Read the following excerpt from Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics.In the real world, Feldman learned to settle for less than 95 percent. He came to consider a company “honest” if its payment rate was above 90 percent. He considered a rate between 80 and 90 percent “annoying but tolerable.” If a company habitually paid below 80 percent, Feldman might post a hectoring note, like this one:The cost of bagels has gone up dramatically since the beginning of the year. Unfortunately, the number of bagels that disappear without being paid for has also gone up. Don’t let that continue. I don’t imagine that you would teach your children to cheat, so why do it yourselves? The excerpt serves as which type of support for the authors’ argument?
Read the excerpt from "Keynote Address." Crime has increased so that we are told one of every three Americans is afraid to walk in his own neighborhood after dark.
Which excerpt from "Keynote Address" includes an example of an allusion?
Which text structure should be used to show the order of events?
Having a counterclaim in an argumentative essay allows the author of the essay to
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. But Paul Feldman sides with Socrates and Adam Smith—for he knows the answer, at least 87 percent of the time, is yes.Feldman reaches the conclusion that most people are honest without receiving an incentive by
Read the excerpt from Hidden Figures.Katherine listened carefully to everything the engineers said, strained for snippets of conversation, and devoured Aviation Week like a kid reading the funny papers. The real action, she knew, was taking place there in the lectures and editorial meetings, those closed-door sessions where engineers subjected preliminary research reports to the same relentless scrutiny and stress testing that they applied to the aircraft they engineered.
Read the excerpt from Hidden Figures.Men gave the orders and women took notes. Unless an engineer was given a compelling reason to evaluate a woman as a peer, she remained in his blind spot, her usefulness measured against the limited task at hand, any additional talents undiscovered.Read Cameron’s paraphrase of the excerpt.Women completed the tasks assigned to them. Unless an engineer was forced to consider a woman his peer, he never paid attention to her. Men were only concerned with completing the tasks that were right in front of them.
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?
Which of the following excerpts from Fast Food Nation best provides evidence that fast food restaurants are designed for using unskilled labor?
Read the excerpt from Fast Food Nation. English is now the second language of at least one-sixth of the nation’s restaurant workers, and about one-third of that group speaks no English at all. The proportion of fast food workers who cannot speak English is even higher.Which type of evidence does the author use in this excerpt?
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 Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Death by Black Hole.”If you stumbled upon a black hole and found yourself falling feet-first toward its center, then as you got closer, the black hole’s force of gravity would grow astronomically. Curiously, you would not feel this force at all because, like anything in free fall, you are weightless. What you do feel, however, is something far more sinister. While you fall, the black hole’s force of gravity at your two feet, they being closer to the black hole’s center, accelerates them faster than does the weaker force of gravity at your head. Read the excerpt from Billy Collins’s “Man Listening to Disc.”the only true point of view,is full of the hope that he,the hub of the cosmoswith his hair blown sideways,will eventually make it all the way downtown.Which choice best describes the differing views Tyson and Collins present of humanity?
Read the excerpt from Other Words for Home.Today the air is so soupy that it feels like I am living inside someone else’s mouth. I wake up at the sound of the first adhan, the muezzin’s voice echoing through my room. But I do not get up to pray. Instead I roll over and press my face into my pillow and pray for cool air and sleep.Other Words For Home by Jasmine Warga Text Copyright (c) 2019 by Jasmine Warga. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers
Read the excerpt from Hidden Figures.By the measure of the rest of the country, she was an insider’s insider. She enjoyed a front-row seat at a spectacle that the rest of the citizenry learned about in the daily newspaper and on the nightly news. But however close she sat to the room where the meetings took place, she was still an outsider if she couldn't get in the door.
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