Read the excerpt from President Ronald Reagan’s speech on the night before the 1980 presidential election. And many Americans today, just as they did 200 years ago, feel burdened, stifled and sometimes even oppressed by government that has grown too large, too bureaucratic, too wasteful, too unresponsive, too uncaring about people and their problems. Which statement best describes the rhetorical technique used in this excerpt?
Read the excerpt from "A Genetics of Justice” by Julia Alvarez. Images of the dictator hung in every house next to the crucifix and Ia Virgencita with the declaration beneath: In this house Trujillo is Chief. The pale face of a young military man wearing a plumed bicorne hat and a gold–braided uniform looked down beneficently at my mother as she read her romantic novelas and dreamed of meeting the great love of her life. Sometimes in her daydreams, her great love wore the handsome young dictator’s face. Never having seen him, my mother could not know the portrait was heavily retouched. What is the central idea of this paragraph?
Read the excerpt from "A Genetics of Justice” by Julia Alvarez. Periodically, Trujillo would demand a tribute, and they would acquiesce. A tax, a dummy vote, a portrait on the wall. To my father and other men in the country, the most humiliating of these tributes was the occasional parade in which women were made to march and turn their heads and acknowledge the great man as they passed the review stand. If you did not march, your cédula would not be stamped, and without a stamped identification card, you could do nothing; in particular, you could not obtain your passport to leave the country under the pretext of wanting to study heart surgery. This was the second escape—this time with his whole family—that my father was planning. The day came when my mother had to march. The parade went on for hours in the hot sun until my mother was sure she was going to faint. Her feet were swollen and hurting. The back of her white dress was damp with sweat. Finally when she thought she could not go one more step, the grandstand came into sight, a clutter of dress uniforms, a vague figure on the podium. Which statement best analyzes how the author develops the central idea across the paragraphs?
Read the excerpt from "A Genetics of Justice” by Julia Alvarez. Passage A: In December 1960, four months after our arrival, Time magazine reported the murder of the three Mirabal sisters, who along with their husbands had started the national underground Dominican Republic. My parents confiscated the magazine. To our many questions about what was going on, my mother always had the ready answer, " En boca cerrada no entran moscas .” No flies fly into a closed mouth. Later, I found out that this very saying had been scratched on the lintel of the entrance of the SIM's torture center at La Cuarenta. Passage B: The novel would be a fictional retelling of the story of three Mirabal sisters, contemporaries of my mother, whose murder had been reported in that confiscated Time magazine. This time, my mother warned, I was not just going to anger family members, but I would be directly responsible for their lives. There were still old cronies of the dictator around who would love an excuse to go after my family, after my father, after her. This was one of the hardest challenges I had ever had to face as a writer. If my mother were indeed speaking the truth, could I really put my work above the lives of human beings? But if I shut up, wouldn't I still be fanning the members of the dictatorship with its continuing power of censorship and control over the imagination of many Dominicans? What central idea do these excerpts work together to develop?
Read the excerpt from "A Genetics of Justice” by Julia Alvarez. Passage A: Given this mandate of silence, I was a real thorn in my mother's side. She had named me, her second of four daughters, after herself—so we shared the same name. Of all her babies, she reports, l was the best behaved, until l learned to talk. Then, I would not shut up. I always had to answer her back when I disagreed with her. Childhood was rocky, but adolescence was a full-fledged war. Passage B: Unfortunately for my mother, I grew up to be a writer publishing under my maiden name. Which statement correctly analyzes how the passages work together to create a central idea?
Which statement summarizes Samantha's claim?
Which ideas from the excerpt would be most appropriate to include in a summary? Choose two correct answers.
Read the two excerpts. "Remembering to Never Forget: Dominican Republic's 'Parsley Massacre’” by Mark Memmott: Seventy-five years ago, thousands of Haitians were murdered in the Dominican Republic by a brutal dictator. It was one of the 20th Century's least-remembered acts of genocide. As many as 20,000 people are thought to have been killed on orders given by Rafael Trujillo. But the "parsley massacre" went mostly unnoticed outside Hispaniola. Even there, many Dominicans never knew about what happened in early October 1937. They were kept in the dark by Trujillo's henchmen. "A Genetics of Justice” by Julia Alvarez: During my early teen years in this country, I knew very little about what was actually going on in the Dominican Republic. Whenever Ia situación on the island came up, my parents spoke in hushed voices. In December 1960, four months after our arrival, Time magazine reported the murder of the three Mirabal sisters, who along with their husbands had started the national underground Dominican Republic. My parents confiscated the magazine. To our many questions about what was going on, my mother always had the ready answer, " En boca cerrada no entran moscas ." No flies fly into a closed mouth. Later, I found out that this very saying had been scratched on the lintel of the entrance of the SIM's torture center at La Cuarenta. Which statement best compares how the two authors address this topic?
Read the excerpt from "Remembering to Never Forget: Dominican Republic’s ‘Parsley Massacre’” by Mark Memmott. Writer and Middlebury College professor Julia Alvarez, the daughter of Dominicans and someone who lived there as a child, said on Tell Me More today that the killings must be acknowledged and testified to. "We can’t change the present or the future unless we acknowledge what has happened,” she told guest host Celeste Headlee. "There's no place on this planet anymore where that should be happening. It's time that the people themselves say . . . ‘that’s enough.’” Which details support Alvarez’s ideas about the situation in her home country? Choose two correct answers.
Read the excerpt from "Remembering to Never Forget: Dominican Republic’s ‘Parsley Massacre’” by Mark Memmott. Passage A: This week, people from around the world are expected to gather in the Dominican Republic for a "Border of Lights” commemoration that aims to "honor a tragedy long forgotten, and unknown to many people.” Passage B: Trujillo, as the Border of Lights website explains, fed and nurtured anti-Haitian sentiment and created an atmosphere that still excludes ethnic Haitians from becoming part of "the Dominican melting pot.” The method his soldiers used in 1937 to try to identify those who would be killed was cruelly unique. When confronting someone in the lands along the border with Haiti, they would hold up a sprig of parsley and ask what it was. If the person responded by trilling the "r” in perejil (Spanish for parsley), he would be free to go. Anyone who didn't trill the "r” was thought to be a Haitian Creole speaker—and was likely to be killed. How do these excerpts work together to develop a central idea?
Which words from the passage have negative connotations that support the author's point? Choose three correct answers.
Read the introduction to Dan DeLuca's argument. Bob Dylan is the songwriter who opened up the doors of possibility to all who followed. He was the mysterious bard with a guitar who sent out a clarion call—first as the acoustic Voice of His Generation, then as the plugged-in rocker who remained a master of the unexpected for five decades—that the words pop singers sang were worthy of being taken seriously. "Dylan was a revolutionary,” Bruce Springsteen said in his 1988 speech inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. "The way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind.” Early masterpieces such as "A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and "Visions Of Johanna” and "Like A Rolling Stone” fueled a debate: Are rock lyrics poetry? The answer must be yes, because on Thursday, Dylan was awarded the highest honor for a writer: the Nobel Prize in literature. The Swedish Academy, in making him the first American winner since novelist Toni Morrison in 1993, cited him for "having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Which statement summarizes DeLuca’s claim?
Read the sentence. Marileta is staying with friends until she finds an apartment . What type of clause do the underlined words form?
Read the example. If you want to know how Dickens’s last novel would end. What common error in sentence construction is evident in this example?
What are the characteristics of an independent clause? Choose three correct answers.
Which examples are clauses? Choose three correct answers.
Which statement is the most effective claim?
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