GED Language Arts Practice Test 5

“For years, the jury summons mailed by Carver County began with a paragraph of legal language: ‘Pursuant to statute, you are hereby commanded to appear.’ Clerk of Court Denise Albright says many people stopped reading there. About one in five summoned residents never responded at all, and her office spent weeks each year mailing second notices and tracking down missing jurors. In 2023, Albright’s staff rewrote the form. The new version opens with a single sentence in large type: ‘You have been chosen for jury service on the date below.’ Under that, a short list answers the questions callers asked most often: where to park, whether jurors are paid, and how to ask for a different date. The legal language still appears, but on the back of the page. The results came quickly. In the first year, the share of residents who never responded fell to about one in twelve. Calls to the jury office dropped by almost half, because people found their answers on the form itself. Not everyone was pleased at first. A local judge worried that a friendlier summons would make jury duty seem optional. Albright answered that the form still states the penalty for ignoring a summons; it simply no longer leads with it. ‘We didn’t make the law softer,’ she said. ‘We made it readable.’” How is the article mainly organized?

• AA timeline of jury service from the summons through the trial
• BA comparison of two counties and the jury forms each one uses
• CA legal argument followed by a long list of the laws that support it
• DA problem, a change made to fix it, the results, and an objection