Read this excerpt from The Great Fire.

When the Waterworks burned down at around three in the morning, the pumping machines went dead, and the water supply to the city stopped. The men at the Tribune would do their best to stamp out and smother the burning embers that landed on the roof, but eventually, the fire won out. The shock felt by White and other citizens when they learned the Tribune was a gutted skeleton was captured perfectly by Charles Mackintosh. After describing at great length how solid and fireproof the Tribune Building was, Mackintosh paused and, with a sad sigh, he concluded, "That is, it was fireproof up to the date of its destruction."

Which statement best describes the theme of this paragraph?

The fire was so fierce that it destroyed everything in its path.
Certain buildings were spared because they were fireproof.
Some structures were spared by the fire because their owners were prepared.
Most people did not even try to stop the fire because it was so massive.

Read the excerpt from "mother tongue." those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as “even though tom was mary thought he was ” and the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for example, “even though tom was foolish, mary thought he was ridiculous.” well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what tom could have been and what mary might have thought of him. so i never did well on tests like that. how does tan build a central idea of her story in the excerpt? tan discusses the types of questions on achievement tests to support the idea that the tests limit students’ ability to write well. tan explains a question on a language achievement test to support the idea that the tests should include more interesting content. tan gives an example of her experience with achievement tests to support the idea that they are not always accurate measures of language ability. tan considers how her mother might answer a question on a test to support the idea that nonstandard english limits a person’s ability to communicate.