Read the excerpt from "A Genetics of Justice” by Julia Alvarez. Passage A: Given this mandate of silence, I was a real thorn in my mother's side. She had named me, her second of four daughters, after herself—so we shared the same name. Of all her babies, she reports, l was the best behaved, until l learned to talk. Then, I would not shut up. I always had to answer her back when I disagreed with her. Childhood was rocky, but adolescence was a full-fledged war. Passage B: Unfortunately for my mother, I grew up to be a writer publishing under my maiden name. Which statement correctly analyzes how the passages work together to create a central idea?
Read the excerpt from "A Genetics of Justice” by Julia Alvarez. Images of the dictator hung in every house next to the crucifix and Ia Virgencita with the declaration beneath: In this house Trujillo is Chief. The pale face of a young military man wearing a plumed bicorne hat and a gold–braided uniform looked down beneficently at my mother as she read her romantic novelas and dreamed of meeting the great love of her life. Sometimes in her daydreams, her great love wore the handsome young dictator’s face. Never having seen him, my mother could not know the portrait was heavily retouched. What is the central idea of this paragraph?
Read the excerpt from President Ronald Reagan’s speech on the night before the 1980 presidential election. A popular novel of the '60s ended prophetically with its description of a "kindly, pleasant, greening land about to learn whether history still has a place for a nation so strangely composed of great ideals and uneasy compromise as she.” That is really the question before us tonight: for the first time in our memory many Americans are asking: does history still have a place for America, for her people, for her great ideals? There are some who answer "no”; that our energy is spent, our days of greatness at an end, that a great national malaise is upon us. They say we must cut our expectations, conserve and withdraw, that we must tell our children . . . not to dream as we once dreamed. Last year I lost a friend who was more than a symbol of the Hollywood dream industry; to millions he was a symbol of our country itself. And when he died, the headlines seemed to convey all the doubt about America, all the nostalgia for a seemingly lost past. "The Last American Hero,” said one headline; "Mr. America dies,” said another. Well, I knew John Wayne well, and no one would have been angrier at being called the "last American hero.” Just before his death, he said in his own blunt way, "Just give the American people a good cause, and there’s nothing they can’t lick.” Duke Wayne did not believe that our country was ready for the dust bin of history, and if we’ll just think about it we too will know it isn’t. Which ideas from the excerpt would be most appropriate to include in a summary? Choose three correct answers.
Read the excerpt from President Ronald Reagan’s speech on the night before the 1980 presidential election. And many Americans today, just as they did 200 years ago, feel burdened, stifled and sometimes even oppressed by government that has grown too large, too bureaucratic, too wasteful, too unresponsive, too uncaring about people and their problems. Which statement best describes the rhetorical technique used in this excerpt?
Read the excerpt from "Remembering to Never Forget: Dominican Republic’s ‘Parsley Massacre’” by Mark Memmott. Passage A: This week, people from around the world are expected to gather in the Dominican Republic for a "Border of Lights” commemoration that aims to "honor a tragedy long forgotten, and unknown to many people.” Passage B: Trujillo, as the Border of Lights website explains, fed and nurtured anti-Haitian sentiment and created an atmosphere that still excludes ethnic Haitians from becoming part of "the Dominican melting pot.” The method his soldiers used in 1937 to try to identify those who would be killed was cruelly unique. When confronting someone in the lands along the border with Haiti, they would hold up a sprig of parsley and ask what it was. If the person responded by trilling the "r” in perejil (Spanish for parsley), he would be free to go. Anyone who didn't trill the "r” was thought to be a Haitian Creole speaker—and was likely to be killed. How do these excerpts work together to develop a central idea?
Read the two excerpts. "Remembering to Never Forget: Dominican Republic's 'Parsley Massacre’” by Mark Memmott: Seventy-five years ago, thousands of Haitians were murdered in the Dominican Republic by a brutal dictator. It was one of the 20th Century's least-remembered acts of genocide. As many as 20,000 people are thought to have been killed on orders given by Rafael Trujillo. But the "parsley massacre" went mostly unnoticed outside Hispaniola. Even there, many Dominicans never knew about what happened in early October 1937. They were kept in the dark by Trujillo's henchmen. "A Genetics of Justice” by Julia Alvarez: During my early teen years in this country, I knew very little about what was actually going on in the Dominican Republic. Whenever Ia situación on the island came up, my parents spoke in hushed voices. In December 1960, four months after our arrival, Time magazine reported the murder of the three Mirabal sisters, who along with their husbands had started the national underground Dominican Republic. My parents confiscated the magazine. To our many questions about what was going on, my mother always had the ready answer, " En boca cerrada no entran moscas ." No flies fly into a closed mouth. Later, I found out that this very saying had been scratched on the lintel of the entrance of the SIM's torture center at La Cuarenta. Which statement best compares how the two authors address this topic?
When writing an argument, it is important for writers to explain their position with
What are the characteristics of an independent clause? Choose three correct answers.
Which examples are clauses? Choose three correct answers.
Read the passage from an argumentative essay. (1) Bernie Sanders has argued that no one should have to pay tuition to go to college. (2) This will only increase the tax burden on the middle classes. To improve the relationship between ideas, the writer should revise sentence 2 by
Read the sentence. Marileta is staying with friends until she finds an apartment . What type of clause do the underlined words form?
Which statement is the most effective claim?
Which elements does a strong argumentative essay always contain? Choose two correct answers.
Read the example. A phone rang in the concert hall the orchestra stopped playing. What common sentence-construction error does this show?
Which ideas from the excerpt would be most appropriate to include in a summary? Choose two correct answers.
Read the introduction to Dan DeLuca's argument. Bob Dylan is the songwriter who opened up the doors of possibility to all who followed. He was the mysterious bard with a guitar who sent out a clarion call—first as the acoustic Voice of His Generation, then as the plugged-in rocker who remained a master of the unexpected for five decades—that the words pop singers sang were worthy of being taken seriously. "Dylan was a revolutionary,” Bruce Springsteen said in his 1988 speech inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. "The way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind.” Early masterpieces such as "A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and "Visions Of Johanna” and "Like A Rolling Stone” fueled a debate: Are rock lyrics poetry? The answer must be yes, because on Thursday, Dylan was awarded the highest honor for a writer: the Nobel Prize in literature. The Swedish Academy, in making him the first American winner since novelist Toni Morrison in 1993, cited him for "having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Which statement summarizes DeLuca’s claim?
Read the excerpt from Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington. I believe that in time, through the operation of intelligence and friendly race relations, all cheating at the ballot-box in the South will cease. It will become apparent that the white man who begins by cheating a Negro out of his ballot soon learns to cheat a white man out of his, and that the man who does this ends his career of dishonesty by the theft of property or by some equally serious crime. In my opinion, the time will come when the South will encourage all of its citizens to vote. It will see that it pays better, from every standpoint, to have healthy, vigorous life than to have that political stagnation which always results when one-half of the population has no share and no interest in the Government. What is the strongest reasoning the author uses to support his claim?
Read the excerpt from Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington. I do not believe that any state should make a law that permits an ignorant and poverty-stricken white man to vote, and prevents a black man in the same condition from voting. Such a law is not only unjust, but it will react, as all unjust laws do, in time; for the effect of such a law is to encourage the Negro to secure education and property, and at the same time it encourages the white man to remain in ignorance and poverty. What is the author’s main claim?
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