1912 Eighth Grade Exam Examples From Bullitt County Schools

Here are examples of test questions from a 1912 eighth grade exam. The copy of the old examination sheet for Bullitt County Schools in 1912 was donated to the Bullitt County History Musuem in Kentucky.

How many can you answer?

Some answers to the questions:

Arithmetic
Question #6: Assuming that the question is asking for a total of the principal plus interest earned over the stated time period, the answer will be $63.41 using principal × rate × time.) with 3 years, 3 months, 3 days = 3.258 years. $50.30 × .08 × 3.258 = $13.11 interest.

Question #7: Since the number of boys equals 2/3 of the number of girls, or B = (2/3)G [or .67G], we can write the equation as 1.67G = 120. Divide both sides of the equation by 1.67 and the equation becomes G = 120 ÷ 1.67 which equals 71.856 which rounds to the whole number of 72. Since there are 72 girls, 120 – 72 = 48 boys.

Alternately, using just fractions, B = (2/3) G and B + G = 120, we get (5/3) G = 120. Staying in fractions, we can multiple both sides of the equation by 3, giving 5G = 360, or G = 72, from which we can determine that B = 48. Rounding to whole numbers thus becomes unnecessary.

Grammar
Question #1:
Traditionally there are eight grammatical parts of speech identified this way (taken from Wikipedia)

Noun: any abstract or concrete entity; a person (police officer, Michael), place (coastline, London), thing (necktie, television), idea (happiness), or quality (bravery)
Pronoun: any substitute for a noun or noun phrase
Adjective: any qualifier of a noun
Verb: any action (walk), occurrence (happen), or state of being (be)
Adverb: any qualifier of an adjective, verb, clause, sentence, or other adverb
Preposition: any establisher of relation and syntactic context
Conjunction: any syntactic connector
Interjection: any emotional greeting (or “exclamation”)

All answers are provided by the Bullitt County History Museum website.