1. Based on your reading of the following passage and the author’s use of the words regal, princeliness, and nobility in conjunction with his description of Nelson Mandela, what do you think Mandela looked like when he emerged from his long prison stay?

I wonder if my children will remember when their mother and I woke them up early on a Sunday morning, just to watch Nelson Mandela walk out of prison, and how it took a couple of hours for him to emerge, and how they both wanted to go back to bed and, then, to watch cartoons? And how we began to worry that something bad had happened to him on the way out, because the delay was so long? And how, when he finally walked out of that prison, we were so excited and teary-eyed at Mandela’s nobility, his princeliness, his straight back and unbowed head? I think I felt that there walked the Negro, as Pop might have said; there walked the whole of the African people, as regal as any king. And that feeling I had, that gooseflesh sense of identity that I felt at seeing Nelson Mandela, listening to Mahalia Jackson sing, watching Muhammad Ali fight, or hearing Martin Luther King speak, is part of what I mean by being colored.

Work Cited

Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “On Honoring Blackness.” American Enterprise 6.5 (Sept/Oct. 1995): 49.

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2. Read the following passage from “The World of Doublespeak” by William Lutz and note the bolded word.

Doublespeak is language that pretends to communicate but really doesn’t. It is language that makes the bad seem good, the negative appear positive, the unpleasant appear attractive or at least tolerable. Doublespeak is language that avoids or shifts responsibility, language that is at variance with its real or purported meaning. It is language that conceals or prevents thought; rather than extending thought, doublespeak limits it.

Work Cited:

Lutz, William. “The World of Doublespeak.” Doublespeak. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989. Print.

By using context clues, what do you think tolerable means?

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3. By using your knowledge of context clues, what do you think esoteric means in the following passage?

But jargon, like the euphemism, can also be doublespeak. It can be — and often is — pretentious, obscure, and esoteric terminology used to give an air of profundity, authority, and prestige to speakers and their subject matter. Jargon as doublespeak often makes the simple appear complex, the ordinary profound, the obvious insightful. In this sense it is used not to express but impress.

Work Cited:

Lutz, William. “The World of Doublespeak.” Doublespeak. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989. Print.

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4. By using your knowledge of context clues, what do you think gumption means in the following passage?

Closer examination, however, finds the McDonald’s kind of job highly uneducational in several ways. Far from providing opportunities for entrepreneurship (the lemonade stand) or self- discipline, self-supervision, and self-scheduling (the paper route), most teen jobs these days are highly structured — what social scientists call “highly routinized.”

True, you still have to have the gumption to get yourself over to the hamburger stand, but once you don the prescribed uniform, your task is spelled out in minute detail.

Work Cited:

Etzioni, Amitai. “Working at McDonald’s.” The Miami Herald. 24 Aug. 1986. Web.

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5. Using context clues, what do you think the word emulate means in the following passage?

Supervision is often both tight and woefully inappropriate. Today, fast-food chains and other such places of work (record shops, bowling alleys) keep costs down by having teens supervise teens with often no adult on the premises.

There is no father or mother figure with which to identify, to emulate, to provide a role model and guidance.

Work Cited:

Etzioni, Amitai. “Working at McDonald’s.” The Miami Herald. 24 Aug. 1986. Web.

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6. Which of the words from the following passage contains a prefix meaning “above”?

The Charper-Fraser study sees merit in learning teamwork and working under supervision. The authors have a point here. However, it must be noted that such learning is not automatically educational or wholesome. For example, much of the supervision in fast-food places leans toward teaching one the wrong kinds of compliance: blind obedience, or shared alienation with the “boss.”

Work Cited:

Etzioni, Amitai. “Working at McDonald’s.” The Miami Herald. 24 Aug. 1986. Web.

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7. Exemplification occurs when an example helps define a term. In the following passage, which sentence does not exemplify initiate?

There is an important difference between terrorists and their victims that should mute talk of the terrorists’ “rights.” The terrorist’s victims are at risk unintentionally, not having asked to be endangered. But the terrorist knowingly initiated his actions. Unlike his victims, he volunteered for the risks of his deed. By threatening to kill for profit or idealism, he renounces civilized standards, and he can have no complaint if civilization tries to thwart him by whatever means necessary.

Work Cited:

Levin, Michael. “The Case for Torture.” Newsweek. 7 June 1982.

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8. Which is the best definition of the word disingenuous in the following passage based on its roots, prefixes, and suffixes?

Just as torture is justified only to save lives (not extort confessions or recantations), it is justifiably administered only to those known to hold innocent lives in their hands. Ah, but how can the authorities ever be sure they have the right malefactor? Isn’t there a danger of error and abuse? Won’t We turn into Them?

Questions like these are disingenuous in a world in which terrorists proclaim themselves and perform for television. The name of their game is public recognition. After all, you can’t very well intimidate a government into releasing your freedom fighters unless you announce that it is your group that has seized its embassy. “Clear guilt” is difficult to define, but when forty million people see a group of masked gunmen seize an airplane on the evening news, there is not much question about who the perpetrators are. There will be hard cases where the situation is murkier. Nonetheless, a line demarcating the legitimate use of torture can be drawn. Torture only the obviously guilty, and only for the sake of saving innocents, and the line between Us and Them will remain clear.

Work Cited:

Levin, Michael. “The Case for Torture.” Newsweek. 7 June 1982.

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9. Several words or suffixes are used for comparisons. Which of the following words in the passage below does not use a suffix to show a comparison?

This has happened because insects, in a triumphant vindication of Darwin’s principle of the survival of the fittest, have evolved super races immune to the particular insecticide used, hence a deadlier one has always to be developed — and then a deadlier one than that.

Work Cited:

Carson, Rachel. “The Obligation to Endure.” Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962. Print.

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10. By using your knowledge of context clues, what do you think the word vernacular means in the following passage?

Among them are many that are used in man’s war against nature. Since the mid-1940’s over 200 basic chemicals have been created for use in killing insects, weeds, rodents, and other organisms described in the modern vernacular as “pests”; and they are sold under several thousand different brand names.

Work Cited:

Carson, Rachel. “The Obligation to Endure.” Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962. Print.

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