High School Reading: Grades 11-12 Quiz: Evaluating Seminal Us Texts

A pamphlet protests: "They taxed our tea, they taxed our paper, and now they would tax our very silence." The repeated structure mainly

A president declares: "We did not choose this hour, but this hour has chosen us." The reversed phrasing mainly serves to

A justice writes: "The ordinance bans only signs criticizing officials; it targets viewpoint, not clutter." Which fact would most weaken this?

A president says: "Liberty is not a fortress we inherit but a field each generation must plow." The metaphor suggests that liberty

A dissent says: "The Court does not overrule our precedent today; it leaves it standing with nothing left inside." The dissenter implies the majority

A delegate writes: "A government strong enough to defend us is strong enough to oppress us; let its powers be few and named." He implies that

A writer argues: "The new tariff must be wise, for every leading merchant in the city supports it." The main weakness of this support is that

A speech asks: "Shall we, who fought for our own freedom, now deny it to our neighbors?" This rhetorical question mainly serves to

An essayist urging union writes: "Ask yourselves, citizens: would a divided nation be safer, or merely smaller?" The question mainly serves to

An essayist writes: "A free press that prints only what pleases the magistrate is a free press in name alone." The writer implies that

A speaker argues: "No man may judge his own cause; so no branch may alone decide the limits of its power." The claim rests mainly on

A critic argues: "The law is unjust, for it was passed in haste, at night, while half the members were absent." Which best evaluates this support?

The following is adapted from an original essay written in the style of The Federalist Papers, arguing for a proposed constitutional provision.

To the People of this Commonwealth:

Among the objections urged against the proposed judiciary, none has been pressed with greater vehemence than that which supposes the power of the courts to expound the laws will, in time, engulf the legislative authority itself. The apprehension, though not without a superficial plausibility, dissolves upon closer inspection. For the judiciary, having neither the sword of the executive nor the purse of the legislature, must depend for the efficacy of its judgments upon the very branches it is accused of threatening to subdue. What weapon has a judge, save reasoned argument set upon parchment? And what force has parchment, when unaccompanied by the concurrence of those who command the militia and the treasury?

It is objected, further, that judges holding office during good behavior will grow imperious, being beyond the reach of popular disapprobation. But let it be observed that the very insulation complained of is the guarantor of that impartiality without which the rights of the minority must ever be at the mercy of transient majorities. A judge who trembles before the next election is no judge at all, but a mere agent of the prevailing faction. Independence is not a privilege granted to the bench for its own aggrandizement; it is a bulwark erected for the protection of the humblest citizen against the encroachments of power, however popularly clothed.

Some have proposed, as a remedy, that judicial decisions be subject to reversal by a supermajority of the legislature. Such an expedient, however moderate in appearance, would in effect restore to the political branches the very authority the Constitution seeks to withhold. For a right that may be extinguished by seventy or eighty voices in an assembly is not a right, but a sufferance; and a Constitution that permits such reversal has ceased, in any meaningful sense, to be fundamental law.

— PUBLIUS

The author's argument that the judiciary poses no threat to the legislature depends most heavily on which unstated assumption?

The following is an excerpt from an original inaugural address, written in the style of a nineteenth-century American president assuming office during a period of sectional tension.

Fellow Countrymen:

I stand before you not as the champion of a section, nor as the instrument of a party, but as the servant of a Union whose preservation is the trust bequeathed to us by those who bled at Saratoga and Yorktown. That trust I shall neither betray by timidity nor by rashness. It has been said, in quarters both North and South, that the differences among us have grown too broad for any bridge of common law to span. I answer that no chasm is so wide as the imagination of those who despair of crossing it, and none so narrow as to be crossed without patience, forbearance, and the willingness of each traveler to bear a portion of the labor.

The Constitution is not a rope of sand, to be scattered by the first contrary wind of local grievance. Neither is it a chain of iron, to bind the several States in a posture of humiliation. It is, rather, a covenant — solemn, deliberate, and mutual — whose terms admit of interpretation but not of unilateral abrogation. When one party to a covenant declares itself absolved by its own decree, the covenant is not thereby dissolved; it is only the declarant who has forsaken it.

Let no man mistake conciliation for concession of principle. I shall employ every lawful means to compose our disagreements, but the laws themselves I have sworn to execute, and that oath admits of no geographical exception. If the ordinary business of government be resisted by force, then the force which the Constitution places in my hands shall be employed — reluctantly, but unhesitatingly — for its restoration. In this I claim no discretion of my own; I do but perform the duty which the office, and not the man, requires.

The speaker's metaphor of the Constitution as a covenant — rather than a rope of sand or chain of iron — most directly advances which argument regarding secession?

The following is an excerpt from an original inaugural address, written in the style of a nineteenth-century American president assuming office during a period of sectional tension.

Fellow Countrymen:

I stand before you not as the champion of a section, nor as the instrument of a party, but as the servant of a Union whose preservation is the trust bequeathed to us by those who bled at Saratoga and Yorktown. That trust I shall neither betray by timidity nor by rashness. It has been said, in quarters both North and South, that the differences among us have grown too broad for any bridge of common law to span. I answer that no chasm is so wide as the imagination of those who despair of crossing it, and none so narrow as to be crossed without patience, forbearance, and the willingness of each traveler to bear a portion of the labor.

The Constitution is not a rope of sand, to be scattered by the first contrary wind of local grievance. Neither is it a chain of iron, to bind the several States in a posture of humiliation. It is, rather, a covenant — solemn, deliberate, and mutual — whose terms admit of interpretation but not of unilateral abrogation. When one party to a covenant declares itself absolved by its own decree, the covenant is not thereby dissolved; it is only the declarant who has forsaken it.

Let no man mistake conciliation for concession of principle. I shall employ every lawful means to compose our disagreements, but the laws themselves I have sworn to execute, and that oath admits of no geographical exception. If the ordinary business of government be resisted by force, then the force which the Constitution places in my hands shall be employed — reluctantly, but unhesitatingly — for its restoration. In this I claim no discretion of my own; I do but perform the duty which the office, and not the man, requires.

The speaker's insistence that his oath admits of no geographical exception and that he claims no discretion of my own functions rhetorically to

The following is an excerpt from an original dissenting opinion in the same hypothetical case, Ashford v. Commonwealth of Delmar (2019).

Justice Halloran, dissenting.

The Court today announces, in effect, that the First Amendment operates as an inflexible instrument, indifferent to the character of the peril against which a legislature seeks to protect its citizens. I cannot subscribe to a doctrine so majestic in its abstraction and so indifferent to consequences.

My disagreement is not with the imminence test as such, but with the Court's mechanical application of it. Imminence is not an atomic quantity, measurable only in minutes or hours between exhortation and act. In a slow-moving epidemic, a general call to defy quarantine, distributed to a population already restive under restrictions, may produce cumulative noncompliance whose effect on public health is every bit as certain, and every bit as devastating, as a shouted command to storm a building. The majority's insistence upon a specific directive, a specific audience, and a specific time collapses the imminence inquiry into a demand for a smoking gun that the pathology of contagion does not require.

I would remand for consideration of whether, in the epidemiological context, the pamphlets' generalized advocacy was reasonably calculated to produce the aggregate defiance that would render the Commonwealth's directives nugatory. If so, the speech loses its shelter, however much its author may have adorned it with the rhetoric of persuasion.

I acknowledge, and do not lightly dismiss, the danger that emergency reasoning may erode settled liberties. But liberties are not preserved by treating them as untethered from the conditions of their exercise. A Constitution unable to distinguish between a philosophical tract and a match struck in a powder magazine is not a charter of freedom but an epitaph for the society it once ordered.

The dissent's critique of the majority's imminence analysis rests principally on which claim?

The following is an excerpt from an original dissenting opinion in the same hypothetical case, Ashford v. Commonwealth of Delmar (2019).

Justice Halloran, dissenting.

The Court today announces, in effect, that the First Amendment operates as an inflexible instrument, indifferent to the character of the peril against which a legislature seeks to protect its citizens. I cannot subscribe to a doctrine so majestic in its abstraction and so indifferent to consequences.

My disagreement is not with the imminence test as such, but with the Court's mechanical application of it. Imminence is not an atomic quantity, measurable only in minutes or hours between exhortation and act. In a slow-moving epidemic, a general call to defy quarantine, distributed to a population already restive under restrictions, may produce cumulative noncompliance whose effect on public health is every bit as certain, and every bit as devastating, as a shouted command to storm a building. The majority's insistence upon a specific directive, a specific audience, and a specific time collapses the imminence inquiry into a demand for a smoking gun that the pathology of contagion does not require.

I would remand for consideration of whether, in the epidemiological context, the pamphlets' generalized advocacy was reasonably calculated to produce the aggregate defiance that would render the Commonwealth's directives nugatory. If so, the speech loses its shelter, however much its author may have adorned it with the rhetoric of persuasion.

I acknowledge, and do not lightly dismiss, the danger that emergency reasoning may erode settled liberties. But liberties are not preserved by treating them as untethered from the conditions of their exercise. A Constitution unable to distinguish between a philosophical tract and a match struck in a powder magazine is not a charter of freedom but an epitaph for the society it once ordered.

The dissent's concluding image — contrasting a philosophical tract with a match struck in a powder magazine — is best understood as an appeal to which form of legal reasoning?

The following is an excerpt from an original speech delivered by a nineteenth-century American reformer at a convention on women's suffrage.

Friends and Fellow Citizens:

We are told, with a regularity that has become wearying, that the ballot is unsuited to our sex — that the delicate offices of the home would be coarsened by contact with the rough business of politics, and that our influence, which is now moral and pervasive, would be diminished were it made merely legal and countable. To which I answer: an influence that exists only so long as it is denied any instrument of enforcement is not influence but flattery. It is the compliment paid by power to those whom it has agreed, upon consultation with itself, to exclude.

Our opponents concede — for they must — that the Declaration of Independence proclaims government to derive its just powers from the consent of the governed. They then proceed, with a straight face, to explain that the word governed signifies only such persons as are already permitted to consent. I confess I find this a curious species of logic. If those from whom consent must be obtained are defined as those from whom it has already been obtained, then the principle has been drained of every drop of meaning and left, like an empty wineskin, hanging as ornament upon the wall of the Republic.

I do not demand the ballot as a favor, nor as a reward for good behavior, nor even as compensation for such contributions as women have made to the common welfare — though these have been neither few nor slight. I demand it as the necessary implication of a founding proposition to which this nation has sworn itself, and from which it cannot recede without ceasing to be what it has declared itself to be.

The speaker's central argumentative strategy in the second paragraph is best described as

The following is an excerpt from an original open letter written in the style of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail, addressed to a group of ministers who had criticized the timing of a nonviolent campaign for economic justice in a Southern city.

My dear Fellow Clergymen:

You write to counsel patience, and to observe that the improvements we seek, though desirable in themselves, would come more surely through the ordinary channels of negotiation than through the extraordinary means of public demonstration. I have heard this counsel, in one form or another, for the greater part of my adult life. It is offered always with sincerity, and almost always by those who are not themselves in the position of waiting.

Allow me to distinguish between two kinds of patience. There is a patience that endures hardship while working steadily to remove its cause; this patience I honor, and I trust I have practiced it. There is another patience that endures hardship because one has grown accustomed to it, or because the disturbance of removing it would embarrass those who profit from its continuance. This second patience is not a virtue but a symptom, and to prescribe it to the sufferer is not counsel but complicity.

You ask why we do not wait for the new administration, which is said to be more sympathetic. I would answer with a question: sympathetic to whom, and to what? An administration sympathetic to our aspirations in principle, but unwilling to expend political capital in their pursuit, is scarcely more useful than one openly opposed. History does not record that oppressed peoples were ever liberated by the sympathetic private sentiments of officeholders; it records that they were liberated when the cost of their continued oppression, whether in conscience or in coin, became greater than the cost of doing them justice.

We demonstrate, then, not to inflame but to reveal — to make visible what has long been visible only to those who suffer it, and to raise the cost of averted eyes.

The author's distinction between two kinds of patience is deployed principally to

The following is an excerpt from an original open letter written in the style of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail, addressed to a group of ministers who had criticized the timing of a nonviolent campaign for economic justice in a Southern city.

My dear Fellow Clergymen:

You write to counsel patience, and to observe that the improvements we seek, though desirable in themselves, would come more surely through the ordinary channels of negotiation than through the extraordinary means of public demonstration. I have heard this counsel, in one form or another, for the greater part of my adult life. It is offered always with sincerity, and almost always by those who are not themselves in the position of waiting.

Allow me to distinguish between two kinds of patience. There is a patience that endures hardship while working steadily to remove its cause; this patience I honor, and I trust I have practiced it. There is another patience that endures hardship because one has grown accustomed to it, or because the disturbance of removing it would embarrass those who profit from its continuance. This second patience is not a virtue but a symptom, and to prescribe it to the sufferer is not counsel but complicity.

You ask why we do not wait for the new administration, which is said to be more sympathetic. I would answer with a question: sympathetic to whom, and to what? An administration sympathetic to our aspirations in principle, but unwilling to expend political capital in their pursuit, is scarcely more useful than one openly opposed. History does not record that oppressed peoples were ever liberated by the sympathetic private sentiments of officeholders; it records that they were liberated when the cost of their continued oppression, whether in conscience or in coin, became greater than the cost of doing them justice.

We demonstrate, then, not to inflame but to reveal — to make visible what has long been visible only to those who suffer it, and to raise the cost of averted eyes.

The author's historical claim in the third paragraph — that liberation comes when the cost of continued oppression... became greater than the cost of doing them justice — most directly supports which conclusion about the purpose of the demonstrations?