How to use this exam
Practice Exam 1 follows the current digital AP English Language exam structure for Section I. You will answer 45 multiple-choice questions in 60 minutes, divided into five sets. Work all of them in one sitting, with a timer and no notes, so that your score tells you something real about how you will perform on test day.
The five sets
- Questions 1 to 12: a nonfiction reading set built on excerpts from Booker T. Washington's 1895 Atlanta Exposition address.
- Questions 13 to 24: a nonfiction reading set built on a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature.
- Questions 25 to 32: a writing set on a draft proposal to a city council, with numbered sentences.
- Questions 33 to 40: a writing set on a draft internal memo, with numbered sentences.
- Questions 41 to 45: a writing set on a short policy memo, with numbered sentences.
Timing
Sixty minutes for 45 questions gives you about 80 seconds per question. The reading sets reward careful attention to how each paragraph relates to the claim; the writing sets usually move faster because you are judging a revision against a purpose and audience. Bank time on the quicker questions and spend it where a choice requires you to compare two plausible options.
Strategy reminders
- Read the passage for its claim, its structure, and its audience before you look at the questions.
- Return to the text for every question. The correct choice can be defended with specific words in the passage; the wrong choices usually overstate, understate, reverse, or invent something.
- In writing sets, decide what the sentence needs to accomplish for its audience (precision, relevance, a limit on a claim, a clear order) and then pick the revision that does exactly that, no more and no less.
- If you are stuck, eliminate choices that are absolute, off-topic, or unsupported, mark the question, and move on.
Practice with the digital tools
A printed or online practice exam cannot reproduce the Bluebook interface. Also complete the official AP test preview in Bluebook at least once to practice the timer, Question Menu, Mark for Review, Highlights and Notes, Line Reader, Option Eliminator, and Zoom.
After you finish
Check each answer against its explanation, including the questions you got right, since the explanations show why every wrong choice fails. Record your number correct out of 45, then mark the skill category of every miss (Claims and Evidence, Reasoning and Organization, Style, or Rhetorical Situation) so you can see which skill to study before you take Practice Exam 2. The free-response half of this exam is in the next unit.