Read the excerpt from Early Victorian Tea Set.In the eighteenth century Josiah Wedgwood had made some of the most expensive stoneware ceramics – in jasper and basalt – in Britain, but this tea set shows that by the 1840s, when Wedgwood produced it, the company was aiming at a much wider market. This is quite clearly mid-range pottery, simple earthenware of a sort that many quite modest British households were then able to afford. But the owners of this particular set must have had serious social aspirations, because all three pieces have been decorated with a drape of lacy hallmarked silver.
Read the passage from "How Should One Read a Book?”Then turn from your blurred and littered pages to the opening pages of some great novelist—Defoe, Jane Austen, Hardy. Now you will be better able to appreciate their mastery.
Read the passage from "How Should One Read a Book?”The thirty-two chapters of a novel—if we consider how to read a novel first—are an attempt to make something as formed and controlled as a building: but words are more impalpable than bricks; reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing.
Read the excerpt from Early Victorian Tea Set.Among the upper classes, tea had been popular since before 1700. It received celebrity endorsement from Charles II’s queen, Catherine of Braganza, and from Queen Anne. It came from China, it was expensive, refreshingly bitter and drunk in tiny cups without milk or sugar. People kept their tea in locked tea caddies, as if it were a drug; for those who could afford it, it often was. In the 1750s Samuel Johnson confessed himself a happy addict:A hardened and shameless tea drinker, who has for twenty years diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant, whose kettle scarcely has time to cool, who with Tea amuses the evening, with Tea solaces the midnights, and with Tea welcomes the morning.
Read the passage from "How Should One Read a Book?”Yet few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.
Look at the picture of John Harrison painted by artist Philippe Joseph Tassaert.

What does pausing before a certain word in the middle of a sentence provide for the listener?
According to "How to Think Like a Researcher," a chapter from How to Find Out Anything, one should not waste time compiling information if someone else has already done it. Opal wants to conduct research on strategies she can use to get accepted into her college of choice.Based on the guidelines in the text, which is the best research strategy Opal should use?
Read the excerpt from a letter.Parkour, also known as free running, is becoming a popular sport. The object of parkour is to navigate obstacles using fluid, efficient movement. Athletes run through urban areas using gymnastic-type leaps and jumps to move over and around walls, ledges, and other barricades. The sport’s name originates from parcours du combattant, an obstacle course used to train soldiers in the French army.
Read the excerpt from "Benin Plaque: The Oba with Europeans.”Whatever the real facts, the British, in ostensible revenge for the killing, organized a punitive expedition which raided Benin City, exiled the Oba and created the protectorate of Southern Nigeria.
Read the excerpt from Pat Mora’s essay "The Leader in the Mirror."We will continue to squander our talent if our leaders—in politics, science, business, education and the arts—do not reflect our grand variety. I urged the students (and all of us) to ponder the strength of the mountains around us, to rise to the challenges.
What an object conveys about the important events, advancements, and people of a specific time period is called the
To effectively compare and contrast two texts written in different genres, a reader must
Read the excerpt from "Hokusai's The Great Wave.”Hokusai has taken more than colour from the West – he has also borrowed the conventions of European perspective to push Mount Fuji far into the distance. It is clear that Hokusai must have studied European prints, which the Dutch had imported into Japan and which circulated among artists and collectors. So The Great Wave, far from being the quintessence of Japan, is a hybrid work, a fusion of European materials and conventions with a Japanese sensibility. No wonder this image has been so loved in Europe: it is an exotic relative, not a complete stranger.
Read the excerpt from Pat Mora’s essay "The Leader in the Mirror."I began by congratulating the family members and teachers for being steady beacons for those young people. In a society that undervalues families and educators, they had truly lived their commitments.As I was planning the talk I would give to this group, I wondered how best to create an occasion for reflection. What could I say to the audience about the daily struggle to create a meaningful life?
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Which excerpt from Early Victorian Tea Set best expresses MacGregor’s viewpoint about tea?
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Read the excerpt from Ship's Chronometer from HMS Beagle.Before long the whole of Britain was running by the clock, and the measurement of time had been severed from the natural cycle of days and seasons. The clock ruled every aspect of life — shops and schools, pleasure and work. As Charles Dickens wrote, ‘There was even railway time observed in clocks, as if the sun itself had given in.’ Nigel Thrift explains:The chronometer, an exceptionally accurate clock, meant that gradually an ever more accurate measure of time became possible, and that of course worked through other things in the nineteenth century to produce ever more standardized time. A good example of that is the railway, where standard time based on the meridian was first applied by the Great Western Railway in 1840 and gradually that standard time became general.
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