There should not be many reasons to actually need the original selector. In your specific use case, if you want to narrow down the set of selected elements, you can use .filter
[docs]:
$test.filter(':checked').attr('id')
$('#whatever').selector
still seems to work though. The documentation says "In 1.9, jQuery no longer attempts to maintain this property in chained methods [...]". Though http://api.jquery.com/selector claims it was removed in 1.9. I don't know, it's a bit confusing.