I. Getting the Phone Call: When I finally got the phone call from the producers of the reality TV show "The Coolest Kid in Schoo
l" telling me I had been accepted as a part of the show's final cast, you’d think that my mom would’ve been happy about it—even proud. I’d shown more initiative in applying for the show than I’d ever shown in trying to improve my grade point average: I’d made an awesome audition tape, filled out a huge 15 page application (including four essays!), and done five different stressful interviews before a panel of producers in order to make the final cut. The phone call informing me that I was on the show was a dream come true for me. But for my mom? No way. She immediately changed her tune from supporting my dream of starring on a reality TV show to doing nothing but questioning it. It’s not so much that she’s opposed to this reality show (focusing on pitting teenagers against one another in a televised popularity contest), it’s all reality shows that she thinks are, in her words, “hate-filled, degrading, and wicked.” She could not be more wrong, though. II. My Mom is Over-reacting: Let’s just face it. People who hate reality shows are really just old, humorless sourpusses. These are people whose last favorite TV show was something produced 40 years ago in black-and-white. They want tv shows to look like what they want reality to look like and not look like what it actually is. In old TV shows, the good guys always win and morality prevails. But reality is not like that—and thus reality shows aren’t either. What could the author add to support his argument in the last sentence of Paragraph 2? A) Take out the claim that reality shows are extremely popular. B) Take out his description of all he did to get on the reality show C) Add an example of an unhappy event occurring on a show, just as it would in real life D) Add a sentence describing his father’s reaction to his future reality show experience.
The answer is C) Add an example of an unhappy event occurring on a show. This would explain to his mother that things are not always happy ending but rather difficult sometimes.
<span>The
statement that best explains how Neil de Grasse Tyson’s “Death by Black Hole”
and Billy Collins’s “Man Listening to Disc” present differing views about the
universe would be choice letter c, “Collins’s poem puts forth the idea that
humans can become the center of the universe, while Tyson reveals that humans
are insignificantly small and weak in comparison to a black hole.<span>”</span></span>
