Read the excerpt from the song, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”They used to tell me I was building a dream With peace and glory ahead— These lines emphasize the pre-Great Depression belief that
Read the sentence.Having fallen out of the nest, the bird was insensible at first, but then flew off.To decipher the meaning of the word insensible, break the word into
Read the excerpt from Flannery O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”“A body and a spirit,” he repeated. “The body, lady, is like a house: it don’t go anywhere; but the spirit, lady, is like a automobile: always on the move, always . . .”This excerpt contains
By signing Executive Order No. 9066, President Roosevelt assumed that
Read the excerpt from the interview with E.Y. (Yip) Harburg.Everybody picked the song up in ’30 and ’31. Bands were playing it and records were made. When Roosevelt was a candidate for President, the Republicans got pretty worried about it. Some of the network radio people were told to lay low on the song. In some cases, they tried to ban it from the air. But it was too late. The song had already done its damage. From the content of the excerpt, it can be inferred that
Read the sentence.Mark Twain is a pseudonym for the writer’s legal name, Samuel L. Clemens.Based on the prefix, pseudo-, what does the word “pseudonym” mean?
Read the excerpt from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens. The appearance of Gatsby from the shadows suggests that
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
Read the paragraph.Length multiplied by width equals the square footage of a room. If the room is L-shaped, you can break the space down into several different squares or rectangles. You may want to measure in inches to figure out the total square inches. Then divide that by 144 to figure out the total square footage.This passage is most appropriate for
Roosevelt’s Executive Order No. 9066 was based on
Because of his journalistic background, Ernest Hemingway’s diction tends to be
Read the sentence.Bailey is far superior to other dogs of his breed; he learns tricks faster and easier than any other dog I have ever owned. Which word best contributes to the positive tone of this sentence?
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 Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.The road was crowded and there were screens of corn-stalk and straw matting on both sides and matting over the top so that it was like the entrance at a circus or a native village.Keeping in mind Hemingway’s iceberg principle, what feeling is he trying to convey by describing the scene as an “entrance to a circus or a native village”?
Which incident taken from O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” is the best example of irony?
Did you find these answers helpful?