Reading Standards for Informational Text: Rhetoric, Style, and Persuasion (CCSS.RI.11-12.6)

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Common Core High School ELA › Reading Standards for Informational Text: Rhetoric, Style, and Persuasion (CCSS.RI.11-12.6)

Questions 1 - 10
1

A bee's path looks like dithering until you attend to the air itself. What seems erratic is a choreography with invisible partners: eddies of scent, threads of polarized light, a sun that appears to move and yet can be held in the brain like a compass rose. In the dark interior of the hive, a returning forager does not speak the flower but the geometry—angle to the sun, duration of the waggle, amplitude of the turn—so that distance becomes rhythm and direction becomes dance. Precision is not a cold instrument here; it is the warmth of agreement. To say this clearly requires the temper of a careful sentence: modifiers that do not overreach, verbs that carry weight without swagger, metaphors that illuminate without pretending to be the thing itself. We call it objectivity, as if the world were an object and we were not in it. But the better name may be fidelity: to the pattern, to the limit of what has been measured, to the astonishment that remains. The hive persuades us—gently—that intelligence can be distributed without being diluted; that order can arise not from command but from enough good information moving quickly enough. If the prose leans, occasionally, toward lyric, it does so not to ornament the facts but to keep them from drying into jargon. A clean line can carry wonder. In that, the bee and the sentence are kin: both find their way by attending to signals we might otherwise miss.

How do the author's stylistic and content choices work together to shape the text's power and persuasiveness?

By arguing that objectivity and lyricism can coexist; periodic sentences, exact modifiers, and restrained metaphors render complex behavior legible while inviting awe, which deepens credibility and engagement.

By simply reporting facts about bee communication; figurative language appears as a flourish that adds beauty but does not alter readers' understanding or trust.

By claiming that poetry is superior to science; the ornate style aims to replace empirical explanation with impressionistic description.

By pressing for immediate funding through urgent, alarming diction; the style relies on fear to motivate readers to support laboratory research.

Explanation

The passage blends precise description (angles, duration) with controlled lyricism to make complexity accessible and arresting. This strategic style enhances both trust and aesthetic appeal, supporting the author's claim about fidelity and distributed intelligence.

2

Open your feed and it opens you: not to the world, but to the version of the world your past clicks would like to see again. The algorithm is generous in the way a mirror is generous. It offers you back to yourself, brightened. I am not here to scold the mirror. I am here to argue for the usefulness of smudges—of friction inserted on purpose into what feels like frictionless attention. When everything is smooth, your convictions glide, never catching on a fact rough enough to revise them. Notice the prose of your day: the thumb-flick, the blink, the small applause of a heart icon. Now imagine interrupting that sentence. A required pause after every tenth post; a deliberate switch to a source you would not choose; a setting that asks you whether you want to keep becoming the person your history predicts. This is not technophobia. It is a design request for humility. Engineers already know how to optimize for time spent; they can also optimize for time reconsidered. We talk about attention as a resource. It is also a habit, and habits are architectural. If we build rooms with doors, we will walk through them. If we build corridors, we will not notice we are walking at all.

How do the author's stylistic choices most effectively serve the purpose of urging readers to embrace "friction" in digital attention?

By condemning technology outright and using alarmist diction, the author aims to frighten readers into abandoning social media entirely.

By using second-person address, extended metaphor (mirror, rooms and doors), and imperative hypotheticals, the author turns abstract design ethics into felt experience, guiding readers to see friction as constructive rather than punitive.

By relying mainly on statistics about screen time, the author keeps the tone objective and avoids making value judgments about design choices.

By celebrating the ease of algorithmic curation, the author suggests that smoothness leads to better information and should be maintained.

Explanation

Choice B recognizes how the crafted second-person voice and metaphors function to reframe friction as a humane design feature, directly aligning style with the persuasive goal. The other options misstate the stance, claim nonexistent data dependence, or invert the argument.

3

For decades, a coastal lab kept a quiet ledger: dates, tides, dissolved oxygen, the tilt and swerve of eelgrass blades under winter light. The entries look modest, almost domestic—numbers in the margins of a much larger sea. Yet stitched together, they shape a sentence the coast has been trying to say. The story is not melodrama; it is tempo. Eelgrass beds inhale and exhale oxygen with the seasons, but warming waters shorten the inhale. Shellfish spawn to a calendar the ocean no longer keeps. We know this not because one season felt strange but because ninety-five of them did, recorded on clipboards worn smooth by hands. Precision, here, is not austerity. It is tenderness—an insistence on naming the world carefully enough that it can answer. I write in favor of funding long-term monitoring not as an indulgence in the past, but as the most reliable repair we can make to the future. Models are hungry for the kind of time that only patience feeds. Without those ledgers, a policy becomes guesswork dressed as confidence. With them, a restoration plan acquires rhythm: plant when oxygen peaks; harvest when heat relents; budget for the lull, not the headline. A graph may be plain, but it is also a promise: if we keep listening, the coast will keep speaking, and our interventions will become less heroic and more precise.

Which analysis best captures how the author's style advances the purpose of advocating long-term ecological monitoring?

By pairing meticulous imagery of patient data-keeping with metaphors of rhythm and listening, the author reframes measurement as care, turning the aesthetic of precision into an ethical and policy imperative.

By listing scientific terms and avoiding figurative language, the author maintains a detached tone that ensures readers focus solely on the data and not on emotional appeals.

By emphasizing that one strange season justifies immediate action, the author uses urgency to argue that long-term records are less important than rapid response.

By focusing on graphs as decorative elements that make reports look professional, the author suggests style is useful mainly for presentation rather than for shaping policy decisions.

Explanation

Choice A shows how figurative language (rhythm, listening) and concrete detail (clipboards, oxygen cycles) elevate precision into a persuasive value, directly serving the purpose. The distractors mischaracterize the tone, misunderstand the argument about time series, or treat style as superficial decoration.

4

The museum used to be an architecture of pause. Now its doorway glows in your hand. In the glass-and-pixel version, we can tour a gallery while commuting, scroll through centuries between stoplights, harvest masterpieces in a minute. Access, yes—but at what cadence? If attention is a habitat, the algorithm is a weather system, and we have built perpetual wind. My aim is not to scold the screen, but to propose a curatorial principle for the digital wing: design for slowness. Make friction an ethic, not a glitch. Let images resist the swipe with a breath of white space; let captions invite rereading instead of rewarding skimming; let silence—no autoplay, no nudge—sound like respect. This is not nostalgia for velvet ropes and hushed stairs. It is an argument that the value of cultural memory is measured less by reach than by residence time. The content of the collection does not change; our way of meeting it does. So write interfaces like galleries, not feeds. Pair a painting with its makers' failed drafts; juxtapose the restoration map with the finished work; render the zoom so that texture becomes a topography the eye must walk. If our attention is a commons, we should steward it with the same care we extend to canvases and climate control. The museum's work online is not to accelerate seeing, but to deepen it.

Which choice best analyzes the author's purpose and how their stylistic and content decisions achieve it?

The author argues that digital museums should curate for slowness, using extended metaphor (attention as habitat), measured cadence, and purposeful rhetorical questions to reorient value from clicks to care.

The author merely laments technology's corruption of art viewing, relying on decorative nostalgia that does little to shape a concrete proposal.

The author champions viral reach as the primary museum goal and adopts a brisk, promotional tone to celebrate frictionless design.

The author neutrally catalogs digitization tools and avoids rhetorical devices to maintain an objective, technical overview.

Explanation

The author's purpose is prescriptive: to advocate for designing slowness into digital curation. The piece's metaphors, rhetorical questions, and crafted pacing function to reframe success metrics and persuade readers to value depth over speed.

5

Museums like to call themselves neutral, as if the air between frame and eye were a kind of Switzerland. But neutrality is not the absence of choice; it is a choice about which choices to hide. A caption that says untitled is still a sentence about power. Consider what the wall text calls a discovery and what it calls a gift; who gets a biography and who gets a date; which room you enter through light and which through a corridor that tightens like a throat. A gallery is an argument in architecture: sightlines that confer importance, sightlines that deny it. To say this is not to accuse curators of conspiracy; it is to recognize that arrangement is a language with grammar and consequences. The claim to objectivity works like frosted glass—softening edges, obscuring fingerprints. Ask, then, what the exhibition asks you not to ask. Why does the map begin here? Why does the story end before the aftermath begins? The critic's task is not to scold but to teach seeing: to place the placard in a paragraph, to translate lighting into emphasis, to notice which absences are treated as natural light. Beauty survives this scrutiny; often, it requires it. For when we understand that selection is a verb, the museum becomes more not less alive: a site where values are arranged, contested, made visible. The frame remains, but so does the world that presses against it.

What is the author's point of view, and how do specific stylistic choices shape the text's critical force?

The author believes museums are deceptive; the accusatory tone and negative diction aim to expose deliberate wrongdoing.

The author argues that claims of neutrality are themselves curatorial choices; rhetorical questions, aphoristic sentences, and spatial metaphors reveal how arrangement functions as argument and prompt readers to re-see what seems natural.

The author's goal is to entertain with anecdotes about galleries; the descriptive style adds color without altering readers' assumptions.

The author neutrally reports how museums are organized; the objective style avoids bias by focusing on facts rather than interpretation.

Explanation

The passage critiques neutrality as a constructed stance and uses devices—rhetorical questions, aphorisms ("selection is a verb"), and spatial metaphor—to expose curatorial power and recalibrate the reader's perception.

6

Connectivity looks like convenience until a school bus parks outside a fast-food restaurant for Wi‑Fi. Then it looks like policy. We have built our economy as if connection were optional, and then wondered at the cost of being left out. The fix is not a mystery; it is a map. Where private providers see a cul-de-sac of profit, municipalities can see a street: rights-of-way, poles, dark fiber, crews that already know how to keep a city lit and flowing. Treat broadband as we treat water and roads: price it transparently, maintain it predictably, and extend it where markets won't. The counterargument is familiar—government slow, innovation fast—and it deserves its hearing. So hear it, and then note the record: communities that built their own networks report lower prices, higher speeds, more competition. Note, too, the secondary effects that budgets rarely capture: a clinic that can finally host telehealth; a storefront that can finally process orders; a student who can finally upload the future she is asked to dream. Policy persuades when it remembers people. Structure persuades when it lets evidence arrive before ideology, and examples arrive before abstractions. Parallel imperatives—build local, buy open, publish prices—do more than chant; they give the reader steps. Infrastructure is not a gadget. It is a promise we renew in maintenance cycles. If we mean equity, we must pave it in fiber. If we mean innovation, we must lower the cost of trying. The network we fund is the economy we permit.

Which analysis best explains the author's purpose and how specific stylistic choices strengthen the argument?

The author neutrally informs readers about internet speeds; the straightforward style avoids rhetoric to maintain objectivity.

The author aims to entertain with clever slogans; the repeated phrases are decorative and do not contribute to the proposal's credibility.

The author's purpose is to summarize municipal history; the chronological style highlights the past to argue for preserving tradition.

The author advocates treating broadband as a public utility; a concession–refutation structure, concrete vignettes, and parallel imperatives translate policy into lived stakes, intensifying the case for municipal action.

Explanation

The passage advances a utility frame through strategic structure (acknowledging and countering objections), vivid scenarios, and parallelism ("build local, buy open, publish prices") that convert abstractions into actionable urgency.

7

Members of the council, we are not choosing between seawalls and surrender; we are choosing the story by which our grandchildren will read this coastline. The water is coming. That sentence is not alarm; it is a tide table. What remains within our authorship is how we move—with panic, or with a plan that honors place by letting it breathe. I argue for managed retreat as a civic act of care, not defeat: phased buyouts that keep neighborhoods intact as communities, not as scattered addresses; easements that turn flood zones into wetlands that protect what lies behind them; investments that relocate livelihoods before storms do. Listen to the cadence of possibility: we can measure twice and move once; we can leave with dignity and arrive with dignity; we can build less wall and more future. The rhetoric matters because the loss is intimate. Anaphora steadies the will. A periodic sentence gathers the facts and lands in resolve. A line of chiasmus—We do not live at the edge of the ocean; the ocean lives at the edge of us—reverses the gaze so that adaptation reads as stewardship, not retreat. Numbers will anchor us—elevations, recurrence intervals—but language will carry us through the hard vote. Choose the policy that saves more than property: choose the policy that saves the capacity to keep choosing.

Which answer best evaluates the author's point of view and the stylistic means that make it persuasive?

The author neutrally presents sea-level projections, relying on an objective tone and technical data to inform without swaying.

The author urges managed retreat framed as stewardship and intergenerational duty, using direct address, anaphora, periodic sentences, and chiasmus to convert perceived loss into collective purpose.

The author celebrates seawalls as engineering triumphs, adopting a plain style to emphasize practicality over values.

The author suggests homeowners alone should decide, using emotive language that decorates rather than directs policy.

Explanation

The author's stance favors managed retreat as ethical stewardship. The persuasive power comes from purposeful rhetoric—direct address, patterned repetition, periodic build, and chiasmus—that reframes retreat as agency and care, not capitulation.

8

City heat is not an accident but a policy, legible at noon in the shape of a shadow. Where budgets have favored asphalt over canopy, thermometers read the choice. The data are now familiar: neighborhoods with sparse tree cover can be several degrees hotter than leafier blocks a mile away. Yet we continue to file shade under amenity—as if relief were a luxury—while treating heat as weather, as if it were neutral. My point is simpler and more radical: shade is infrastructure. It deserves the same forward planning, maintenance schedules, and equity standards we require of bridges and pipes. Consider the cadence of this claim: cooling is not a perk; cooling is a public good. When we acknowledge that, the map changes. Funds move. Timelines shift. The metrics of success stop at skin temperature and start at fairness. So let me braid the registers. Ethos: arborists and clinicians agree on the human consequences of radiant heat. Logos: modest increases in canopy can measurably reduce peak temperatures and energy demand. Pathos: a bus stop without shade in August is a small cruelty repeated thousands of times. This is not a call for postcards of green, but for maintenance plans, species diversity, and sidewalk widths that welcome roots instead of severing them. Policy built the heat; policy can reverse it. We need ordinances that treat the casting of shade as a civic obligation, not an afterthought that withers at the first budget cut.

Which option best captures the author's point of view and explains how their stylistic and content choices enhance the argument's power?

The author primarily aims to inform readers about which tree species thrive in cities, using descriptive language to make technical facts more appealing.

The author seeks to expose municipal mismanagement by relying on an accusatory tone and anecdotal evidence to assign blame for heat disparities.

The author reframes "shade" as infrastructure to argue for policy and budget reallocation, using anaphora, strategic statistics, and antithesis to bind climate urgency to equity and thereby intensify persuasiveness.

The author celebrates community gardening and employs ornate metaphors mainly to beautify an otherwise straightforward claim about urban aesthetics.

Explanation

The author's purpose is to recast shade as civic infrastructure to drive policy change. Stylistically, the piece uses anaphora (e.g., "cooling is not…"), antithesis (amenity vs. public good), and braided ethos/logos/pathos with targeted data to convert information into persuasive force.

9

The promise of the fifteen-minute city is not romance; it is arithmetic. If essential errands fit within a quarter-hour walk, the civic day grows longer without adding a single minute to the clock. I write as a planner who has learned to distrust spectacle and to favor the quiet revolutions of zoning. Not because cars are bad, but because distances are. A parent who walks to a clinic does not ask a neighbor to leave work early. An elder who buys food without a bus transfer is not dependent on weather. We legislate for those outcomes by legalizing corner stores where we have banned them, by allowing homes above shops we once separated, by turning the leftover width of a road into the front porch of a city. Concession matters: there will be deliveries; there will be noise. Call that life. Good policy does not pretend to silence it; it arranges it. So the ordinance I propose reads like modest carpentry—setbacks shaved, minimums retired, trees required, curb radii taught to take a smaller bite. Notice the style: it is not a drumroll. It is a checklist. But checklists can be radical when they change who has time. In the end, this is a budget of footsteps. We balance it by bringing errands home.

Which option best evaluates how the author's style and content work together to persuade readers to support the proposed zoning changes?

The author relies primarily on emotional anecdotes about traffic, allowing sentiment to overshadow the lack of specific policy mechanisms.

The author's use of elevated, celebratory tone and poetic imagery seeks to inspire, showing that beautified language is sufficient to secure policy change even without trade-offs.

The author dismisses the complexities of urban delivery systems, maintaining that quiet streets are achievable only by banning vehicles outright.

By coupling concrete, modest policy levers (setbacks, mixed-use allowances) with measured, carpentry-like metaphors and concessive structure, the author reframes reform as practical and humane, making the proposal feel both technically sound and socially considerate.

Explanation

Choice D shows how the restrained checklist tone, concessions, and precise content make the argument credible and persuasive. The distractors mischaracterize the tone, ignore trade-offs, or claim sentiment replaces mechanism.

10

Cities inherit their crises in concrete. We notice the heat only when the asphalt rises to meet our breath, the stormwater only when the curb becomes a temporary river, the loneliness only when a block offers no shade and no reason to linger. In such a ledger, a tree is not a luxury; it is a line item. Consider it as hydrant, as crosswalk, as streetlight—an instrument that cools, slows, connects. Not as ornament but as infrastructure. We could price the canopy in avoided hospital visits, in fewer missed shifts, in electricity that never needed to be bought. We could, but the argument is stronger when we refuse to split the difference between beauty and utility. Because a city that asks you to hurry is a city that forgets you have a body; a city that invites you to pause is a city that remembers you have a life. Planting is policy, yes, but it is also a promise written in shade. You might say, Where is the proof? Walk in July. Step from a treeless block into a corridor of leaves; feel the temperature drop like a hand taken off your shoulder. The leaf is a minor technology. The grove is a public covenant. We do not inherit parks; we decide them. We do not discover equity; we grow it. If we can read a budget, we can read a canopy map. If we can count potholes, we can count rings. We already know what to do; the question is whether we will count trees as if we counted on them.

Which statement best captures the author's purpose and explains how the style advances it?

To inform readers about tree biology; the descriptive style is decorative but does not affect the argument.

To entertain with poetic musings about summer; the imagery is included primarily to create a pleasant mood.

To reframe urban trees as civic infrastructure, using anaphora, second-person address, and fiscal metaphors to fuse ethical appeal with practical urgency.

To argue for more parks by tracing their historical development; the style relies on chronological narration to build authority.

Explanation

The author's purpose is to redefine trees as infrastructure. Devices like anaphora ("We do not…"), direct address ("You might say"), and budget/canopy metaphors align beauty with utility, intensifying the persuasive claim that planting is policy and promise.

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