Research Workshop: Writing and Presenting the Argumentative Essay, Part 2 — Unit test Answers

Read this excerpt from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.There was a lot of stuff that made me panicky, like suspension bridges, germs, airplanes, fireworks… A lot of the time I’d get that feeling like I was in the middle of a huge black ocean, or in deep space, but not in the fascinating way.How does the narration affect Oskar’s credibility in this excerpt?

Read the excerpt from Fast Food Nation. At Burger King restaurants, frozen hamburger patties are placed on a conveyer belt and emerge from a broiler ninety seconds later fully cooked. The ovens at Pizza Hut and at Domino’s also use conveyer belts to ensure standardized cooking times. The ovens at McDonald’s look like commercial laundry presses, with big steel hoods that swing down and grill hamburgers on both sides at once. The burgers, chicken, french fries, and buns are all frozen when they arrive at a McDonald’s. The evidence presented here supports the author’s claim that fast food restaurants are like factories because the excerpt

Read this outline for an argumentative speech.1. Introduction: Consuming organic food. A. It is better for your health to consume organic fruits and vegetables instead of conventionally grown produce.2. Organic fruits and vegetables are free of chemicals. A. Farmers who raise organic produce do not use synthetic pesticides. B. Some say the pesticide residue on conventional produce is minimal, but even minimal amounts of pesticide can have a harmful effect over time. C. Organic produce is safer due to the lack of chemicals.3. Organic fruits and vegetables are more nutritious. A. Organic produce is packed with vitamins and minerals. B. Conventionally grown foods are not lacking in nutrition, but the concentration of vitamins and minerals is higher in organic foods. C. Organic produce is healthier due to the high concentration of vitamins and minerals.4. Organic fruits and vegetables are less likely to carry diseases. A. Organic farming is cleaner than conventional farming. B. Organic farming does not include chemicals that kill organisms, however incidences of harmful bacteria are lower in organic produce. C. Organic produce is safer due to the low incidence of harmful bacteria. 5. Organic fruits and vegetables are better for your health for three reasons. A. Organic fruits and vegetables are grown without the use of synthetic chemicals, are more nutritious, and are less likely to spread diseases. B. The lack of chemicals, the high concentration of vitamins and minerals, and the lower incidence of disease are all better for your health. The underlined sentence in the outline is

Read the sentence.Head toward the large yellow sign to find the lemon grove.Which word is a preposition?

Which statement best describes a good presentation slide?

Read the excerpt from Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Death by Black Hole.”Black holes are regions of space where the gravity is so high that the fabric of space and time has curved back on itself, taking the exit doors with it. Another way to look at the dilemma: the speed required to escape a black hole is greater than the speed of light itself. . . . light travels at exactly 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum and is the fastest stuff in the universe. If light cannot escape, then neither can you, which is why, of course, we call these things black holes.Which of the following features would best enhance the reader’s understanding of this excerpt?

the active voicea prepositionthe passive voicea split infinitive

Which excerpt from “Man Listening to Disc” best supports the idea that when the speaker listens to music he is the center of his own world?

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.Compared with Feldman’s argument, the tale of “The Ring of Gyges” is best described as a

Read the following excerpt from Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics.The data also show that smaller offices are more honest than big ones. An office with a few dozen employees generally outpays by 3 to 5 percent an office with a few hundred employees. This may seem counterintuitive. In a bigger office, a bigger crowd is bound to convene around the bagel table, providing more witnesses to make sure you drop your money in the box. But in the big-office/small-office comparison, bagel crime seems to mirror street crime. There is far less street crime per capita in rural areas than in cities, in large part because a rural criminal is more likely to be known (and therefore caught). Also, a smaller community tends to exert greater social incentives against crime, the main one being shame.Which idea from this paragraph supports the claim that “smaller offices are more honest than big ones”?

Read the excerpt from Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics.In the beginning, Feldman left behind an open basket for the cash, but too often the money vanished. Then he tried a coffee can with a money slot in its plastic lid, which also proved too tempting. In the end, he resorted to making small plywood boxes with a slot cut into the top. The wooden box has worked well. Each year he drops off about seven thousand boxes and loses, on average, just one to theft. This is an intriguing statistic: the same people who routinely steal more than 10 percent of his bagels almost never stoop to stealing his money box—a tribute to the nuanced social calculus of theft. From Feldman’s perspective, an office worker who eats a bagel without paying is committing a crime; the office worker probably doesn’t think so. This distinction probably has less to do with the admittedly small amount of money involved (Feldman’s bagels cost one dollar each, cream cheese included) than with the context of the “crime.” The same office worker who fails to pay for his bagel might also help himself to a long slurp of soda while filling a glass in a self-serve restaurant, but he is very unlikely to leave the restaurant without paying.Which of the following best summarizes the main idea of this paragraph?

Read the sentence.Jameson dropped and broke the cookie jar while his parents were on vacation.What is the best explanation for why the writer would revise this sentence to use passive voice?

Read the excerpt from “Man Listening to Disc.”to Tommy Potter for taking the timeto join us on this breezy afternoonwith his most unwieldy bassand to the esteemed Arthur Taylorwho is somehow managing to navigatethis crowd with his cumbersome drums.And I bow deeply to Thelonious Monkfor figuring out a wayto motorize—or whatever—his huge pianoso he could be with us today.Which of the following additional features would best enhance the reader’s understanding of this excerpt?

Read the following excerpt from Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics.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 best describes the type of reasoning the excerpt uses?

Which statement best explains how Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Death by Black Hole” and Billy Collins’s “Man Listening to Disc” present differing views about the universe?

Which sentence requires no revision?

Select 4 options.Which words are prepositions?atnoundernearfromsee

Which excerpt from Billy Collins’s “Man Listening to Disc” best reflects the euphoric effect the narrator experiences from listening to music on his headphones?

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?

Read the following excerpt from Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics.When he started his business, he expected a 95 percent payment rate, based on the experience at his own office. But just as crime tends to be low on a street where a police car is parked, the 95 percent rate was artificially high: Feldman’s presence had deterred theft. Not only that, but those bagel eaters knew the provider and had feelings (presumably good ones) about him. A broad swath of psychological and economic research has shown that people will pay different amounts for the same item depending on who is providing it. . . .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.” The excerpt helps the authors arrive at their conclusion by