High School Reading: Grades 11-12 Quiz: Analyzing Effective Rhetoric

"We do not ask for charity. We ask for the wages we already earned." The contrast between these sentences mainly serves to:

"Inspectors toured the plant for nearly eleven minutes before declaring it entirely safe." The author most likely:

"Developers call it 'revitalizing' the district; longtime tenants call it moving day." The author implies that "revitalizing":

"Some call the library outdated. Tell that to the forty kids at its tables every afternoon." The second sentence mainly serves to:

"Who among us has not been helped by a stranger? This fund lets us return the favor." The opening question mainly serves to:

"The senator's speech meandered through statistics before it finally wandered toward a point." The words "meandered" and "wandered" suggest the speech was:

"Our app boosts focus: nine of ten staff in our office said they felt sharper." The main weakness in this support is that it:

In "The plan is bold, bold enough to fund a bridge to an empty field," the repeated "bold" suggests the author sees the plan as:

"Schools should start later: a famous quarterback says teens learn best after ten a.m." The main weakness in this support is that it:

The following is adapted from an essay on urban planning.

When city planners tout the transformative potential of "green corridors"—those slender ribbons of parkland threaded through dense neighborhoods—they typically point to rising property values, cooler summer temperatures, and glossy photographs of joggers at dusk. These benefits are real, and I have no interest in disputing the arithmetic. What I would ask, however, is whom the arithmetic serves. In the six cities I have studied over the past decade, the completion of a signature green corridor has been followed, within eight years, by the displacement of between twenty-two and forty-one percent of the low-income households who lived within a quarter mile of it. The trees remained; the residents did not. The planners' brochures, of course, mention none of this, preferring instead to celebrate the corridor as a democratic amenity, a gift to "the community"—as though the community that receives the gift were the same community that lived there when the shovels first broke ground.

I do not propose that we stop planting trees. I propose that we stop pretending the trees are innocent.

The author's primary purpose in the passage is to:

The following is adapted from a magazine column on technology and reading.

Every few months, another study surfaces claiming that readers absorb less from screens than from paper. The findings are typically modest—a few percentage points of comprehension, a slight dip in recall—but the coverage is invariably apocalyptic: literacy is dying, attention is shattered, the book is a relic. I confess a certain fatigue with this genre. Not because the studies are wrong (they are, on the whole, competently conducted) but because the conclusions drawn from them so vastly outrun what the data can support. A seven-point difference in recall on a laboratory task, measured in undergraduates reading unfamiliar expository prose, tells us something interesting about a narrow slice of cognition. It does not tell us that civilization is unraveling.

What interests me is not whether screens are worse than paper—a question that admits of no clean answer—but why we are so eager to believe they are. The panic, I suspect, precedes the evidence. We wanted a villain; the studies obliged.

The author's point of view is best described as that of someone who:

The following is adapted from a talk given to a conference of secondary-school science teachers.

I want to say something today that will make several of you uncomfortable, and I want to say it plainly: the laboratory exercises we assign our students are, for the most part, not science. They are recipes. A student who follows the printed procedure, records the expected measurements, and computes the expected result has performed an act of obedience, not of inquiry. She has learned that authority can be trusted, which is a lesson worth learning in some contexts but is precisely the opposite of the lesson science exists to teach. Real science begins when the expected result fails to appear and the investigator must decide whether the apparatus is broken, the theory is wrong, or she herself has erred. Our labs, as currently designed, engineer this moment out of existence. We give students problems whose answers we already know, procedures we have already validated, and equipment we have already calibrated. Then we express surprise when they graduate believing that science is a body of settled facts rather than a method for unsettling them.

The speaker's primary purpose is to:

The following is adapted from an introduction to a scholarly edition of a nineteenth-century travel narrative.

When Amelia Cartwright published her Impressions of the Levant in 1873, she was praised for what her contemporaries called her "sympathetic eye"—her willingness to describe the customs of Damascus and Aleppo without the reflexive contempt then customary in English travel writing. Modern readers, arriving at Cartwright with different expectations, are often disappointed to discover that her sympathy has sharp limits: she admires much, but she assumes throughout that what she admires is picturesque rather than serious, decorative rather than intellectually alive. It would be anachronistic to condemn her for failing to hold views that were, in her lifetime, held by almost no one in her position. It would be equally misguided, however, to praise her as though her sympathy were more complete than it was. My aim in this edition is neither to prosecute nor to defend Cartwright but to place her—precisely—in the tradition she inhabited and the one she partially, imperfectly, began to unsettle.

The editor's purpose in this introduction is best described as an effort to:

The following is adapted from an essay on scientific popularization.

The popularizer of science labors under a constraint that the working scientist does not: he must be interesting. This constraint sounds trivial and is, in fact, ruinous. To be interesting to a general audience, one must simplify; to simplify responsibly, one must know which simplifications preserve the essential structure of the underlying idea and which distort it beyond recognition. This knowledge is rare, and the incentive structure of publishing rewards those who do not bother to acquire it. A vivid metaphor that misleads will sell more books than a careful qualification that clarifies; and so, over time, the metaphors accumulate and the qualifications are stripped away.

I do not mean to suggest that popularization is worthless. Some of it—a small fraction—is superb, and even the mediocre performs the modest service of keeping science visible in a culture that would otherwise forget it exists. I mean only to say that the reader who mistakes popularization for the thing itself has made an error whose consequences are difficult to reverse. The map is not the territory. It is, in this case, not even a very accurate map.

The author's view of popular science writing can best be described as:

The following is adapted from a foreword to a collection of essays on architecture.

The essays gathered here span thirty years of my thinking about buildings, and I want to warn the reader, at the outset, of an inconsistency he will certainly notice. The earlier pieces—those from the 1990s especially—argue with confidence that a building's meaning resides in the intentions of its architect: the forms chosen, the materials specified, the spatial hierarchies imposed. The later essays no longer believe this. They contend, instead, that a building's meaning is negotiated over decades by the people who use it, alter it, ignore it, and remember it, and that the architect's intentions are only the first of many voices in a long conversation.

I could have revised the earlier essays to bring them into agreement with the later ones. I chose not to. A collection that pretended to a coherence its author does not possess would be a small dishonesty, and I have grown suspicious of small dishonesties. Let the contradiction stand. Let the reader watch a mind change—slowly, imperfectly, and, I hope, for reasons that the essays themselves make visible.

The author's purpose in the foreword is chiefly to:

The following is adapted from an essay on the philosophy of memory.

We speak of memory as though it were a warehouse—a place where the past is stored, more or less intact, awaiting retrieval. This metaphor is so deeply lodged in ordinary speech that we scarcely notice it: we "file" a fact away, we "retrieve" it later, we complain that our storage has grown unreliable with age. The metaphor is, however, almost certainly wrong. What the last four decades of experimental work suggest is that remembering is not a matter of finding but of making; each act of recall reconstructs the memory from fragmentary traces, and the reconstruction is inflected by everything the rememberer has become in the interval. To remember is to invent, cautiously, using materials that constrain but do not determine the result.

This is not a counsel of despair. It is a plea for humility—both for those who trust their memories too readily and for those who, learning of memory's frailty, abandon it altogether. The past is neither a photograph nor a fiction. It is somewhere, uncomfortably, in between.

The author writes primarily in order to:

The following is adapted from a review of a biography of the composer Hector Berlioz.

Martina Vogel's new life of Berlioz is exhaustively researched, elegantly written, and, in a way I find difficult to forgive, entirely uninterested in the music. Vogel gives us the duels, the debts, the doomed infatuations, the political intrigues at the Conservatoire—all rendered with a novelist's eye for texture and a historian's respect for source material. What she does not give us is any sustained account of why the Symphonie fantastique sounds the way it does, or what Berlioz was attempting when he asked an orchestra to imitate the guillotine's fall. One closes the book knowing a great deal about the man and remarkably little about the composer. This is not a failure of research; it is a failure of nerve. Vogel, I suspect, feared that technical discussion would alienate the general reader, and so she wrote around the music rather than into it. The result is a biography of Berlioz's life that could, with minor adjustments, be a biography of any nineteenth-century Parisian bohemian.

The reviewer's central purpose is to:

The following is adapted from a public address delivered in 1889 by a founder of a workers' mutual-aid society.

Fellow citizens—there are those among our employers, and among the newspapers that speak for them, who have taken to calling our society "radical." The word is meant to alarm, and I concede that it has done its work upon some of our neighbors. I ask you tonight to consider what is radical about a society whose members contribute two dollars a month so that the widow of a fallen brother may bury him with dignity, and so that his children may not be turned into the street. If this is radicalism, then radicalism is only another name for the ordinary decency our grandmothers practiced without ceremony and without title. What our critics find intolerable is not our doctrine—we have none to speak of—but our arithmetic. Two dollars from each of a thousand men is a sum that no single man among us could raise, and that sum, pooled, is what makes the employer's threat of destitution lose its power over us. It is not our ideas he fears. It is our subtraction from his leverage.

The speaker's primary rhetorical strategy is to:

The following is adapted from a letter written in 1847 by a farmer to a regional agricultural journal.

Mr. Editor—I have read with considerable interest the recent series of articles urging farmers in this county to adopt the new mechanical reapers now offered by the manufactories of the East. The gentlemen who write these articles speak with great confidence of efficiency, of yield, of the inevitability of progress. They speak with somewhat less confidence—indeed, with a curious silence—about the cost of these machines, the cost of their repair when they fail (as fail they must, being made of iron and subject to the same laws as all iron things), and the cost to a man of borrowing against his land to purchase what he cannot afford, in the hope that a good harvest will spare him from ruin. I do not oppose the reaper. I oppose the sermon that surrounds it. Let the machine be sold as a tool, honestly priced and honestly described, and let each farmer weigh it against his own particular soil, his own particular debts, and his own particular judgment. That is the only progress worth having.

The farmer's purpose in writing the letter is chiefly to:

The following is adapted from an op-ed on public monuments.

Those who argue that historical monuments should never be removed, on the grounds that doing so erases history, misunderstand both monuments and history. A monument is not a history book. It is an argument in bronze—a claim that this person, and not some other, deserves to be elevated above the sidewalk and honored by passing citizens. To remove a monument is to withdraw that honor; it is not to expunge the honoree from the historical record, where he remains, footnoted and indexed and available to any curious reader.

This distinction, I would have thought, was obvious. Yet it is repeatedly obscured, sometimes by people who ought to know better, in ways that suggest the confusion is not entirely accidental. To defend a monument by conflating it with history is to demand that the passerby accept the argument the monument makes, on pain of being called a book-burner. It is a rhetorical trick, and not a particularly subtle one.

The author's tone is best characterized as: