Analyzing Idea Development in an Essay Answers

Read the excerpt from "How the Grimm Brothers Saved the Fairy Tale."Turning to the tales of the first edition, a reader might notice that many of the stories such as "The Hand with the Knife,” "How Some Children Played at Slaughtering,” and "The Children of Famine,” have nothing to do with fairies or happy endings. Instead, these are stark narratives about brutal living conditions in the nineteenth century. For instance, "The Children of Famine” begins this way:Once upon a time there was a woman with two daughters, and they had become so poor that they no longer had even a piece of bread to put in their mouths. Their hunger became so great that their mother became unhinged and desperate. Indeed, she said to her children, "I’ve got to kill you so that I can get something to eat.”

Yael is writing an essay about the development of folk tales. Read the excerpt from her essay.Every culture throughout time has had its own folk tales, which were first transmitted from person to person with the technology available at the time. Folk tales began as an oral tradition. With the invention of written language, folk tales were recorded by community scribes, until 1450, when the printing press was invented. The result was a wider distribution of folk tales, which were collected in books.

Read the excerpt from "How the Grimm Brothers Saved the Fairy Tale."Between 1812 and 1857, seven editions of their tales appeared, each one different from the last, until the final, best-known version barely resembled the first. Given that the first edition has recently been honored in bicentenary celebrations throughout the world, it is perhaps a good time to reexamine what we think we know about the original tales of the Brothers Grimm.

Read the excerpt from an essay about folk tales.The majority of folk tales involve danger. Stories like "Little Red Riding Hood” are based on dangerous situations the characters have to get out of.Which revision would best help the author present the main point more effectively?

When a text encourages the reader to believe or do something, the author's purpose is

Read the excerpt from "How the Grimm Brothers Saved the Fairy Tale."What compelled the Grimms to concentrate on old German epics, tales, and literature was a belief that the most natural and pure forms of culture—those which held the community together—were linguistic and based in history. According to them, modern literature, even though it might be remarkably rich, was artificial and thus could not express the genuine essence of Volk culture that emanated naturally from experience and bound the people together. Therefore, all their efforts went toward uncovering stories from the past.

For what purpose does the author mention the names of various Grimm works in this excerpt? Select three answers.

Read the excerpt from "How the Grimm Brothers Saved the Fairy Tale."All of the tales in the first edition bear the marks of their diverse storytellers who believed in the magic, superstitions, and miraculous transformations of the tales. It may be difficult for us to understand why this is the case, but for the storytellers and writers of these tales, the stories contained truths about the living conditions of their times. The tales in the first edition were collected not from peasants, as is commonly believed, but mainly from literate people whom the Grimms came to know quite well. Evidence shows that these people often obtained their tales from illiterate or anonymous informants. Even if they did not know their informants, the Grimms came to trust almost everyone who contributed to their collection. It is this mutual trust that marks the tales as something special and endows them with a certain humanity, what Germans call Menschlichkeit, and it is this mutual trust among folklorists in the nineteenth century that marks it as the golden age of folk and fairy tales. The tales in the first edition set a certain standard that collectors began to follow and still follow even today.