This week the state Education Department released 75 percent of the questions from this year's ELA and mathematics Common Core state tests for grades 3-8. That's about two months earlier than in past years.

In years past we've posted a handful of the 8th grade math questions as a sort of short quiz. And people always seem curious about the question -- and, you know, interested to see if they can answer them.

So we pulled seven questions from this year's 8th grade mathematics test -- they're after the jump with the (hidden) answers.

Before we jump in: As we said in past years, looking at a handful of multiple-choice questions isn't going to provide a complete look at what's on the tests, nor is it going to provide any broad perspective on the Common Core. For example, the math tests includes multiple-choice questions, as well as questions that require short written answers. So this is just a small slice of the test.

The release includes the correct answer for each question, along with the concept category. But as far as we can tell, this year's release of questions doesn't include explanations for each correct answer, nor the percentage of students who got the correct answer, as in years past. (We thought both of those bits were helpful, but maybe they had to be dropped in order to get the questions out earlier this year.)

Here are all the sample math questions for the 8th grade test.

Question 1

(click to reveal answer)

Answer: A

Category: Expressions And Equations



Question 2

(click to reveal answer)

Answer: B

Category: Expressions And Equations



Question 3

(click to reveal answer)

Answer: A

Category: Statistics and Probability



Question 4

(click to reveal answer)

Answer: A

Category: Geometry



Question 5

(click to reveal answer)

Answer: B

Category: Expressions and Equations



Question 6

(click to reveal answer)

Answer: A

Category: Expressions and Equations



Question 7

(click to reveal answer)