Read the following excerpt from “Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Then answer the question that follows. To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The majority of Emerson’s text reflects on the beauty of nature in long sentences.   What is the purpose of these short sentences with little or no internal punctuation?

Read the excerpt from The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. Then answer the question that follows.   The drawing-room was a triumph of tasteful luxury. Everything in it seemed designed to suggest wealth without appearing to demand attention: the pale carpets, the delicate furniture, and the flowers arranged as though they had grown there naturally. Beyond the tall windows, however, the street was dark and crowded, its pavement shining with rain beneath the gas lamps. Carriages passed in a steady stream, splashing through the muddy gutters, while people hurried along with their collars turned against the cold. Inside, the room remained warm and silent, protected from the disorder beyond the glass.   How does Wharton’s use of juxtaposition affect the reader’s understanding of the setting?

Read the scenario. Then, answer the question that follows. Each night, a ghost appears in Marcus’s bedroom and warns him to leave his family’s old house. When Marcus refuses, the ghost causes objects to move, doors to lock, and threatening messages to appear on the walls. Marcus searches for a way to break the spirit’s hold over the house. Which type of conflict is most clearly illustrated in this scenario?

“The Story of An Hour” Kate Chopin (1894) Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death. It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of “killed.” He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.   She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.   There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.   She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.   There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.   She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.   She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.   There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.   Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will–as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under hte breath: “free, free, free!” The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.   She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial. She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.   There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.   And yet she had loved him–sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!   “Free! Body and soul free!” she kept whispering.   Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhold, imploring for admission. “Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door–you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven’s sake open the door.”   “Go away. I am not making myself ill.” No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window.   Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.   She arose at length and opened the door to her sister’s importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister’s waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.   Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of the accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry; at Richards’ quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.   When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease–of the joy that kills.   Writing Prompt Layers of meaning exist in all works of literary fiction. Compose a thesis statement AND one body paragraph of an essay in which you analyze and explain how Chopin’s use of style and literary elements create the mood of the text. You must include textual evidence. Your thesis must be clear, concise, and clearly state the mood of the text. Within your body paragraph, you should provide at least 2 pieces of evidence with proper MLA citations. Your reasoning should link to your evidence and explain why your particular mood works with your chosen evidence.  

Which Point of View is this short story written in?

Which statement best defines a dangling modifier?

Read the excerpt from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. Then, answer the question that follows. “I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.” How does the author use meiosis in this excerpt?

Read the following excerpt from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Then answer the question that follows.   He had been left, by the death of their parents in India, guardian to a small nephew and a small niece, children of a younger, a military brother, whom he had lost two years before. These children were, by the strangest of chances for a man in his position—a lone man without the right sort of experience or a grain of patience—very heavily on his hands. It had all been a great worry and, on his own part doubtless, a series of blunders, but he immensely pitied the poor chicks and had done all he could; had in particular sent them down to his other house, the proper place for them being of course the country, and kept them there, from the first, with the best people he could find to look after them, parting even with his own servants to wait on them and going down himself, whenever he might, to see how they were doing.   What effect does the sentence structure have on the bolded sentence?

In the word ‘obviously,’ is the morpheme -ly derivational or inflectional?

Fill in the blank with the English translation for [ipelo]: