to have face-to-face conversations, settle conflicts in person, and build the kinds of friendships that do not depend on a screen. Schools that have adopted full-day storage policies often describe louder, livelier cafeterias, a change many staff members welcome. For students who feel left out online, a few hours away from social media can also be a welcome relief.
The evidence from real schools is convincing. A teacher at a school in a neighboring district told me that after her school locked phones away during the day, every one of her students earned higher grades. If a ban worked there, it will work in every school in the state.
Critics argue that parents need to reach their children in an emergency. That concern is understandable, but schools have always had ways to contact families, from front office phones to staff radios, and many safety experts caution that students using phones during a crisis can spread rumors and slow an orderly response. Others say students must learn to manage technology on their own. Self-control matters, but we do not teach it by placing the most distracting device ever invented in every student's hand during algebra and then expecting perfect discipline.
A full-day storage policy is clear, fair, and easy to enforce, because it removes the constant negotiation between teachers and students over when a quick look is acceptable. Teachers would no longer have to act as phone monitors, and students would know exactly what is expected of them. Our schools exist to help young people learn and grow. Clearing away the biggest distraction in the room is one of the simplest ways to let them do both.
Answer: B. incomplete actions
In paragraph 1, half-measures refers to polite requests, honor systems, and silence rules, which the author sees as partial steps that have not solved the problem. The word has nothing to do with estimates or delays, and divided portions reflects a literal reading of the word parts rather than its meaning in context.
Question 9 · Writing Knowledge and Proficiency (Subtest 092): Multiple Choice
Answer: D. Sentence 7: change 'was' to 'were'.
When subjects are joined by "neither ... nor," the verb agrees with the nearer subject, which in Sentence 7 is the plural "students," so "were" is correct. "Install" would shift to the present tense, "taken" requires a helping verb, and "professionals" is a plural noun, not a possessive.
Question 10 · Writing Knowledge and Proficiency (Subtest 092): Multiple Choice
Answer: B. For weeks, I cleaned kennels, washed food bowls, and folded towels.
"Weeks and weeks," "over and over again," and "repeatedly" all express the same idea, so one time phrase is enough. The second and third versions keep some of the repetition. "I cleaned kennels" is concise but drops the other tasks and the length of time.
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