ShmoopTube
Where Monty Python meets your 10th grade teacher.
Search Thousands of Shmoop Videos
AP English Language and Composition Videos 171 videos
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 Literature and Composition 1.1 Passage Drill 7. The primary purpose of this passage is what?
Wishing upon a star may help you pass your AP English Language and Composition test, but answering this question would be a safer bet.
AP English Language and Composition 3.7 Passage Drill 541 Views
Share It!
Description:
Which answer best describes the theme of the following passage? And if you say "fission chips," we'll give you half credit. The AP test graders might not, but that's neither here nor there.
Transcript
- 00:00
[ musical flourish ]
- 00:03
And here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by scientists.
- 00:07
What's a physicist's favorite food?
- 00:09
Fission chips.
- 00:11
Haha.
Full Transcript
- 00:12
That's a Manhattan Project joke. They really, uh...
- 00:15
laughed about it back then as they were building the atom bomb.
- 00:20
Okay, we done skimming?
- 00:21
Royal Commission...
- 00:22
Fish and chips.
- 00:24
British thing. Yeah.
- 00:25
Gotta put it a little bit of salt on it.
- 00:27
[ mumbles ]
- 00:31
All right. Which of the following best describes the theme of the passage?
- 00:35
Theme.
- 00:36
And here are the potential answers.
- 00:37
All right, do we see a theme in there?
- 00:41
All right, well,
- 00:42
when we're trying to figure out the main theme of any passage,
- 00:45
we've gotta take everything into account. We ask ourselves,
- 00:48
"What's the big picture here?"
- 00:49
If we stare too hard at the details, we'll miss the point.
- 00:52
And, well, we'll also strain our eyes.
- 00:55
Option A doesn't cut it.
- 00:57
Our author doesn't say anything about a well-rounded education being important.
- 01:01
As far as we can tell, he's an all science all the time kind of guy.
- 01:05
Hate to see his grades in history. [ clears throat ]
- 01:07
Choice B thinks the author is trying to show us
- 01:09
the poetry in scientific research.
- 01:12
Well, the part about seeing the reflection of the stars in mud
- 01:15
puddles and all that? That might be poetic.
- 01:17
But to the author, science is about more than poetry.
- 01:21
Answer C tries to convince us that the author's main point
- 01:24
is that the scientists are mainly philosophers.
- 01:27
Well, we can see where this option is coming from.
- 01:29
Some of the quotes do sound philosophical.
- 01:31
But all in all, this article is about science for science's sake.
- 01:35
The author isn't using it as a launchpad to hurtle us
- 01:38
into new dimensions of thought.
- 01:39
And we're glad. We just ate, and all that hurtling
- 01:42
into new dimensions makes us queasy.
- 01:44
Choice D is getting warmer, but the passage
- 01:46
doesn't specifically connect science with any other subject.
- 01:50
Option E is the one that finally gets it right.
- 01:53
The author isn't focused on how science helps us
- 01:55
with other subjects. He's zeroed in on how the subject of
- 01:59
science helps us win at the game of life.
- 02:01
Right. We'd love more cheats.
Related Videos
AP English Language and Composition 3.5 Passage Drill. How is "forcible" being used here?
Take a look at this shmoopy question and see if you can figure out which device the speaker employs the most.
He or she that answereth this question shall...answereth it. And hopefully feel kind of accomplished. Hit play and figure out the primary rhetorica...
We're not going to give you a speech about how answering this Shmoopy AP English Lit question will help you succeed in life, but if we did, we wond...
AP English Language and Composition 4.9 Passage Drill. The syntax of the third paragraph suggests that the speaker...what?