Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England.The underlying reasons for such differences are not hard to find. In a society in which people still starve to death, an orchard is not a beautiful thing in itself: its beauty lies in the fact that it produces apples and cider. A wide flat field is "finer” than rugged terrain for it can be tilled easily to produce wheat and so represents good white bread. A small thatched cottage, which a modern viewer might consider pretty, will be considered unattractive by an Elizabethan traveler, for cottagers are generally poor and able to offer little in the way of hospitality. Ranges of hills and mountains are obstacles to Elizabethan travelers and very far from picturesque features you go out of your way to see. Hills might feature in an Elizabethan writer’s description of a county because of their potential for sheep grazing, but on the whole he will be more concerned with listing all the houses of the gentry, their seats and parks.
Read this excerpt from chapter 2 of The Scarlet Letter.Meagre, indeed, and cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for, from such bystanders at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.Which best describes the purpose of the words “meagre,” “scaffold,” “stern,” and “punishment of death”?
In “The Girl Who Silenced the World for Five Minutes,” what is the most likely reason Suzuki speaks about herself as “only a child”?
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England.By the end of the reign he [Jonson] has married, had two children and lost one, tried to become an actor and failed, become a playwright, been arrested for a scurrilous play and released, killed another actor in a duel, been arrested again and put on trial for murder, and escaped hanging by pleading benefit of the clergy. The play for which he is arrested, The Isle of Dogs, coauthored with Thomas Nashe, is so slanderous and offensive that the privy council orders the closure not just of the play but of every theater in London.
Read the excerpt from The Dark Game.On January 16, 1917, in a clear attempt to convince the Mexican government to help Germany in the war, Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign secretary, sent a telegram to Count von Bernstorff, the German ambassador in Washington. The foreign secretary wanted to be certain that this message reached von Bernstorff, so he made arrangements for it to be carried aboard a U-boat to Sweden and from there to Washington through diplomatic channels.
Read the excerpt from "A Quilt of a Country."What is the point of this splintered whole? What is the point of a nation in which Arab cabbies chauffeur Jewish passengers through the streets of New York—and in which Jewish cabbies chauffeur Arab passengers, too, and yet speak in theory of hatred, one for the other? What is the point of a nation in which one part seems to be always on the verge of fisticuffs with another, blacks and whites, gays and straights, left and right, Pole and Chinese and Puerto Rican and Slovenian? Other countries with such divisions have in fact divided into new nations with new names, but not this one, impossibly interwoven even in its hostilities.Once these disparate parts were held together by a common enemy, by the fault lines of world wars and the electrified fence of communism. With the end of the cold war there was the creeping concern that without a focus for hatred and distrust, a sense of national identity would evaporate, that the left side of the hyphen—African-American, Mexican-American, Irish-American—would overwhelm the right. And slow-growing domestic traumas like economic unrest and increasing crime seemed more likely to emphasize division than community. Today the citizens of the United States have come together once more because of armed conflict and enemy attack. Terrorism has led to devastation—and unity.
Review the excerpt from The Code Book. Cryptanalysts realize that their real goal is to find a way of cracking the RSA cipher, the cornerstone of modern encryption . . . Use the meaning of the underlined words above to understand the sentence.David’s family was puzzled by the short and cryptic note he left on the table.
Which kinds of evidence are included in the excerpt? Select 3 options.
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Read the excerpt from Fast Food Nation. Cooking instructions are not only printed in the manual, they are often designed into the machines. A McDonald’s kitchen is full of buzzers and flashing lights that tell employees what to do.The evidence presented in this excerpt best supports the author’s claim that
Read this excerpt from "The Legend."Tonight, I read about Descartes'grand courage to doubt everythingexcept his own miraculous existenceand I feel so distinctfrom the wounded man lying on the concreteI am ashamed
Read the following sentence.There are strict laws in place regarding the dumping of waste, in part to avoid the possibility that drinking water supplies will become contaminated.
Read the excerpt from Warriors Don't Cry.Dear Diary,The two days since I first went to Central felt like I was living in some stranger's life. Today I won't think of integration, I won't think of Central High, and I won't think of the white people. I will spend the whole day finding the perfect disguise to wear to the wrestling matches. . . .No matter what, I'm gonna be a regular person. I'm gonna have my usual date with Grandma and my secret, pretend date with Vince at the matches.
Read the excerpt from The Evolution of Useful Things.The new two-tone style of painting automobiles was popular in 1925, but it presented considerable problems for auto manufacturers and body shops alike. In order to get a clean, sharp edge when applying a second paint color, the first had to be masked, of course, and this required that newspaper or butcher paper be fastened to the car body. If shop-brewed glue was used, it would sometimes stick so well that it had to be scraped off, more often than not pulling paint with it. Surgical adhesive tape was sometimes employed, but its cloth backing tended to absorb solvents from the newly sprayed paint and cause the masking materials to stick to the paint they were intended to protect. Clearly, existing means of masking had serious flaws.
Read the excerpt from "A Quilt of a Country."The reality is often quite different, a great national striving consisting frequently of failure. Many of the oft-told stories of the most pluralistic nation on earth are stories not of tolerance, but of bigotry. Slavery and sweatshops, the burning of crosses and the ostracism of the other. Children learn in social-studies class and in the news of the lynching of blacks, the denial of rights to women, the murders of gay men. It is difficult to know how to convince them that this amounts to "crown thy good with brotherhood," that amid all the failures is something spectacularly successful.
Read the following excerpt from Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics.There is a tale, “The Ring of Gyges,” that Feldman sometimes tells his economist friends. It comes from Plato’s Republic. A student named Glaucon offered the story in response to a lesson by Socrates—who, like Adam Smith, argued that people are generally good even without enforcement. Glaucon, like Feldman’s economist friends, disagreed. He told of a shepherd named Gyges who stumbled upon a secret cavern with a corpse inside that wore a ring. When Gyges put on the ring, he found that it made him invisible. With no one able to monitor his behavior, Gyges proceeded to do woeful things—seduce the queen, murder the king, and so on. Glaucon’s story posed a moral question: could any man resist the temptation of evil if he knew his acts could not be witnessed? Glaucon seemed to think the answer was no. The excerpt serves as which of the following in relation to the authors’ argument?
Read the excerpt from The Code Book.A more recent development is the so-called tempest attack, which aims to detect the electromagnetic signals emitted by the electronics in a computer's display unit.
Read the excerpt from The Hot Zone.Jerry was terribly keyed up. In the past he had lectured Nancy on the dangers of working with Ebola in a space suit, and now he was leading a team into an Ebola hell. At the moment, he didn't care what happened to himself, personally. He was expendable, and he knew it.
Read the excerpt from Roosevelt’s "Four Freedoms" speech.A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes. In my Budget Message I shall recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program be paid for from taxation than we are paying today. No person should try, or be allowed, to get rich out of this program; and the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay should be constantly before our eyes to guide our legislation.
Read the excerpt from President Ronald Reagan’s Address at Moscow State University.The explorers of the modern era are the entrepreneurs, men with vision, with the courage to take risks and faith enough to brave the unknown. These entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States. They are the prime movers of the technological revolution. In fact, one of the largest personal computer firms in the United States was started by two college students, no older than you, in the garage behind their home. Some people, even in my own country, look at the riot of experiment that is the free market and see only waste. What of all the entrepreneurs that fail? Well, many do, particularly the successful ones; often several times. And if you ask them the secret of their success, they'll tell you it's all that they learned in their struggles along the way; yes, it's what they learned from failing. Like an athlete in competition or a scholar in pursuit of the truth, experience is the greatest teacher.
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