Read the excerpt from The Great Gatsby.Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They were not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size. I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them.The use of words such as “fashionable,” “superficial,” “bizarre,” and “sinister” provide
Read the excerpt from Amy Tan’s essay “Mother Tongue.”I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother’s “limited” English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect.What is the purpose of this text?
Cory is responding to the writing prompt below.Examine a Department of Education advertising campaign that promotes literacy. Analyze the campaign to discover the target audience and the advertising techniques used. Then evaluate the effectiveness of these advertising techniques. Write a formal essay in which you explain how the advertising campaign effectively promotes literacy to a range of audiences. Which is the best main topic for his response essay?
Read the excerpt from Brown v. Board of Education.[T]here are findings below that the Negro and white schools involved have been equalized, or are being equalized, with respect to buildings, curricula, qualifications and salaries of teachers, and other "tangible" factors.The Supreme Court is most likely interested in these findings because it hopes to determine whether
Which best explains how the title of A Rumor of War can be considered a paradox?
Read the excerpt from Elie Wiesel’s All Rivers Run to the Sea.It is unbelievable how fast people adapt. It hurts to admit it, but within hours of first breathing the cattle car’s nauseating air, we began to feel at home. ‘Home’ was the edge of the wooden plank I sat on as I dreamed of the Jewish exiles of antiquity and the Middle Ages. More curious than afraid, I thought of myself as their brother. Mixed into my sadness there was undeniable excitement, for we were living a historic event, a historic adventure.Which best describes the author at this point in his life?
Read the following excerpt from Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Death by Black Hole.”That’s the gory moment when your body snaps into two segments, breaking apart at your midsection. Upon falling further, the difference in gravity continues to grow, and each of your two body segments snaps into two segments. Shortly thereafter, those segments each snap into two segments of their own, and so forth, and so forth, bifurcating your body into an ever-increasing number of parts: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc.Read the following excerpt from Billy Collins’s “Man Listening to Disc.”The music is loud yet so confidentialI cannot help feeling even morelike the center of the universethan usual as I walk along to a rapidlittle version of “The Way You Look Tonight,”What do these two excerpts reveal about the difference in ideas presented by Tyson and Collins?
Which of the following sentences is written correctly?
Read the excerpt from the interview with E.Y. (Yip) Harburg.I was relieved when the Crash came. I was released. Being in business was something I detested. When I found that I could sell a song or a poem, I became me, I became alive. Other people didn’t see it that way. They were throwing themselves out of windows.Harburg was relieved when the crash occurred because
Which is the best definition of the term “magic realism”?
Read the sentence from an argumentative essay about chemical waste. The chemical waste produced by factories is out of hand, and factory owners should get in trouble.Which revision offers the most improvement in word choice?
Read the excerpt from Leslie Marmon Silko’s story "The Man to Send Rain Clouds."Leon knocked at the old carved door with its symbols of the Lamb. While he waited he looked up at the twin bells from the king of Spain with the last sunlight pouring around them in their tower.What does the image of the Lamb above the priest’s door symbolize?
Read the following excerpt from Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics. The bagel data also reflect how much personal mood seems to affect honesty. Weather, for instance, is a major factor. Unseasonably pleasant weather inspires people to pay at a higher rate. Unseasonably cold weather, meanwhile, makes people cheat prolifically; so do heavy rain and wind. Worst are the holidays. The week of Christmas produces a 2 percent drop in payment rates—again, a 15 percent increase in theft, an effect on the same magnitude, in reverse, as that of 9/11. Thanksgiving is nearly as bad; the week of Valentine’s Day is also lousy, as is the week straddling April 15. There are, however, a few good holidays: the weeks that include the Fourth of July, Labor Day, and Columbus Day. The difference in the two sets of holidays? The low-cheating holidays represent little more than an extra day off from work. The high-cheating holidays are fraught with miscellaneous anxieties and the high expectations of loved ones.Which of the following best summarizes the main idea of this paragraph?
Read the excerpt from Fast Food Nation. Up and down Academy Boulevard, along South Nevada, Circle Drive, and Woodman Road, teenagers like Elisa run the fast food restaurants of Colorado Springs. Fast food kitchens often seem like a scene from Bugsy Malone, a film in which all the actors are children pretending to be adults. No other industry in the United States has a workforce so dominated by adolescents.How does Schlosser effectively build his argument in this excerpt?
Which accurately describes a contrast between Wiesel’s All Rivers Run to the Sea and Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, Maus?
Read the quote from Leslie Marmon Silko’s story "The Man to Send Rain Clouds""Send us rain clouds, Grandfather." They laid the bundle in the back of the pickup and covered it with a heavy tarp before they started back to the pueblo.This quote is located early in the narrative. What does it reveal about Leon?
Read the excerpt from Leslie Marmon Silko’s story "The Man to Send Rain Clouds."The sun was approaching the long mesa where it disappeared during the winter. What type of figurative language is included in this passage?
Read the sentence.The fake, counterfeit money, which isn't valid, was discovered in the crime investigation.What is the best way to revise this sentence to eliminate wordiness?
Read the excerpt from "Mother Tongue."Those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as “Even though Tom was ______, Mary thought he was _____.” And the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for example, “Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous.” Well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and what Mary might have thought of him. So I never did well on tests like that. Which information from the excerpt best supports the inference that achievement tests ignore imagination as an element of language ability?
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