Praxis Core Practice Test.
Free practice exam — 60 verified questions, instant feedback.

Answer: C
Compare place by place after padding to equal length: 0.450 versus 0.405 versus 0.400 versus 0.099. In the hundredths place, 0.45 shows 5 against 0 for both 0.405 and 0.4, and 0.099 lost already in the tenths. The lure is reading 0.099 as large because it has more digits — decimal ordering rewards place value, not digit count.

Answer: B
One teacher per 12 students: 96 ÷ 12 = 8 teachers. Choosing 12 confuses the ratio's parts, and 84 subtracts instead of divides. Ratio problems in real-world dress — chaperones, paint mixtures, class supplies — are core Number and Quantity content, and labeling which quantity each number counts prevents the part-swap error.

Answer: B
Order of operations: exponent first (4² = 16), then multiplication (3 × 16 = 48), then addition (2 + 48 = 50). Working left to right yields 80 or 400 depending on where the exponent is misapplied. PEMDAS violations power an entire distractor family on the math subtest, and the exponent-before-multiply step is the one most often skipped.

Answer: D
Slope is rise over run: (7 − 3)/(2 − 0) = 4/2 = 2. Inverting the ratio gives 1/2, taking only the y-change gives 4, and 3 is the y-intercept — every distractor is a named misstep. With one point on the y-axis, the equation is immediately y = 2x + 3, a form worth recognizing for the algebra strand's graph questions.

Answer: C
Scale problems are proportions: 3.5 inches × 20 miles per inch = 70 miles. Adding the scale numbers (23.5) or halving the product (35) are the standard distractor errors. Ratio and proportional reasoning — maps, recipes, unit prices — recur throughout Number and Quantity, and writing the units beside each factor exposes wrong setups immediately.

Answer: B
Order the data first: 67, 72, 85, 85, 91. The median of five values is the third — 85. The classic error is grabbing the middle of the unordered list (91 as written); 80 is the mean, a different measure of center. Median questions in the statistics strand almost always hinge on remembering to sort before selecting.

Answer: C
Probability is favorable outcomes over total outcomes: 2 blue out of 8 equal sections gives 2/8 = 1/4. The distractor 2/6 divides by the number of non-blue outcomes plus a miscount, and 1/8 counts only one blue section. Equal-section spinners are the test's cleanest probability setup — simplify the fraction as the final step.

Answer: C
Add 7 to both sides to get 3x = 21, then divide by 3: x = 7. Answer C stops after the addition step, and D divides before isolating the variable term — both are order-of-operations slips in reverse. Checking by substitution (3 × 7 − 7 = 14 ✓) takes seconds and converts algebra items into guaranteed points.

Answer: C
The passage states a phenomenon (city hives often outproduce rural ones) and then gives the researchers' explanation: longer-blooming, more diverse urban plantings. That cause-and-effect account is the passage's main purpose; the other options either overstate the claim about farmland or introduce topics the passage never raises.

Answer: B
In context, records once 'dismissed as routine' are now 'prized' — the contrast signals a shift from neglect to high regard, so 'valued' fits. 'Awarded' confuses the noun 'prize' with the verb sense used here, and nothing suggests the records are being opened or doubted. Vocabulary-in-context items reward testing each substitute inside the sentence.

Answer: C
The author concedes keyboarding 'matters too' but argues handwriting's motor memory 'appears to do work typing cannot' — a both/and position that preserves a distinct role for handwriting. The full-replacement position is the view the author is rebutting, and the passage directly ties hand-formed letters to letter recognition, contradicting the no-effect and cannot-be-taught choices.

Answer: B
The passage pairs the service cut with tripled complaints and declining foot traffic at nearby businesses — evidence of effects reaching past riders themselves. Nothing predicts a restored schedule, 'entirely' overstates the business link, and alternative routes are never mentioned. Supported-conclusion items reward the most modest inference the facts can carry.

Answer: A
The tower example directly illustrates the opening correction — the 'same place twice' myth — by naming structures hit dozens of times yearly. The passage mentions grounding systems as a consequence, not a construction manual, and says nothing about relocation or rising lightning frequency. Purpose-of-detail questions ask why an example appears, not what else is true.

Answer: D
Diversion rates and targets are verifiable figures — facts. Calling the program the 'wisest investment' is a value judgment that the numbers alone cannot verify, which is the hallmark of opinion. Fact-versus-opinion items turn on verifiability: if evidence could confirm or refute it, it is factual; if it ranks or praises, it is opinion.

Answer: A
Author 1 praises gardens outright; Author 2's warning that they 'vanish' to developers presumes they are worth keeping — so both treat gardens as valuable. Only Author 2 addresses tenure, so the land-trust remedy is not a shared position, and neither author disparages gardens or blames neighbor apathy. Point-of-agreement items require support from both passages.

Answer: A
'First… Next… Finally' marks chronological process organization — each step depends on completing the prior one. No second method is compared, no argument is rebutted, and the ordering is temporal rather than by importance. Organization questions ask how a text is built, and transition words are the fastest reliable signal.

Answer: D
The skeptics do not dispute the doubling; they point to a rival cause — the blockbuster exhibit — that arrived simultaneously, which undermines attributing the rise to free admission alone. That is a classic alternative-explanation move in evaluating causal arguments. They neither challenge the data, claim a decline, nor recommend policy.

Answer: D
The arc runs from poor sales to growing critical reputation to canonical syllabus status — steady rise, or 'ascendant.' 'Cyclical' would need alternating rises and falls, 'static' no change, and 'declining' the reverse. Trajectory questions compress a passage's timeline into a single descriptor, so map each stage before choosing.

Answer: D
The passage credits desalination with supplying most drinking water in several states, then flags energy intensity and brine damage — benefit and cost presented side by side, with 'though' marking the pivot. Neither pure praise nor condemnation matches that structure. Attitude questions are answered by the balance of the language, not by any single clause.

Answer: C
'Indeed' escalates: it confirms the thoroughness claim and introduces evidence — a forty-page appendix — that strengthens it. Contrast would need 'however' or 'yet'; doubt or topic shifts would need entirely different connectives. Function-of-a-word questions test how transitions steer the logic of a sentence, a recurring Reading skill.

Answer: D
A universal rule about the workshop's violins plus the fact that the bench instrument is one of them yields the conclusion deductively. The converse choice reverses the logic — the rule runs from workshop to materials, not back. Quality judgments and who built it are outside the premises. Must-be-true items permit only conclusions the premises force.

Answer: B
The passage's arc is presence, absence, and confirmed return, so a title about the otters' comeback fits the whole text. Camera traps are only the detection method, the 1930s only the baseline, and 'disappeared forever' is contradicted by the sightings. Best-title items reward coverage of the full passage over any single detail.

Answer: A
The critics' evidence is arithmetic: one mile per year of budget versus forty miles of pipe makes a five-year goal implausible. That is a pace-versus-scale comparison, not an attack on credentials, an outside example, or a denial of the underlying need. Method-of-argument items ask how a position is supported, not whether it is right.

Answer: D
The passage states the consequence directly: missed feedings weaken the colony and sour the flavor 'beyond appeal.' Detail questions like this require only accurate retrieval — the wrong answers add effects the text never mentions or contradict it outright. On Reading, every answer must trace to stated content, since no outside knowledge is required.

Answer: C
'However' pivots from dismissal to modern directors finding 'social critique beneath the farce' — implying the plays held depth the early critics missed. The farce label is retained, not denied; modern directors actively stage the works; and nothing limits the playwright's output to comedies. Implication items stay one small step from the text.

Answer: A
Sentence one names an ongoing problem; sentence two reports an intervention on one mile with good results — a partial remedy, not a cure, contradiction, or restatement. The gravel work addresses only 'the steepest mile,' so erosion overall may continue. Sentence-relationship items ask what work each sentence performs relative to its neighbor.

Answer: D
Problem, then response: the treatment mandate exists because of the invasions the first sentence describes. The rules address the harm rather than downplay it, no organism biology is given, and shipping volume is never questioned. Recognizing problem-solution structure quickly is among the most transferable Reading skills the test rewards.

Answer: D
Perpetual sell-outs for a decade is an extreme assumption; exposing it undercuts the payback claim without proving fraud or asserting stadiums never earn. The finding weakens by attacking a premise — the standard evaluative move the Reading test measures when it asks how new information bears on an argument. Fabrication is a stronger charge than the text supports.

Answer: A
With neither…nor, the verb agrees with the nearer subject: 'teachers' is plural, so 'were' is correct. 'Neither' pairs with 'nor' (never 'or'), eliminating C, and the double negative in D reverses the meaning. Proximity agreement with correlative conjunctions is a staple of the usage section — check the subject closest to the verb.

Answer: B
'Each' is a singular indefinite pronoun, so it takes 'has' despite the plural 'of the students' phrase between subject and verb. That intervening prepositional phrase is the classic trap — the verb agrees with 'each,' not 'students.' The singular 'portfolio' is consistent with each student submitting one, and 'before the deadline' is idiomatic.

Answer: A
The opening participle 'Running to catch the bus' must describe the subject that follows; a backpack cannot run. Converting the modifier to a clause with its own subject — 'As I ran' — repairs the dangler. The other options simply hand the running to papers or the sidewalk instead. Dangling modifiers are a fixture of the sentence-correction part.

Answer: A
A regular plural ending in -s takes only a trailing apostrophe for possession: coaches'. Placing the apostrophe inside the plural is wrong, 'strategie's' turns the possessed noun into a false possessive, and the added -s in coaches's is reserved for singular nouns (the coach's strategy). Plural-possessive placement is among the most frequently tested mechanics rules.

Answer: C
Items in a series must share grammatical form: 'reviewed, weighed, and recommended' keeps all three verbs in the past tense, while the present 'recommends' derails the parallel. 'Weighed the costs' is the correct idiom, and a collective noun like 'committee' takes a singular verb in standard American usage. Parallel structure is a core usage target.

Answer: C
Rectangle area is length times width: 9 × 6 = 54 square feet. The 30 square feet answer is the perimeter (2 × (9 + 6)), the most common confusion, and 15 merely adds the dimensions. Area-versus-perimeter discrimination appears throughout the geometry strand, often dressed in classroom contexts like rugs, bulletin boards, and garden plots.

Answer: A
Two independent clauses may be joined by a semicolon, which A does cleanly. A comma alone between independent clauses is a comma splice (B), no punctuation at all is a fused sentence (C), and D scatters punctuation that severs the subject from its verb. Distinguishing splice, fusion, and legitimate joins is central to the mechanics questions.

Answer: B
Pronouns following a preposition take the objective case: between you and me. The subject 'schedule' is singular, so 'benefits' agrees, and 'than' is the comparative conjunction — 'then' would wrongly signal sequence. Hypercorrection with 'I' in compound objects is one of the most reliably tested case errors on the usage section.

Answer: A
The vague 'which' has no clear noun antecedent — what surprised the directors was the speed, so the revision names it and shifts to active voice. 'And surprising' creates a faulty conjunction, one rewrite attaches 'written in four days' to the directors, and the comma-riddled version muddles what happened in four days. Revision items reward clarity of reference above all.

Answer: D
The correct sentence stays in second person throughout. The others drift between 'you,' 'one,' and 'we' mid-sentence — a person shift that the usage section tests regularly. Whichever pronoun frame a sentence opens with must carry through; mixing formal 'one' with conversational 'you' is the most common flavor of the error.

Answer: B
'Hardly' is already negative in force, so pairing it with 'not' produces a nonstandard double negative; 'could hardly read' is the conventional form. 'Faded' correctly describes the entries' present condition, and the plural of 'entry' is 'entries.' Negation words that hide in adverbs — hardly, scarcely, barely — are frequent usage-section bait.

Answer: C
Comparing exactly two items calls for the comparative 'shorter'; the superlative 'shortest' requires three or more. 'More shorter' doubles the comparison, and D garbles the noun entirely. The two-versus-three-or-more boundary between comparative and superlative is tested often because everyday speech blurs it.

Answer: A
Credibility for statistics rests on authority, transparency of method, and currency — a federal assessment program publishes methodology and recent data. Anonymous blogs and social threads lack accountability, and an old encyclopedia fails currency for 'current' statistics. Research-skills questions in the Writing test weigh sources on exactly these axes.

Answer: A
Quotation marks promise the source's exact words; silent alterations break that promise even with a citation attached. Accepted practice is to bracket changes, use ellipses for omissions, or paraphrase outright. No page-count or percentage threshold exists. Quotation integrity questions belong to the research-skills part of the selected-response section.

Answer: C
'Due to the fact that' compresses to 'because,' and 'in the process of being renovated' to 'was being renovated' — same meaning, half the words. The other options preserve or multiply the padding. Concision questions ask for the shortest version that keeps meaning and grammar intact, a skill the essay scorers reward as well.

Answer: D
The whole clause 'whoever had organized the food drive' is the object of 'congratulated,' but within that clause the pronoun is the subject of 'had organized' — so it must be 'whoever.' Case is set by the pronoun's role inside its own clause, not by the verb in front of it. This inside-the-clause test defeats the most tempting usage trap.

Answer: B
To say the vaccines are limited to Tuesdays, 'only' must sit beside 'on Tuesdays.' Placing it before 'offers' suggests offering is the sole activity, before 'vaccines' implies no other services that day, and C bolts on a comma splice. 'Only' takes its meaning from whatever it touches, making misplacement a favorite revision-in-context item.

Answer: D
Substitute carefully: 2(−3) + 5 = −6 + 5 = −1. Dropping the negative gives 11, and sign slips in the addition produce 1 or −11. Signed-number arithmetic inside function evaluation is a persistent point-loser; writing the substitution in full with parentheses around the negative value prevents nearly all of these errors.

Answer: D
Three repetitive sentences reduce to one precise claim: strong results. Chaining the repetition with 'and…and' keeps the clutter, the appositive rewrite stutters 'worked' twice, and 'working really well' dangles its modifier onto 'results.' Sentence-combining items test whether you can consolidate meaning while shedding redundancy — the same economy the scored essays reward.

Answer: A
In-text citations are pointers: author and date direct the reader to the complete entry in the references, where the source can be located and checked. They complement rather than replace the list, and they attest to where specific material came from, not to how much of the source was read. Documentation mechanics appear in the research-skills questions.

Answer: D
An effective thesis takes an arguable position and previews its support: later start times, justified by attendance and grade evidence. Announcements ('this essay will be about'), observations that people discuss a topic, and universal truisms give the essay nothing to argue. Thesis quality drives the argumentative essay rubric's top criterion.

Answer: C
As a verb meaning 'to influence,' 'affect' is correct; 'effect' serves as the noun ('a positive effect'). Another choice stacks 'principle' for 'principal' and 'it's' for 'its,' while the last uses the noun slot with 'affect' and the nonstandard 'alot.' Commonly confused word pairs — affect/effect, principal/principle, its/it's — recur across the usage questions.

Answer: A
Multiply the per-batch amount by the batch count: 6 × 3/4 = 18/4 = 4 1/2 cups. Converting the improper fraction 18/4 to a mixed number is the second step candidates rush past. Fraction-times-whole-number problems anchor the Number and Quantity strand, and estimating first (6 × 3/4 is a bit under 6) guards against slips.

Answer: A
A 25 percent discount removes a quarter of the price: 80 × 0.25 = 20 off, leaving 80 − 20 = $60. Equivalently, paying 75 percent of the original gives 80 × 0.75 = 60 directly. Answer D is the discount amount, not the price — a distractor pattern the test uses constantly, so always reread which quantity the question requests.

Answer: A
Wednesday's 150 versus Monday's 120 is an increase of 30, and 30/120 = 25 percent. Tuesday ties Thursday at 90 — neither is the maximum nor greater than the other — and the sequence 120, 90, 150, 90 rises and falls. Data-interpretation items demand both accurate reading and a correct percent-change base (the earlier value).

Answer: B
Divide: 4 ÷ 5 = 0.8 = 80 percent. The trap answers translate the digits '4' and '5' directly into 45 percent or 0.45, and 5/4 flips the fraction into a value greater than one. Fraction-decimal-percent conversion is among the most frequently tested Number and Quantity skills, and the divide-then-shift routine settles every case.

Answer: A
A mean of 15 across four numbers means the total is 4 × 15 = 60. The three known values sum to 40, so the fourth is 60 − 40 = 20. Reasoning from mean back to total is the reverse skill the statistics strand loves; answer C is the mean of the three given numbers rounded, and B assumes the missing value equals the mean.

Answer: C
Regular pay: 40 × 18 = 720. Overtime rate: 18 × 1.5 = 27, for 4 hours: 108. Total 720 + 108 = $828. Paying all 44 hours at the straight rate gives 792, and paying all at overtime gives 864 — both distractors mirror incomplete setups. Multi-step wage problems test rate construction plus careful bookkeeping of the two pay tiers.

Answer: D
Triangle angles sum to 180°: 180 − 90 − 35 = 55°. Subtracting from 190 or only from 90 produces the neighboring wrong answers. The angle-sum property is the single most-used geometry fact on the test, appearing alone and embedded inside multi-step figures, so it should be automatic before test day.

Answer: A
'Twice a number' is 2n; 'seven less than' that quantity subtracts 7 from it: 2n − 7. Reversing to 7 − 2n flips the subtraction — the single most common translation error, since English order and algebra order disagree in 'less than' phrases. Verbal-to-symbolic translation is a fixture of the algebra strand.

Answer: D
Not black means white: 5 favorable out of 8 total, so 5/8. Equivalently, complement reasoning gives 1 − 3/8 = 5/8. The 3/5 distractor compares black to white instead of black to total — odds language rather than probability. Complement questions reward reading the NOT carefully; the test capitalizes it precisely because rushed readers skip it.

Answer: D
Divide correct by total: 42/56 = 3/4 = 75 percent. Reducing the fraction first (both divide by 14) makes the arithmetic mental. Reading 42 directly as a percent ignores the different total, the error the test invites by choosing numbers under 100. Score-style percent problems double as practice for interpreting your own drill results.