High School Reading: Grades 9-10 Quiz: Analyzing Seminal Us Documents

The following is an excerpt from an original speech written in the style of a 20th-century American presidential address.

My fellow citizens, we gather in a season when the ordinary business of the Republic seems small against the roar of events abroad. Yet I would remind you that the strength of this nation has never rested in its armies alone, nor in the machinery of its factories, but in the willingness of ordinary people to shoulder inconvenient truths. There are those who counsel silence — who tell us that to speak plainly of injustice at home is to weaken our hand abroad. I answer them thus: a house that will not name its own cracks cannot long stand against the storm. If we would defend liberty beyond our shores, we must first refuse to be comfortable with its absence within them. The farmer in Kansas, the shipwright in Maine, the schoolteacher in Alabama — each is a keeper of that liberty, and each has the right, indeed the duty, to demand that our practice match our creed.

In "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King Jr. criticizes people who urge activists to stay quiet and wait for a more convenient time, arguing that injustice must be confronted openly rather than politely ignored. Which statement best describes how the speaker's argument relates to King's?

A founding-era essay argues: "Let each branch temper the others, so no single hand may grip the whole of power." Here, "temper" most nearly means

A reformer's speech declares: "We will not be appeased by promises; we demand rights secured in law." Here, "appeased" most nearly means

An abolitionist editor writes: "I will not soften my words, for the cause I plead is too urgent for gentle phrases." What can be inferred?

A colonial assembly resolves: "These grievances, long tolerated, have now become insupportable to a free people." Here, "insupportable" most nearly means

A suffrage declaration states: "A government that taxes women yet denies them the vote betrays the very principle it was founded upon." Its central idea is that

A reformer writes: "A freedom held by some and denied to others is not a freedom; it is a privilege wearing freedom's coat." The central idea is that

A memorial speech says: "Those who fell here did not die for a field of grass, but for the idea the field stands upon." The speaker implies that

A wartime leader tells the nation: "A fire in a neighbor's house is no private matter when the wind blows toward our own roof." The leader mainly aims

A wartime president says: "We are tested not by whether we prevail, but by whether we remain worthy of the cause for which we fight." His purpose is to

A colonial petition states: "We do not ask the Crown for new rights; we ask only that it honor the old ones it swore to keep." The writers mainly aim to

From an original passage in the style of King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

I have been asked how I distinguish a just law from an unjust one. My answer is this: a just law is a code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God, or — if that language troubles you — with the dignity that we recognize in every human person. An unjust law is a code out of harmony with that dignity. More concretely: any law that a majority compels a minority to obey, but which the majority does not bind upon itself, is unjust on its face. Any law that a group has had no part in enacting, because it was denied the vote by devices designed for that very purpose, is unjust in its origin. To break such a law openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty, is not to disrespect law itself but to express the highest respect for law — for it is to insist that law must deserve the name.

Which situation would the passage most clearly identify as involving an unjust law?

Passage A (in the style of the Gettysburg Address): It is for us the living to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

Passage B (in the style of Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech): A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear. Since the beginning of our American history we have been engaged in change — in a perpetual, peaceful revolution — a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly, adjusting itself to changing conditions.

The two passages differ most importantly in how they characterize the ongoing project of American democracy. Which statement best captures that difference?

From an original passage in the style of Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech.

Certain nations abroad have proclaimed a "new order" — an order in which the rights of individuals are to be sacrificed to the appetite of the state, and in which peace is defined as the silence that follows conquest. To that order we oppose a greater conception: the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination without fear because it knows that freedom is not a possession to be locked away but a habit to be practiced. The nation that hoards its liberties, refusing to extend them, discovers too late that hoarded liberties do not keep — they spoil in the storeroom of privilege while the world grows hungry for their example.

The passage's central contrast is best described as one between —

Adapted from an original essay written in the style of a Founding-era address.

Friends and Fellow-Citizens: As I withdraw from the councils of public life, permit me to press upon your minds a truth which experience has burned into my own. The spirit of party, though it may wear the dress of principle, is in its nature a fire that consumes the very timber of the house it pretends to warm. Parties will tell you that the opposing faction is not merely mistaken but wicked; they will teach your neighbors to see enemies where once they saw fellow-workers. And when the citizen learns to hate his countryman for the color of his cockade, the foreign power needs no army to divide us — we have done its labor for it. Cherish, therefore, the habits of national union above the transient satisfactions of victory over a rival. For a republic that survives its enemies abroad only to be undone by its passions at home has purchased nothing worth the keeping.

Which claim best captures the passage's central argument?

Passage 1 (in the style of King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail"): I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the outright opponent of justice but the person who prefers order to justice — who constantly says, "I agree with your goals but cannot agree with your methods."

Passage 2 (in the style of Washington's Farewell Address): Citizens, guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism. Those who counsel calm at every hour, and who identify the peace of the moment with the health of the whole, mistake the symptom for the cure. A body politic may be quiet because it is well; it may also be quiet because it is dying.

Which idea is developed in both passages?

From an original address in the style of Washington's Farewell Address.

Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened. For it is on the character and understanding of the people — their capacity to weigh evidence, to distrust flattery, to prefer the durable to the dazzling — that the whole edifice at last must rest. A republic ignorant of its own principles is a ship without ballast; the first strong wind that blows shall lay it upon its side.

The metaphor of "a ship without ballast" primarily functions to —

The following is an original passage in the style of a mid-19th-century American public address delivered at a battlefield memorial.

We come not to praise the earth that received them, nor to lend our small voices to a chorus already sung by braver deeds. The men who lay here have consecrated this ground beyond the power of speech to add or diminish. But there is a labor still unfinished — a labor which belongs not to the dead but to us. They died that a certain proposition might endure: that a people may govern themselves, and that such government, being of the many, shall not be swept away by the ambition of the few. If we would honor them, we shall do so not with monuments of stone but with the daily practice of that proposition — with the ballot honestly cast, with the office honestly served, with the neighbor honestly heard. Let us then take from this field not sorrow only, but resolution.

How does the passage's rhetorical strategy most resemble that of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address?

From an original letter written in the style of King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

You write that our marches, however peaceful, are "ill-timed" — that we should wait for a more convenient hour. I confess I have grown weary of that word. For years the answer has been "wait," and "wait" has almost always meant "never." I do not deny that timing matters; I deny that those who suffer the injustice should be the ones asked to consult the clock. When you tell a mother whose child cannot enter the public library that she must wait until sentiment ripens, you have not counseled patience — you have counseled her to accept her child's diminishment as the price of your comfort. Justice delayed by the powerful is not prudence; it is a quieter form of the same denial. We do not march because we are impatient men; we march because patience, in the mouths of the comfortable, has become a weapon.

The author's treatment of the word "wait" primarily serves to —

Passage 1 (in the style of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address): The great task remaining before us is that this nation, under the burden of its losses, shall find a new birth of purpose — that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not vanish from the earth.

Passage 2 (in the style of King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail"): We are not the creators of tension; we are its revealers. The tension has always existed between the promise of our founding documents and the practice of our daily institutions. To bring that tension into the open, where it may at last be confronted, is not to sow discord but to make honest what has too long been hidden.

Which statement best describes a shared assumption underlying both passages?