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Playlist AP® English Language and Composition: Passage Drills 40 videos

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AP English Language and Composition 1.7 Passage Drill
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AP English Language and Composition: Passage Drill Drill 1, Problem 7. What is the principal rhetorical function of paragraphs one to three?

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AP English Language and Composition 1.8 Passage Drill
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AP English Language and Composition: Passage Drill 1, Problem 8. The quotation marks in the third paragraph chiefly serve to what?

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AP English Language and Composition 2.10 Passage Drill
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In this AP Language and Composition drill question, read the provided passage and infer information based upon footnote two. AP Language and Com...

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AP English Language and Composition 4.2 Passage Drill 191 Views


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Description:

AP English Language and Composition 4.2 Passage Drill. Which of the following lines provides the most unity to the passage?

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:00

[ musical flourish ]

00:03

And here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by unity.

00:07

What do you call it when a bunch of short people get behind a cause?

00:11

Punity.

00:13

Is that bad?

00:14

We didn't mean to be...

00:28

All right, well, we're moving on. We're done reading.

00:30

Which of the following lines provides the most

00:32

unity to the passage?

00:34

And here are the potential answers.

00:35

All right. [ mumbles ]

00:39

All right, well, let's go one by one.

00:41

In the first portion of the passage, the speaker questions whether it's even

00:44

possible to answer the question he's asked.

00:47

In the second, he goes on about life and immortality.

00:50

So the section that gives the most unity

00:52

to the whole passage is the one that ties these

00:55

two together. Get it? That's the key to answering this question.

00:58

It'll be like the ankle rope in the three-legged race.

01:01

In option B, the speaker spends all his time questioning

01:03

whether the question he's been asked is too big to answer.

01:06

For the record, AP test graders aren't impressed by this tactic.

01:10

Choice E comes right after B in the first paragraph, and it

01:13

keeps the same ball up in the air.

01:15

Though these two might play nicely together, they don't do anything to unify

01:18

the entire passage, so we can cross them both off the list.

01:22

We've got the opposite situation with options D and C.

01:25

In D, the speaker tells us that some people find more life

01:28

in death than they had in life.

01:30

Obviously a Walking Dead fan.

01:33

[ mumbles ]

01:35

In C, he clarifies by saying that some people live on in

01:38

the memory of others and have more impact after they die

01:41

than when they're alive.

01:43

Too bad he wasn't talking directly about zombies.

01:45

Yeah. Well, whatever the case, all this talk about life and immortality

01:48

is totally limited to the second half of the passage.

01:50

So neither C nor D is gonna win its merit badge for unity today.

01:54

So it looks like choice A is our best option. The speaker says,

01:58

"One cannot make the best of such impossibilities,

02:01

and the question is doubly fatuous until we are

02:04

told which of our two lives - the conscious or the unconscious -

02:08

is held by the asker to be the truer life."

02:11

Ugh. That was a mouthful.

02:14

What the speaker is doing here is connecting the two sections

02:17

by showing how it's especially impossible to answer the question

02:20

about how best to live our lives

02:22

until we know which kind of life we're talking about.

02:25

Does anybody else feel their brains expanding by just talking about this stuff?

02:28

[ zombie sounds ]

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