Maggie was serverly burnt in a house fire years before the storys time
It can affect your life in the business world in a lot of ways. If you have good rhetoric, you're more likely to be hired and you'll probably perform better since you'd be more persuasive and eloquent.
If you have poor rhetoric, you're probably less likely to be hired because you don't know the vocabulary or you're not very persuasive. You also might perform poorly (for instance if you had to sell something and you didn't have good speech)
the authors purpose was to simply teach you and entertain at the same time the author is explaining that even though he was nervous of his new coming year he had noticed hope through his friends and his teacher
