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• I remember the summer of 1940 when I first left here. After my final school year my days had been reduced to waiting, anticipating the preinduction physical for the year of compulsory service required of all physically fit seventeen and eighteen year olds, both men and women. Although I wanted the medical reports to declare me perfectly fit and would have felt inferior if they had not, I was not looking forward to upcoming camp life. Yet without any say in my future, all I hoped to know was where and when. Then the paralyzing uncertainty ended. My orders to report to a never-heard-of location in Czechoslovakia even kindled a spark of anticipation for traveling to a foreign country and moving toward new experiences, whatever they might be. I was assigned to a camp that was an agricultural teaching facility, where I was expected to learn to run a large rural household. Like me, most of the girls at the camp enjoyed the hearty meals and learned to ignore our servant status. After years of having subsisted on ration diets in the cities, we blossomed into robust young women whose physical well-being countered surges of hurt pride, resentment, and periods of homesickness. And so began just one of the many disjointed and unpredictable periods I endured before the subsiding waves of war swept me an ocean away.

The author uses the phrase "disjointed and unpredictable" to describe

• (A)   her infrequent reunions with her family
• (B)   her plans for her life after the war
• (C)   the varied situations she experienced during the war   CORRECT ANSWER
• (D)   her prior experiences with foreign traveling
• (E)   her preparation for performing skilled labor

Explanation:

In the last sentence of the passage, the author states that the period described was one of the many "disjointed and unpredictable" periods she endured before the waves of war swept her an ocean away. Therefore, choice (C) is the correct answer.

(from the October 18, 1997 test)