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 gives an example of her experience with achievement tests to support the idea that they are not always accurate measures of language ability.

Explanation:

According to the excerpt from "Mother Tongue." Amy Tan directs attention to her mother's "broken" English to prove that some standardized tests do not actually assess linguistic competence. Besides, her story also demonstrates that lack of English proficiency does not mean that a person is intellectually limited.

motion can be transfered from one object to another by having an objetct in motion push or hit it

"it's more of an essay than story, but perhaps it is best described as a mood-piece: it uses a lot of musical imagery, not to mention sea imagery, religious imagery, and any other imagery that suits his purpose."