Sample GED® Test Questions

1. The Internet is a world-wide network of computers that allow for easy sharing and transfer of all sorts of information.

Until modern times, high rates of reproduction were necessary to offset high mortality — especially infant mortality. In agricultural societies, children were assets in the home and farm-centered economy. Also, before care of the aged became institutionalized, parents had to rely upon their children for care in their old age. Large numbers of children were advantageous. As a result of those factors and of short life expectancy, American women spent most of their adult lives bearing and rearing four or five children.

Long before the tradition of the large family disappeared, some couples had begun to adopt the small family pattern. As a result of declining mortality rates, a diminishing need for child labor in agriculture, increasing costs of raising a child in an industrialized urban society, and improved methods of fertility control, both the number of children desired and the number born declined.

Every day you breathe about 16,000 quarts of air. Almost everywhere in New York state, but especially in heavily populated areas, the air which circulates through your lungs and supplies oxygen to your bloodstream is splotched with unhealthy substances — carbon black, fly ash, soot, silica, metal dust, and other organic and nonorganic pollutants.

Air contaminants from industries, incinerators, power plants, automobiles, airplanes, and backyard leaf-and-debris burners stack the odds against us by contributing to staggering death and disease tolls. Medical research shows that air pollution can cause lung cancer. It increases suffering from pneumonia, allergies, asthma, and the common cold, as well as aggravating cases of chronic bronchitis and emphysema.

High concentrations of air pollution — each lasting only a few days — were blamed for sharply increased death rates in Belgium’s Meuse Valley in 1930; in Donora, PA in 1948; in London in 1952; and in New York City in 1963 and 1966. Air pollution kills.

Air pollution adversely affects all living things, stunting and killing flowers, shrubs, trees, and crops. Spinach, for example, can no longer be grown as an agricultural crop in the Los Angeles basin because of the city’s smog problems. Crop damage means higher food prices, amplifying our already inflationary grocery-budget blues.

Pollutants also damage property and materials, soil clothing, discolor paint and even corrode stone, marble, and metal. Again the result can be measured in dollars and cents, in inconvenience and in higher cleaning and maintenance bills for homeowners, businesses, and government alike.

From this time I was most narrowly watched. If I was in a separate room any considerable length of time, I was sure to be suspected of having a book, and was at once called to give an account of myself. All this, however, was too late. The first step had been taken. Mistress, in teaching me the alphabet, had given me the inch, and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ell.

The plan which I adopted, and the one by which I was most successful, was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in the street. As many of these as I could, I converted into teachers. With their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different places, I finally succeeded in learning to read. When I was sent on errands, I always took my book with me, and by doing one part of my errand quickly, I found time to get a lesson before my return. I used also to carry bread with me, enough of which was always in the house, and to which I was always welcome; for I was much better off in this regard than many of the poor white children in our neighborhood. This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return, would give me the more valuable bread of knowledge.

I am strongly tempted to give the names of two or three of those little boys, as a testimonial of the gratitude and affection I bear them; but prudence forbids; — not that it would injure me, but it might embarrass them; for it is almost an unpardonable offense to teach slaves to read in this Christian country. It is enough to say of the dear little fellows that they lived on Philpot Street, very near Durgin and Bailey’s shipyard. I used to talk this matter of slavery over with them. I would sometimes say to them, I wished I could be as free as they would be when they got to be men. “You will be free as soon as you are twenty-one, but I am a slave for life! Have not I as good a right to be free as you have?” These words seemed to trouble them; they would express for me the liveliest sympathy, and console with the hope that something would occur by which I might be free.

— from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass