The Impact of Diction and Syntax on Mood — Unit test Answers

Which excerpt from the poem "Girl Powdering Her Neck” by Cathy Song is an example of a simile?

Read the passage from Amy Tan's "Rules of the Game."One day, after we left a shop I said under my breath, "I wish you wouldn’t do that, telling everybody I’m your daughter.” My mother stopped walking. Crowds of people with heavy bags pushed past us on the sidewalk, bumping into first one shoulder, then another."Aiii-ya. So shame be with mother?” She grasped my hand even tighter as she glared at me.I looked down. "It’s not that, it’s just so obvious. It’s just so embarrassing.”"Embarrass you be my daughter?” Her voice was cracking with anger."That’s not what I meant. That’s not what I said.”"What you say?”I knew it was a mistake to say anything more, but I heard my voice speaking, "Why do you have to use me to show off? If you want to show off, then why don’t you learn to play chess?”My mother’s eyes turned into dangerous black slits. She had no words for me, just sharp silence.I felt the wind rushing around my hot ears. I jerked my hand out of my mother’s tight grasp and spun around, knocking into an old woman. Her bag of groceries spilled to the ground."Aii-ya! Stupid girl!” my mother and the woman cried. Oranges and tin cans careened down the sidewalk. As my mother stooped to help the old woman pick up the escaping food, I took off.

Question is locked

Which excerpts from "Two Kinds” are examples of internal conflict? Select two options.“America was where all my mother's hopes lay. She had come here in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her family home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls. But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better.”“In all of my imaginings, I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect. My mother and father would adore me. I would be beyond reproach. I would never feel the need to sulk for anything.”“Before going to bed that night, I looked in the mirror above the bathroom sink and when I saw only my face staring back—and that it would always be this ordinary face—I began to cry. Such a sad, ugly girl! I made high-pitched noises like a crazed animal, trying to scratch out the face in the mirror.”“My mother slapped me. ‘Who ask you be genius?’ she shouted. ‘Only ask you be your best. For you sake. You think I want you to be genius? Hnnh! What for! Who ask you!’“‘So ungrateful,’ I heard her mutter in Chinese, ‘If she had as much talent as she has temper, she would be famous now.’”“So maybe I never really gave myself a fair chance. I did pick up the basics pretty quickly, and I might have become a good pianist at that young age. But I was so determined not to try, not to be anybody different that I learned to play only the most ear-splitting preludes, the most discordant hymns.”

Read the passage from A Room of One’s Own.This may be true or it may be false—who can say?—but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare's sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.

Question is locked

What is a stanza?

Read the excerpt from "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” by Chinua Achebe.In the fall of 1974 I was walking one day from the English Department at the University of Massachusetts to a parking lot. It was a fine autumn morning such as encouraged friendliness to passing strangers. Brisk youngsters were hurrying in all directions, many of them obviously freshmen in their first flush of enthusiasm. An older man going the same way as I turned and remarked to me how very young they came these days. I agreed. Then he asked me if I was a student too. I said no, I was a teacher. What did I teach? African literature. Now that was funny, he said, because he knew a fellow who taught the same thing, or perhaps it was African history, in a certain community college not far from here. It always surprised him, he went on to say, because he never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know. By this time I was walking much faster. "Oh well," I heard him say finally, behind me: "I guess I have to take your course to find out."A few weeks later I received two very touching letters from high school children in Yonkers, New York, who—bless their teacher—had just read Things Fall Apart. One of them was particularly happy to learn about the customs and superstitions of an African tribe.

Which quotation from the poem "Sonnet in Primary Colors” by Rita Dove includes an allusion?

Read the passage from "Two Kinds.”And I started to play. It was so beautiful. I was so caught up in how lovely I looked that at first I didn’t worry how I would sound. So it was a surprise to me when I hit the first wrong note and I realized something didn’t sound quite right. And then I hit another and another followed that. A chill started at the top of my head and began to trickle down. Yet I couldn’t stop playing, as though my hands were bewitched. I kept thinking my fingers would adjust themselves back, like a train switching to the right track. I played this strange jumble through two repeats, the sour notes staying with me all the way to the end.

Read the first three paragraphs of "Two Kinds.”My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant. You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous."Of course you can be a prodigy, too," my mother told me when I was nine. "You can be best anything. What does Auntie Lindo know? Her daughter, she is only best tricky."America was where all my mother's hopes lay. She had come here in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her family home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls. But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better.

Which sentences should be removed or revised to eliminate logical fallacies and improve clarity? Select two options.

Read the line from Robert Hayden’s poem "Monet’s ‘Waterlilies,’” then look at the painting Water Lilies by Claude Monet.O light beheld as through refracting tears.

Read the passage from A Room of One’s Own.To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her. Had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination.

Read the excerpt from chapter 8 of Obasan by Joy Kogawa.Obasan is sitting on a mandarin box at my feet winding the twine from Aunt Emily’s package onto a twine ball she keeps in the pantry.Obasan never discards anything. Besides the twine ball, there’s a ball of string full of knots, a number of balls of wool bits, and even short bits of thread twirled around popsicle sticks that are stacked up like soldiers in a black woven x. The twine ball is larger than a baseball and slips off her lap, rolling a short distance along the floor.

Which scenario is an example of extrinsic motivation?

Where should the writer include a counterclaim in an argumentative essay?