1. Which of the following words used by Gates in the following passage contains a prefix of space, direction, or position that means “across”?

Even so, I rebel at the notion that I can’t be part of other groups, that I can’t construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me. Is that what I want on my gravestone: Here lies an African American? So I’m divided. I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time—but to do so in order to come out the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color. Bach and James Brown. Sushi and fried catfish. Part of me admires those people who can say with a straight face that they have transcended any attachment to a particular community or group . . . but I always want to run around behind them to see what holds them up.

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 purported means?

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

While it is true that these [fast food jobs] provide income, work, and even some training to such youngsters, they also tend to perpetuate their disadvantaged status. They provide no career ladders, few marketable skills, and undermine school attendance and involvement.

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 “opposite of”?

Some say that while these jobs are rather unsuited for college-bound, white, middle-class youngsters, they are “ideal” for lower-class, “non-academic,” minority youngsters. Indeed, minorities are “over-represented” in these jobs (21 percent of fast-food employees). While it is true that these places provide income, work, and even some training to such youngsters, they also tend to perpetuate their disadvantaged status. They provide no career ladders, few marketable skills, and undermine school attendance and involvement.

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 sentences exemplify extortionist?

Once you concede that torture is justified in extreme cases, you have admitted that the decision to use torture is a matter of balancing innocent lives against the means needed to save them. You must now face more realistic cases involving more modest numbers. Someone plants a bomb on a jumbo jet. He alone can disarm it, and his demands cannot be met (or if they can, we refuse to set a precedent by yielding to his threats). Surely we can, we must, do anything to the extortionist to save the passengers. How can we tell three hundred, or one hundred, or ten people who never asked to be put in danger, “I’m sorry, you’ll have to die in agony, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to . . . .”

Work Cited:

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

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8. Which the best definition of the word demarcating from the following passage?

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. The suffix -ous is used in the word impetuous in the following passage. What does the suffix and the word mean?

The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.

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 insipid means in the following passage?

Such thinking, in the words of the ecologist Paul Shepard, “idealizes life with only its head out of water, inches above the limits of toleration of the corruption of its own environment. . . . Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”

Work Cited:

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

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