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AP English Language and Composition: Passage Drill Drill 1, Problem 2. What is the speaker's primary purpose in using onomatopoeia in line four?
AP English Language and Composition: Passage Drill Drill 1, Problem 7. What is the principal rhetorical function of paragraphs one to three?
AP English Language and Composition: Passage Drill 1, Problem 8. The quotation marks in the third paragraph chiefly serve to what?
AP English Language and Composition 4.5 Passage Drill 168 Views
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Description:
Feel like shifting gears and answering a question about shifting tones? We've got you covered. Take a look at this question and see if you can follow the change in tone.
Transcript
- 00:00
[ musical flourish ]
- 00:03
And here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by a fear of public speaking.
- 00:07
Some say you should picture the audience naked, but
- 00:10
we've always come to regret that choice.
- 00:15
[ mumbles ]
Full Transcript
- 00:22
[ mumbling continues ]
- 00:34
[ further mumbling ]
- 00:41
Okay. The shift in tone from the first two paragraphs
- 00:45
to the rest of the passage can be best described as... what?
- 00:48
And here are the potential answers.
- 00:51
[ mumbles ]
- 00:55
All right. Wow, this question is vocab city. Good thing we brought a map.
- 01:00
And by map, we mean the dictionary and our brains.
- 01:04
All right, option E says the speaker is being enigmatic,
- 01:08
or mysterious, in the first paragraph, which could be true
- 01:11
with all the question-dodging he's doing.
- 01:15
But E also says that in the second paragraph, the speaker acts
- 01:19
indifferently, meaning that he acts like he couldn't care less.
- 01:22
Well, this just isn't true. It's clear the speaker has
- 01:24
thought a lot about what he's saying, so he's bound to care about it.
- 01:27
If he didn't care, well, he probably wouldn't have shown up to speak in the first place, right?
- 01:33
How about answer D?
- 01:34
Eh. "Succinct" means short
- 01:37
and to the point, while "verbose" means
- 01:40
wordy, wordy, wordy. Like lots of words to describe something
- 01:42
that you could've said just in two.
- 01:45
So D would be a contender if it said
- 01:47
verbose to more verbose, but, uh, well, zing.
- 01:52
We can see where C is coming from.
- 01:54
The speaker does sound a little argumentative when he begins by
- 01:57
telling the committee that they asked him to speak about a stupid question.
- 02:00
He doesn't get conciliatory, or apologetic, in the next paragraph, though.
- 02:04
He just keeps on dissecting exactly why the question's unanswerable.
- 02:11
Well, A would be plausible only if the order were reversed.
- 02:14
The speaker sounds way more imperious, or arrogant,
- 02:17
in the first paragraph when he's dissing the committee's question.
- 02:20
But in the second paragraph, he confidently lays out the rationale behind his opinion.
- 02:24
Choice B does the speaker the most justice.
- 02:27
At first, his tone is searching.
- 02:29
He's pulling apart the question and honestly trying to figure out
- 02:31
how best to answer it.
- 02:33
Then in the second paragraph, he illustrates just why he thinks
- 02:36
the things he does. How much you wanna bet that half the audience
- 02:39
walked out thinking he was brilliant
- 02:42
and the other half thinking he was a jerk?
- 02:47
[ shout ]
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