Eng 6, Unit 4 Review

Read the following excerpt from Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics. The bagel data also reflect how much personal mood seems to affect honesty. Weather, for instance, is a major factor. Unseasonably pleasant weather inspires people to pay at a higher rate. Unseasonably cold weather, meanwhile, makes people cheat prolifically; so do heavy rain and wind. Worst are the holidays. The week of Christmas produces a 2 percent drop in payment rates—again, a 15 percent increase in theft, an effect on the same magnitude, in reverse, as that of 9/11. Thanksgiving is nearly as bad; the week of Valentine's Day is also lousy, as is the week straddling April 15. There are, however, a few good holidays: the weeks that include the Fourth of July, Labor Day, and Columbus Day. The difference in the two sets of holidays? The low-cheating holidays represent little more than an extra day off from work. The high-cheating holidays are fraught with miscellaneous anxieties and the high expectations of loved ones. Which of the following best summarizes the main idea of this paragraph?

Different emotional states affect people's honesty.

Which sentence must be revised to eliminate a split infinitive?

Emily loves to noisily and cheerfully make breakfast for her family each day.

Read the excerpt from Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Death by Black Hole." That's the gory moment when your body snaps into two segments, breaking apart at your midsection. Upon falling further, the difference in gravity continues to grow, and each of your two body segments snaps into two segments. Shortly thereafter, those segments each snap into two segments of their own, and so forth, and so forth, bifurcating your body into an ever-increasing number of parts: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc. After you've been ripped into shreds of organic molecules, the molecules themselves begin to feel the continually growing tidal forces. Eventually, they too snap apart, creating a stream of their constituent atoms. And then, of course, the atoms themselves snap apart, leaving an unrecognizable parade of particles that, minutes earlier, had been you. Which statement best describes how the author conveys the message that humans are no match for the power of a black hole?

He personalizes the experience for the reader and uses vivid imagery to create a clear mental picture.

Read the excerpt from Fast Food Nation. Up and down Academy Boulevard, along South Nevada, Circle Drive, and Woodman Road, teenagers like Elisa run the fast food restaurants of Colorado Springs. Fast food kitchens often seem like a scene from Bugsy Malone, a film in which all the actors are children pretending to be adults. No other industry in the United States has a workforce so dominated by adolescents. How does Schlosser effectively build his argument in this excerpt?

He uses analogical evidence to help the reader visualize his point about the workers.

Read this excerpt from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. She said, "Ron is a great person," which was an answer to a question I didn't ask. So I asked again. "True or false: you are in love with Ron." She put her hand with the ring on it in her hair and said, "Oskar, Ron is my friend." Which of these statements best describes the ambiguity in this excerpt?

It is unclear whether the ring is from Ron or from Oskar's dad.

Read this excerpt from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I stood on all of that and it worked for a second. But then I had the tips of my fingers on the vase, and the tragedies started to wobble, and the tuxedo was incredibly distracting, and the next thing was that everything was on the floor, including me, and including the vase, which had shattered. "I didn't do it!" I hollered, but they didn't even hear me, because they were playing music too loud and cracking up too much. How does the narration shape Oskar's characterization in this excerpt?

It shows his youth and inexperience.

Which of the following excerpts from Fast Food Nation best provides evidence that fast food restaurants are designed for using unskilled labor?

The ovens at Pizza Hut and at Domino's also use conveyer belts to ensure standardized cooking times.

Read the excerpt from Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Death by Black Hole." If you stumbled upon a black hole and found yourself falling feet-first toward its center, then as you got closer, the black hole's force of gravity would grow astronomically. Curiously, you would not feel this force at all because, like anything in free fall, you are weightless. What you do feel, however, is something far more sinister. While you fall, the black hole's force of gravity at your two feet, they being closer to the black hole's center, accelerates them faster than does the weaker force of gravity at your head. Read the excerpt from Billy Collins's "Man Listening to Disc." the only true point of view, is full of the hope that he, the hub of the cosmos with his hair blown sideways, will eventually make it all the way downtown. Which choice best describes the differing views Tyson and Collins present of humanity?

Tyson presents humans as powerless against the forces of nature, while Collins presents an individual creating his own destiny.

Read the following excerpt from Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Death by Black Hole." That's the gory moment when your body snaps into two segments, breaking apart at your midsection. Upon falling further, the difference in gravity continues to grow, and each of your two body segments snaps into two segments. Shortly thereafter, those segments each snap into two segments of their own, and so forth, and so forth, bifurcating your body into an ever-increasing number of parts: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc. Read the following excerpt from Billy Collins's "Man Listening to Disc." The music is loud yet so confidential I cannot help feeling even more like the center of the universe than usual as I walk along to a rapid little version of "The Way You Look Tonight," What do these two excerpts reveal about the difference in ideas presented by Tyson and Collins?

Tyson stresses humanity's relative insignificance in the universe, while Collins stresses man's perceived importance.

Read the following excerpt from Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics. In the real world, Feldman learned to settle for less than 95 percent. He came to consider a company "honest" if its payment rate was above 90 percent. He considered a rate between 80 and 90 percent "annoying but tolerable." If a company habitually paid below 80 percent, Feldman might post a hectoring note, like this one: The cost of bagels has gone up dramatically since the beginning of the year. Unfortunately, the number of bagels that disappear without being paid for has also gone up. Don't let that continue. I don't imagine that you would teach your children to cheat, so why do it yourselves? The excerpt serves as which type of support for the authors' argument?

an example

A split infinitive occurs when a word or group of words is inserted __________ the two parts of an infinitive.

between

A writer sometimes chooses to end a sentence with a preposition because doing so makes the sentence more

clear

Read this excerpt from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I knew I could never let Mom hear the messages, because protecting her is one of my most important raisons d'être, so what I did was I took Dad's emergency money from on top of his dresser, and I went to the Radio Shack on Amsterdam. It was on a TV there that I saw that the first building had fallen. I bought the exact same phone and ran home and recorded our greeting from the first phone onto it. I wrapped up the old phone in the scarf that Grandma was never able to finish because of my privacy, and I put that in a grocery bag, and I put that in a box, and I put that in another box, and I put that under a bunch of stuff in my closet, like my jewelry workbench and albums of foreign currencies. Which word best describes the tone of this excerpt?

methodical

Read the excerpt from Fast Food Nation. English is now the second language of at least one-sixth of the nation's restaurant workers, and about one-third of that group speaks no English at all. The proportion of fast food workers who cannot speak English is even higher. Which type of evidence does the author use in this excerpt?

statistical

Read the following excerpt from Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics. There is a tale, "The Ring of Gyges," that Feldman sometimes tells his economist friends. It comes from Plato's Republic. A student named Glaucon offered the story in response to a lesson by Socrates—who, like Adam Smith, argued that people are generally good even without enforcement. Glaucon, like Feldman's economist friends, disagreed. He told of a shepherd named Gyges who stumbled upon a secret cavern with a corpse inside that wore a ring. When Gyges put on the ring, he found that it made him invisible. With no one able to monitor his behavior, Gyges proceeded to do woeful things—seduce the queen, murder the king, and so on. Glaucon's story posed a moral question: could any man resist the temptation of evil if he knew his acts could not be witnessed? Glaucon seemed to think the answer was no. But Paul Feldman sides with Socrates and Adam Smith—for he knows the answer, at least 87 percent of the time, is yes. Feldman reaches the conclusion that most people are honest without receiving an incentive by

studying his individual experiences and arriving at a broad generalization.