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. what can be inferred from the excerpt?

That Tan believes that achievement tests give inadequate measurements of language ability can be inferred from the excerpt.

Explanation:

According to his experience a person could find it hard to answer this kinds of question since there are many possible answers to fill in the blanks and even if there are options provided each person may have a different understanding of how a person may feel or think about the topic and answer ina different way, then he states that this kind of questions do not really show the language ability of people.

answer: metaphor: because there is a comparison between the treasures spread on the ground and the evil seed of adam drifting from the shoreline  

explanation: