High School Reading: Grades 9-10 Quiz: Authors Purpose And Rhetoric

The push to replace grass lawns with native plant gardens is often framed as an environmental necessity, and to some extent, it is. Traditional lawns consume enormous quantities of water and require fertilizers that pollute waterways. Native gardens, by contrast, support pollinators and require little maintenance once established.

Still, we should be honest about what the movement asks of ordinary homeowners. A native garden is not simply a lawn without mowing. It requires research, an initial investment that can run into thousands of dollars, and a tolerance for the 'messy' aesthetic during the years it takes for plants to mature. Homeowners' associations frequently issue fines for yards that look untended, and neighbors—however unfairly—may view a wildflower meadow as a sign of neglect rather than stewardship.

None of this is a reason to abandon the effort. But those of us who advocate for ecological landscaping do a disservice when we pretend the transition is easy or cheap. The movement will not spread by shaming lawn-owners. It will spread when we acknowledge the real barriers and work to lower them—through community education, cost-sharing programs, and reforms to the ordinances that still, in many towns, make a wildflower meadow technically illegal.

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

Every few years, a new study appears claiming that a glass of red wine, a square of dark chocolate, or a cup of coffee will extend your life. The headlines are irresistible, and I confess I have written a few myself. But after twenty years covering nutrition science, I have come to believe these stories cause more harm than the modest pleasures they endorse.

The problem is not that the studies are fraudulent. Most are carefully done. The problem is what happens between the laboratory and the reader. A researcher observes a small statistical association in a population of 40,000 people—say, a two percent reduction in heart disease among moderate wine drinkers. By the time this finding reaches a morning news segment, it has become 'Wine Prevents Heart Attacks!' The qualifiers vanish. The confounding variables—that moderate drinkers tend to be wealthier, more socially connected, and more likely to exercise—go unmentioned.

Readers then make decisions based on this distorted picture. They pour a second glass, reasoning that it is practically medicine. They feel virtuous rather than indulgent. And the cumulative effect, across millions of readers making millions of small choices, is almost certainly negative.

The author's point of view can best be described as that of:

Proponents of the four-day school week point to happier students, lower operating costs, and improved teacher retention. Districts across rural America have adopted the schedule with enthusiasm. And when surveyed, families overwhelmingly report satisfaction with the change.

Satisfaction, however, is not the same as success. Recent longitudinal studies from Oregon and Missouri suggest that students on four-day schedules score modestly lower on standardized tests in reading and mathematics than peers on traditional calendars, with the gap widening in later grades. Attendance rates on the remaining four days are indeed higher—but total instructional hours are lower, and the difference shows.

Defenders of the schedule counter that test scores are not the only measure of a good education. They are right. But when the families expressing satisfaction are disproportionately those with the resources to enrich the fifth day—with music lessons, tutoring, or a parent at home—we should ask whether the schedule is delivering education or merely outsourcing it. A policy that families like is not automatically a policy that serves all children equally.

How does the author's purpose shift over the course of the passage?

The invention of the mechanical clock in medieval Europe is often celebrated as a triumph of human ingenuity, and technically it was. But we should also recognize what the clock did to the people who lived with it. Before mechanical time, work followed the sun, the seasons, the tasks that needed doing. A farmer worked until the field was plowed. A baker worked until the bread was baked. Time was, in a sense, made of things.

The clock changed this. Time became a container into which activities were poured, and increasingly, a measure by which human labor could be bought. When employers began paying by the hour rather than by the task, they gained something workers lost: the authority to define what counted as a full day's work. The clock did not just tell time; it enabled a new relationship between people and their labor, one in which the employer owned the minutes and the worker owned only the effort to fill them.

I am not arguing we should smash the clocks. I could not write this essay without one. I am arguing that technologies are never neutral, and that the tools we celebrate always carry, in their gears, arrangements of power we rarely stop to notice.

The author most likely includes the statement "I am not arguing we should smash the clocks" in order to:

Adapted from an editorial in a community newspaper:

The city council will vote next month on whether to install cameras at four downtown intersections to catch drivers who run red lights. Proponents cite safety statistics: cities with camera enforcement see, on average, a 21 percent reduction in fatal right-angle collisions. Opponents cite privacy concerns and the possibility that cameras function primarily as revenue generators for cash-strapped municipalities.

Both sides have a point. But both sides are also, in a way, changing the subject. The real question is not whether cameras work or whether they invade privacy in the abstract. The real question is whether our city, with our specific accident patterns and our specific budget pressures, will use these cameras honestly. A camera at an intersection where accidents are frequent, with a yellow-light interval set to standard engineering guidelines, and with revenue directed to traffic-safety programs, is one thing. A camera at a low-accident intersection with a shortened yellow, generating tickets that fund the general budget, is quite another. The technology is the same. The policy around it is what matters.

Before the council votes, residents deserve to see the specific proposals: which intersections, what yellow-light timing, and where the money will go.

The author's purpose is best described as attempting to:

The word 'grit' has become inescapable in education. Since the psychologist Angela Duckworth popularized the term in a 2013 TED talk, schools have introduced 'grit curricula,' teachers have been trained in 'grit pedagogy,' and children as young as six have been told that their success in life depends on their perseverance in the face of setbacks.

There is nothing wrong with teaching perseverance. Perseverance is a virtue. What troubles me is the way 'grit' has been used to explain—and, more quietly, to excuse—the outcomes of children whose circumstances differ enormously. When a wealthy suburban student succeeds, we say the school is excellent. When a poor urban student fails, we increasingly say the student lacked grit. The framework locates the problem inside the child, and by doing so, lets the surrounding conditions off the hook.

Duckworth herself has cautioned against this misuse of her research. She never intended grit to be a substitute for adequate funding, stable housing, or well-trained teachers. But once a concept enters the policy bloodstream, its author rarely controls where it goes. Grit was supposed to be one factor among many. In practice, it has become an alibi.

Which statement best captures the relationship between the author's view and Angela Duckworth's view as presented in the passage?

Adapted from a museum director's letter to donors:

When our museum opened in 1962, the mission statement referred to 'preserving the artistic heritage of Western civilization.' For decades, no one questioned that phrase. It seemed self-evidently good. Today, of course, it reads differently—both narrower and more presumptuous than we would ever write it now.

Some of our donors have asked whether we plan to change the statement, and I want to explain why we have not. It is not because we still endorse it. We do not, and our acquisitions and programs over the past fifteen years demonstrate that. It is because the statement is a historical document, revealing of the assumptions of the museum's founders and the era in which they worked. To quietly rewrite it would be to hide something that ought to be visible. It would let visitors imagine that the museum was always as expansive in its vision as we hope it is becoming.

Instead, we have chosen to display the original statement alongside a contemporary one, with a brief explanation of the distance between them. This is, I think, the more honest approach: not to erase our history, but to show that institutions grow, and to invite our visitors to see the growing.

The director's primary purpose in the letter is to:

In debates about screen time and adolescents, two camps have hardened. On one side, alarmists point to rising rates of teen anxiety and depression and blame smartphones with a confidence that outruns the evidence. On the other side, dismissers cite the same evidence's uncertainties to suggest we need not worry at all—that today's anxieties about phones are no different from yesterday's anxieties about television, comic books, or novels.

I find both positions unserious, though for different reasons. The alarmists mistake correlation for causation and overlook the many other things that changed in teenagers' lives after 2012. But the dismissers make a subtler and more dangerous error. They treat 'we don't have proof' as if it meant 'there is no problem.' They forget that we act on incomplete evidence all the time—when we buckle seatbelts, when we vaccinate children, when we regulate anything at all. To insist on certainty before responding is not intellectual rigor. It is a decision to do nothing, dressed up as caution.

The honest position is uncomfortable: we do not know how much harm phones are causing, and we cannot wait until we do.

The author's chief rhetorical strategy in the passage is to:

The old rule for résumés was one page. Any longer and you seemed self-important; any shorter and you seemed inexperienced. This rule made sense in an era when a human being would pick up your résumé, glance at it for perhaps six seconds, and decide whether to keep reading.

That era is over. Today, the first reader of your résumé is almost certainly software—an applicant tracking system that scans for keywords, parses your work history into a database, and produces a score. The human being, if there is one, sees only the résumés the software has ranked highly. The old design principles—clean layout, tasteful use of white space, a memorable summary at the top—do not help you at this stage. In fact, some of them actively hurt. Graphics confuse the parser. Fancy fonts render as gibberish. That elegant two-column layout you spent an hour perfecting? The software may read the columns as one continuous line and produce nonsense.

I say this not to depress job-seekers but to spare them wasted effort. Design your résumé for the reader who will actually see it first. Impress the human later, if you get the chance.

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

For twenty years, I taught high school biology in a school where about a third of my students each year told me, at some point, that they did not believe in evolution. Colleagues from other regions often assumed this must have been a source of constant conflict. It was not. I want to explain why, because I think there is a lesson in it that extends beyond biology classrooms.

I never asked my students to believe anything. I asked them to understand the theory of evolution—its evidence, its mechanisms, its predictions—well enough to explain it back to me on an exam. What they did with that understanding on Sunday morning was not my business. I was not in the belief-changing profession. I was in the understanding-building profession. Those are different jobs, and confusing them has cost science education a great deal of goodwill.

Some of my colleagues found this approach a compromise. I did not. A student who can articulate a theory she rejects has learned more, in a sense, than one who accepts a theory she cannot articulate. The first has done real intellectual work. The second has merely agreed.

The author's point of view is most clearly reflected in which of the following statements?

When I tell people I collect rejection letters, they usually laugh, thinking I mean it as a joke about my failed literary ambitions. I don't. I have a folder—now a fat manila thing, held together with a rubber band—of every rejection I have received in fifteen years of submitting stories to magazines. Two hundred and forty-seven, at last count.

I keep them for a specific reason, and it isn't masochism. Each rejection is proof that I sent something out. For every story I submitted, there was a period, sometimes years long, when the story existed only as an idea, then only as a draft, then only as a draft I was afraid to show anyone. The rejection is the artifact of the moment I stopped being afraid.

I have twelve acceptances in that same fifteen years. Twelve stories in print. I do not keep a folder of those. The published stories belong to their readers now, and to the magazines, and to the version of me who wrote them. The rejections belong to me alone. They are the record of the harder thing—not the writing, but the sending.

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

Fast fashion companies have taken to advertising their 'sustainable' collections with impressive-sounding claims: garments made from recycled polyester, cotton grown with reduced water, dyes free of certain chemicals. Consumers, wanting to do the right thing, pay a small premium and feel better about their purchases.

I will not say these claims are lies. In the narrow sense, most are technically accurate. A shirt made from recycled plastic bottles is, indeed, made from recycled plastic bottles. What the claims obscure is the scale of the industry they decorate. The same company that sells you a 'conscious' shirt sells forty other shirts that day made in the ordinary way. The company's total environmental footprint grows every year, even as its sustainability marketing budget grows faster. A tiny green corner of an enormous brown business is not a green business.

The deeper trouble is what this marketing does to us. It gives us the sensation of solving a problem while the problem continues to worsen. It converts moral concern into a purchase, and purchases into more of what caused the concern in the first place. If we want fashion to be less destructive, we will have to buy less of it—a message no company will ever put on a hangtag.

The author's purpose in the second paragraph is primarily to: