Diagnostic PostTest Answers

Which phrases in the excerpt best support the author’s purpose of creating a positive image of a town? Select five options.

Consider this text feature from Chapter 1 of Wheels of Change by Sue Macy.

Read the excerpt from Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics.Feldman has also reached some of his own conclusions about honesty, based more on his experience than the data. He has come to believe that morale is a big factor—that an office is more honest when the employees like their boss and their work. He also believes that employees further up the corporate ladder cheat more than those down below. He got this idea after delivering for years to one company spread out over three floors—an executive floor on top and two lower floors with sales, service, and administrative employees. (Feldman wondered if perhaps the executives cheated out of an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. What he didn’t consider is that perhaps cheating was how they got to be executives.)Which idea from the excerpt best addresses the counterclaim that people are only honest when there is a financial incentive?

Which ideas are stated explicitly in the excerpt? Select two options.

Read the excerpt from Roosevelt’s State of the Union address and the poster below it.Fortunately, there are only a few Americans who place appetite above patriotism. The overwhelming majority realize that the food we send abroad is for essential military purposes, for our own and Allied fighting forces, and for necessary help in areas that we occupy.

My mom was optimistic that the camping trip would go well, but my dad was doubtful that we would have nice weather and enough supplies.

Consider these text features from Chapter 1 of Wheels of Change by Sue Macy.In England, high wheelers were called penny farthings because the relationship of the front wheel to the back wheel resembled that of the large British penny coin to the smaller farthing (quarter penny) coin.

Read the excerpt from Roosevelt’s State of the Union address.Fortunately, there are only a few Americans who place appetite above patriotism. The overwhelming majority realize that the food we send abroad is for essential military purposes, for our own and Allied fighting forces, and for necessary help in areas that we occupy.

Read the excerpt from Silent Spring.On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs—the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit.

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Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England.Elizabethans do not understand infection and contagion as we do. It is not that they are completely ignorant as to how illnesses spread—physicians believe they know perfectly well—it is rather that their understanding is very different from ours. The principal ideas underpinning most Elizabethan medical thinking come from Galen, who lived in the second century A.D. Physicians will cite him as an unquestionable authority when they explain to you that your health depends on a balance of the four humors: yellow bile or choler, black bile, phlegm, and blood. If there is too much choler in your body, you will grow choleric; too much blood and you will be sanguine; too much phlegm and you will be phlegmatic; and too much black bile makes you melancholic. It is from these imbalances that sickness arises.

Which line from President Reagan’s Address at Moscow State University best substantiates his opinion that small businesses are moving the technological revolution?

Read the excerpt from The Code Book.More than a hundred million e-mails are sent around the world each day, and they are all vulnerable to interception. Digital technology has aided communication, but it has also given rise to the possibility of those communications being monitored.

Read the excerpt from "Elevator Systems of the Eiffel Tower, 1889" by Robert M. Vogel.The first complete elevator machine in the United States, constructed in 1855, was a complex and inefficient contrivance built around an oscillating-cylinder steam engine. The advantages of an elevator system independent of the mill drive quickly became apparent, and by 1860 improved steam elevator machines were being produced in some quantity, but almost exclusively for freight service. It is not clear when the first elevator was installed explicitly for passenger service, but it was probably in 1857, when Otis placed one in a store on Broadway at Broome Street in New York.In the decade following the Civil War, tall buildings had just begun to emerge; and, although the skylines of the world’s great cities were still dominated by church spires, there was increasing activity in the development of elevator apparatus adapted to the transportation of people as well as of merchandise. Operators of hotels and stores gradually became aware of the commercial advantages to be gained by elevating their patrons even one or two floors above the ground, by machinery. The steam engine formed the foundation of the early elevator industry, but as building heights increased it was gradually replaced by hydraulic, and ultimately by electrical, systems.

Read the excerpt from “A Century Ride.”Ten o’clock, and she wheeled breathlessly past the outlying houses, and stepped wearily off on the threshold of the little inn, where the Doctor lived. It was such a parody on a hotel—just two square rooms and a lean-to below, and three tiny bedrooms above, with their sashless windows, covered with mosquito netting, looking blank and deserted.

Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England.Eight years later Francis Langley erects the Swan on a site nearby; and in 1596 Richard Burbage builds the Blackfriars Theatre, an indoor venue, although it does not open its doors until 1599. Most important of all, Shakespeare, Richard and Cuthbert Burbage, and their partners dismantle The Theatre and remove its beams to a new site at Southwark, where it is rebuilt in 1599 as the Globe. When Edward Alleyn builds the Fortune on the northern edge of the city in 1600, the array of Elizabethan theaters is complete.

Read the excerpt from “A Century Ride.”It seemed to coax her, to whisper of the long, lonely stretch ahead, of the Indians in their tepees, in the hollow; of a host of vague and nameless terrors; of how lonely and weary and defenseless she was, on that vast plain, twenty-five miles—twenty-five miles—and the half-way house flashed past and was soon left far behind!

Read this excerpt from chapter 1 of The Scarlet Letter.Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than any thing else in the new world.The author most likely includes the words “darker aspect,” “beetle-browed,” “gloomy,” and “ponderous” in order to