Answer:People are horrible at keeping secrets. As in, really, really bad at it (no matter what anyone may tell you to the contrary). And you know what? We’re right to be. Just like the two Rhesus Macaques in the picture above, we have an urge to spill the beans when we know we shouldn’t—and that urge is a remarkably healthy one. Resist it, and you may find yourself in worse shape than you’d bargained for. And the secreter the secret, the worse the backlash on your psyche will likely be.
I never much cared for Nathaniel Hawthorne. I first dreaded him when my older sister came home with a miserable face and a 100-pound version of The House of the Seven Gables. I felt my anxiety mount when she declared the same hefty tome unreadable and said she would rather fail the test than finish the slog. And I had a near panic attack when I, now in high school myself, was handed my own first copy of the dreaded Mr. H.
Now, I’ve never been one to judge books by size. I read War and Peace cover to cover long before Hawthorne crossed my path and finished A Tale of Two Cities (in that same high school classroom) in no time flat. But it was something about him that just didn’t sit right. With trepidation bordering on the kind of dread I’d only ever felt when staring down a snake that I had mistaken for a tree branch, I flipped open the cover.
Luckily for me, what I found sitting on my desk in tenth grade was not my sister’s old nemesis but The Scarlet Letter. And you know what? I survived. It’s not that the book became a favorite. It didn’t. And it’s not that I began to judge Hawthorne less harshly. After trying my hand at Seven Gables—I just couldn’t stay away, could I; I think it was forcibly foisted on all Massachusetts school children, since the house in question was only a short field trip away—I couldn’t. And it’s not that I changed my mind about the writing—actually, having reread parts now to write this column, I’m surprised that I managed to finish at all (sincere apologies to all Hawthorne fans). I didn’t.
But despite everything, The Scarlet Letter gets one thing so incredibly right that it almost—almost—makes up for everything it gets wrong: it’s not healthy to keep a secret.
I remember how struck I was when I finally understood the story behind the letter – and how shocked at the incredibly physical toll that keeping it secret took on the fair Reverend Dimmesdale. It seemed somehow almost too much. A secret couldn’t actually do that to someone, could it?
Explanation:
A. the headings and bullet points help organize the content in small pieces that are easy to take in.
This question is missing the excerpts. I was able to find the complete question online. The excerpts are the following:
Mr. Luther King Jr.: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness."
Governor George Wallace's inaugural speech: "We invite the negro citizens of Alabama to work with us from his separate racial station . . . as we will work with him . . . to develop, to grow in individual freedom and enrichment."
Answer:
The excerpts conflict because:
B. the first suggests that all are born with equal rights, while the second suggests that certain citizens need to be separated in order to become equal.
Explanation:
While Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. states that all men, independently of race, are born equal, Governor George Wallace states the opposite. According to him, black people can work with white people, only separately. He claims that there is equality and freedom in segregation, which we all know to be impossible. As we can see, the two excerpts present conflicting ideas. The first defies segregation while the second tries to justify it and maintain it. Having that in mind, we can choose letter B as the best option.
