Why does Lina miss the stop for her school?
Read a Literary Passage · ELPAC Grades 9–10 reading. The correct answer, and the reasoning behind it.
A short story or scene, with questions about characters, events and what words mean in context.
Read the passage. Then answer the questions.
The Number 9
For her first month in the city, Lina rode the Number 9 bus with her eyes on the floor. Her cousin had written the stops on an index card, and she kept it in her coat pocket and counted them under her breath: the hospital, the car wash, the park with the broken fountain, then school. Seven stops. She never looked up long enough to learn what anything else was called.
Then her mother started a job on the far side of town, and Lina's little brother, Sami, became her responsibility in the mornings. He was eight, and he asked questions the way other people breathed.
“Why is that man wearing two hats?” “Why does the bus kneel down?” “Why are we going past the school?”
Lina's head snapped up. The school was sliding by on the right, and the bus was not slowing. Someone had pulled the cord at the stop before hers, and somewhere between the hats and the kneeling she had lost her count.
She pulled the cord herself, too late, and the bus let them off two blocks past the gate, in front of a laundromat she had never seen. Sami looked up at her with his whole face, waiting to find out whether this was a disaster.
She made herself look around. Above the rooftops stood the water tower with the city's name painted on it, the one she could see from her classroom window during math. If she could see the tower from the school, then the school could be found from the tower.
“We walk toward that,” she said, as if she had planned it.
They were four minutes late. The office secretary wrote them both passes without asking why. That afternoon, on the ride home, Lina kept her eyes on the window and named every stop out loud before the driver did, and Sami, who had never once been quiet on that bus, listened.
The question
Choose the best answer.
Why does Lina miss the stop for her school?
- She has been counting stops instead of watching the street, and Sami’s questions make her lose count.Correct answer
- The driver ignores Lina even though she pulls the cord in time.
- Her cousin wrote the wrong number of stops on the index card.
- She falls asleep after a long morning of taking care of Sami.
Why “She has been counting stops instead of watching the street, and Sami’s questions make her lose count.” is correct
This tests connecting a cause in one paragraph with its background in another. The first paragraph establishes that Lina rides by counting stops and never looks up, and the fourth paragraph shows the count breaking down 'somewhere between the hats and the kneeling', which are Sami's questions. Students who read only the fourth paragraph may blame the cord, so ask them why counting was a fragile method to begin with.
Why the other answers are wrong
- The driver ignores Lina even though she pulls the cord in time. — Lina pulls the cord only after the school has gone by, "too late"; the driver does nothing wrong. The real problem is that she lost track of her count.
- Her cousin wrote the wrong number of stops on the index card. — Nothing suggests the card was wrong; she had been using it successfully for a month.
- She falls asleep after a long morning of taking care of Sami. — Lina is awake and listening to Sami's questions when the bus passes the school.
Practice more of this
More reading practice for Grades 9–10, or see the ELPAC practice test for grades 9–10. For other grades, see free ELPAC practice tests by grade.
This is an independent study resource. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the California Department of Education or the official ELPAC program. All questions here are original practice material written to match the published task formats.