1. Based on your reading of the following passage and the author's use of the words regal, princeliness, and nobility in conjunc
tion 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.
He looked tearful.
He looked like he had been beaten many times.
He carried himself with great dignity.
He looked sad.
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?
the ability to be tolled or taxed
the ability to communicate
the ability to avoid responsibility
the ability to be endured
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.
related to the earth
simplistic
known by a small group
related to being outside
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.
A.initiative
B.structure
C.entrepreneurial sense
D.uneducational
