What Is the Authors Father Like?
It was an impressive place: old, solidly built, in the Tudor style, with leaded windows, a slate roof, and rooms of royal proportions. Buying it had been a big step for my parents, a sign of growing wealth. This was the best neighborhood in town,
and although it was not a pleasant place to live (especially for children), its prestige outweighed its deadliness. Given the fact that he wound up spending the rest of his life in that house, it is ironic that my father at first resisted moving there.
He complained about the price (a constant theme), and when at last he relented, it was with grudging bad humor. Even so, he paid in cash. All in one go. No mortgage, no monthly payments. It was 1959, and business was going well for him.
Always a man of habit, he would leave for work early in the morning, work hard all day, and then, when he came home (on those days he did not work late), take a short nap before dinner. Sometime during our first week in the new house,
before we had properly moved in, he made a curious kind of mistake. Instead of driving home to the new house after work, he went directly to the old one, as he had done for years, parked his car in the driveway, walked into the house
through the back door, climbed the stairs, entered the bedroom, lay down on the bed, and went to sleep. He slept for about an hour.
Needless to say, when the new mistress of the house returned to find a strange man sleeping in her bed, she was a little surprised. But unlike Goldilocks, my father did not jump up and run away. The confusion was eventually settled, and
everyone had a good laugh. Even today, it still makes me laugh. And yet, for all that, I cannot help regarding it as a pathetic story. It is one thing for a man to drive to his old house by mistake, but it is quite another, I think, for him not to notice
that anything has changed inside it.
Paul Auster, from The Invention of Solitude (1982)
Why does the author think the story of his fathers mistake is pathetic?
A. It shows how stubborn his father was.Whats Wrong with Commercial Television?
Kids who watch much commercial television ought to develop into whizzes at the dialect; you have to keep so much in your mind at once because a series of artificially short attention spans has been created. But this in itself means that the
experience of watching the commercial channels is a more informal one, curiously more homely than watching BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation].
This is because the commercial breaks are constant reminders that the medium itself is artificial, isn't, in fact, "real," even if the gesticulating heads, unlike the giants of the movie screen, are life-size. There is a kind of built-in alienation effect.
Everything you see is false, as Tristan Tzara gnomically opined. And the young lady in the St. Bruno tobacco ads who currently concludes her spiel by stating categorically: "And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything," is saying no more
than the truth. The long-term effect of habitually watching commercial television is probably an erosion of trust in the television medium itself.
Since joy is the message of all commercials, it is as well they breed skepticism. Every story has a happy ending, gratification is guaranteed by the conventions of the commercial form, which contributes no end to the pervasive unreality of it
all. Indeed, it is the chronic bliss of everybody in the commercials that creates their final divorce from effective life as we know it.
Grumpy mum, frowning dad, are soon all smiles again after the ingestion of some pill or potion; minimal concessions are made to mild frustration (as they are, occasionally, to lust), but none at all to despair or consummation. In fact, if the form
is reminiscent of the limerick and the presentation of the music-hall, the overall mood in its absolute and unruffled decorum is that of the uplift fables in the Sunday school picture books of my childhood.
Angela Carter, from Shaking a Leg (1997)
According to the author, what is the main difference between commercial channels and public television stations like the BBC?
A. Commercial television is very artificial.Why Is the Man Screaming?
Edvard Munch's 1893 painting "The Scream" is a powerful work of art that has true aesthetic value. In its raw depiction of the unavoidable human emotions of alienation, anxiety and fear, "The Scream" invites meaningful introspection as the
viewer internalizes its message of the vulnerability of the human psyche.
"The Scream" is a very dynamic and yet frightening painting. The blood-red sky and eerie water/air seem to be moving and twirling, even enveloping the screaming mans mind as he stands on a bridge completely disregarded by passers-by
who do not share in his horror. Viewers of the painting cannot help but ask:
Why is the man screaming? And why is he alone in is scream? What is he afraid of? Or, what has he realized or seen that is making him scream?
Why arent the others as affected as he? The threat must be internal, yet the brushstrokes, colors and perspective seem to indicate that the horror is also bound to something in nature, something outside of the man. In any case, the agony
and alienation are inescapable. Something horrible has happened or been realized by the man who cannot contain his horror, but has not affected the others on the bridge.
That the people in the background are calm and do not share this horror conveys a truth regarding the ownership of our own feelings. We are often alone in our feelings, as can be especially noticed when we are in pain. The horror is the
mans own; he must carry it himself. In this expressionist piece, the black, red, and orange colors are both bold and dark, illuminating and haunting at the same time. Remarkably, the light from the blood-reds and vibrant oranges in the distant
sky seem to be somewhat detached from the figure in the forefront, failing to reach his persona, suggesting that there is little to illuminate his (and the viewers) fears.
The mans face is nondescript; in fact, it almost looks more like a skull than a living mans face, hollow with two simple dots to indicate the nostrils, no hair, no wrinkles of the skin. This could be any man or woman, left to deal with his or her
own horrors.
According to the author, what might be making the man scream?
A. He has seen something horrible.What Did the Speaker Learn from Alfonso?
Alfonso I am not the first poet born to my family. We have painters and singers, actors and carpenters.
I inherited my trade from my zio, Alfonso. Zio maybe was the tallest man in the village, he certainly was the widest. He lost his voice to cigarettes before I was born, but still he roared with his hands, his eyes, with his brow, and his deafening
smile.
He worked the sea with my nonno fishing in silence among the grottoes so my father could learn to write and read and not speak like the guaglione, filled with curses and empty pockets.
He would watch me write with wonder, I could hear him on the couch, he looked at the lines over my shoulder, tried to teach himself to read late in the soft Adriatic darkness. Wine-stained pages gave him away.
But I learned to write from Zio He didnt need words, still he taught me the language of silence, the way the sun can describe a shadow, a gesture can paint a moment, a scent could fill an entire village with words and color and sound, a
perfect little grape tomato can be the most beautiful thing in the world, seen through the right eyes.
Marco A. Annunziata (2002)
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Which of the following statements about Alfonso is true?
A. He was a poet.What Happened When He Came to America? My parents lost friends, lost family ties and patterns of mutual assistance, lost rituals and habits and favorite foods, lost any link to an ongoing social milieu, lost a good part of the sense they had of themselves. We lost a house, several towns, various landscapes. We lost documents and pictures and heirlooms, as well as most of our breakable belongings, smashed in the nine packing cases that we took with us to America. We lost connection to a thing larger than ourselves, and as a family failed to make any significant new connection in exchange, so that we were left aground on a sandbar barely big enough for our feet. I lost friends and relatives and stories and familiar comforts and a sense of continuity between home and outside and any sense that I was normal. I lost half a language through want of use and eventually, in my late teens, even lost French as the language of my internal monologue. And I lost a whole network of routes through life that I had just barely glimpsed. Hastening on toward some idea of a future, I only half-realized these losses, and when I did realize I didnt disapprove, and sometimes I actively colluded. At some point, though, I was bound to notice that there was a gulf inside me, with a blanketed form on the other side that hadnt been uncovered in decades.My project of self-invention had been successful, so much so that I had become a sort of hydroponic vegetable, growing soil-free. But I had been formed in another world; everything in me that was essential was owed to immersion in that place, and that time, that I had so effectively renounced. [ . . . . ] Like it or not, each of us is made, less by blood or genes than by a process that is largely accidental, the impact of things seen and heard and smelled and tasted and endured in those few years before our clay hardens. Offhand remarks, things glimpsed in passing, jokes and commonplaces, shop displays and climate and flickering light and textures of walls are all consumed by us and become part of our fiber, just as much as the more obvious effects of upbringing and socialization and intimacy and learning. Every human being is an archeological site. Luc Sante, from The Factory of Facts (1998) According to the author, our personalities are formed mostly by
A. our genes.What Inspires Thomas?
[Thomas Builds-the-Fire is a Spokane Indian living on the Spokane Indian Reservation.]
So Thomas went home and tried to write their first song. He sat alone in his house with his bass guitar and waited for the song. He waited and waited. Its nearly impossible to write a song with a bass guitar, but Thomas didn't know that. He’d
never written a song before. "Please," Thomas prayed. But the song would not come, so Thomas closed his eyes, tried to find a story with a soundtrack. He turned on the television and watched The Sound of Music on channel four. Julie
Andrews put him to sleep for the sixty-seventh time, and neither story nor song came in his dreams.
After he woke up, he paced around the room, stood on his porch, and listened to those faint voices that echoed all over the reservation. Everybody heard those voices, but nobody liked to talk about them. They were loudest at night, when
Thomas tried to sleep, and he always thought they sounded like horses. For hours,
Thomas waited for the song.
Then, hungry and tired, he opened his refrigerator for something to eat and discovered that he didnt have any food. So he closed the fridge and opened it again, but it was still empty. In a ceremony that he had practiced since his youth, he
opened, closed, and opened the fridge again, expecting an immaculate conception of a jar of pickles. Thomas was hungry on a reservation where there are ninety-seven different ways to say fry bread.
[. . . .]
As his growling stomach provided the rhythm, Thomas sat again with his bass guitar, wrote the first song, and called it "Reservation Blues."
Sherman Alexie, from Reservation Blues (1995)
Thomas titles the song "Reservation Blues." Based on this passage, you can expect the song to be about
A. the good times he's had on the reservation.Why Are the Characters Arguing?
[Sophie, the narrator, is talking with Tante Atie.
The first line is spoken by Tante Atie.]
"Do you know why I always wished I could read?" Her teary eyes gazed directly into mine. "I don't know why." I tried to answer as politely as I could. "It was always my dream to read," she said, "so I could read that old Bible under my pillow
and find the answers to everything right there between those pages. What do you think that old Bible would have us do right now, about this moment?" "I don't know," I said.
"How can you not know?" she asked. "You try to tell me there is all wisdom in reading but at a time like this you disappoint me." "You lied!" I shouted. She grabbed both my ears and twisted them until they burned. I stomped my feet and
walked away. As I rushed to bed, I began to take off my clothes so quickly that I almost tore them off my body. The smell of lemon perfume stung my nose as I pulled the sheet over my head. "I did not lie," she said, "I kept a secret, which is
different. I wanted to tell you. I needed time to reconcile myself, to accept it. It was very sudden, just a cassette from Martine saying, I want my daughter, and then as fast as you can put two fingers together to snap, she sends me a plane
ticket with a date on it. I am not even certain that she is doing this properly. Alls he tells me is that she arranged it with a woman who works on the airplane." "Was I ever going to know?" I asked. "I was going to put you to sleep, put you in a
suitcase, and send you to her. One day you would wake up there and you would feel like your whole life here with me was a dream." She tried to force out a laugh, but it didn't make it past her throat.
Edwidge Danticat, from Breath, Eyes,Memory (1998)
How will Tante Atie feel when the narrator is gone?
A. happyWhat Did the Speaker Learn from Alfonso?
Alfonso I am not the first poet born to my family. We have painters and singers, actors and carpenters.
I inherited my trade from my zio, Alfonso. Zio maybe was the tallest man in the village, he certainly was the widest. He lost his voice to cigarettes before I was born, but still he roared with his hands, his eyes, with his brow, and his deafening
smile.
He worked the sea with my nonno fishing in silence among the grottoes so my father could learn to write and read and not speak like the guaglione, filled with curses and empty pockets.
He would watch me write with wonder, I could hear him on the couch, he looked at the lines over my shoulder, tried to teach himself to read late in the soft Adriatic darkness. Wine-stained pages gave him away.
But I learned to write from Zio He didnt need words, still he taught me the language of silence, the way the sun can describe a shadow, a gesture can paint a moment, a scent could fill an entire village with words and color and sound, a
perfect little grape tomato can be the most beautiful thing in the world, seen through the right eyes.
Marco A. Annunziata (2002)
Reprinted by permission of the author.
What is the relationship between the speaker and Alfonso?
A. Alfonso is his uncle.How Are Robots Different from Humans?
[Helena is talking to Domain, the general manager of Rossums Universal Robots factory.]
DOMAIN: Well, any one whos looked into anatomy will have seen at once that man is too complicated, and that a good engineer could make him more simply. So young Rossum began to overhaul anatomy and tried to see what could be left
out or simplified. In short but this isnt boring you, Miss Glory?
HELENA: No; on the contrary, its awfully interesting.
DOMAIN: So young Rossum said to himself: A man is something that, for instance, feels happy, plays the fiddle, likes going for walks, and, in fact, wants to do a whole lot of things that are really unnecessary.
HELENA: Oh!
DOMAIN: Wait a bit. That are unnecessary when hes wanted, let us say, to weave or to count. Do you play the fiddle?
HELENA: No.
DOMAIN: Thats a pity. But a working machine must not want to play the fiddle, must not feel happy, must not do a whole lot of other things. A petrol motor must not have tassels or ornaments, Miss Glory. And to manufacture artificial workers
is the same thing as to manufacture motors. The process must be of the simplest, and the product of the best from a practical point of view. What sort of worker do you think is the best from a practical point of view?
HELENA: The best? Perhaps the one who is most honest and hard-working.
DOMAIN: No, the cheapest. The one whose needs are the smallest. Young Rossum invented a worker with the minimum amount of requirements. He had to simplify him. He rejected everything that did not contribute directly to the progress of
work. In this way he rejected everything that made man more expensive. In fact, he rejected man and made the Robot. My dear Miss Glory, the Robots are not people. Mechanically they are more perfect than we are, they have an enormously
developed intelligence, but they have no soul. Have you ever seen what a Robot looks like inside? HELENA: Good gracious, no!
DOMAIN: Very neat, very simple. Really a beautiful piece of work. Not much in it, but everything in flawless order. The product of an engineer is technically at a higher pitch of perfection than a product of nature.
HELENA: Man is supposed to be the product of nature.
DOMAIN: So much the worse.
Karel C apek,
from R.U.R. (1923, translated by P. Selver)
Rossum created robots because
A. humans are complicated and inefficient.How Are Robots Different from Humans?
[Helena is talking to Domain, the general manager of Rossums Universal Robots factory.]
DOMAIN: Well, any one whos looked into anatomy will have seen at once that man is too complicated, and that a good engineer could make him more simply. So young Rossum began to overhaul anatomy and tried to see what could be left
out or simplified. In short but this isnt boring you, Miss Glory?
HELENA: No; on the contrary, its awfully interesting.
DOMAIN: So young Rossum said to himself: A man is something that, for instance, feels happy, plays the fiddle, likes going for walks, and, in fact, wants to do a whole lot of things that are really unnecessary.
HELENA: Oh!
DOMAIN: Wait a bit. That are unnecessary when hes wanted, let us say, to weave or to count. Do you play the fiddle?
HELENA: No.
DOMAIN: Thats a pity. But a working machine must not want to play the fiddle, must not feel happy, must not do a whole lot of other things. A petrol motor must not have tassels or ornaments, Miss Glory. And to manufacture artificial workers
is the same thing as to manufacture motors. The process must be of the simplest, and the product of the best from a practical point of view. What sort of worker do you think is the best from a practical point of view?
HELENA: The best? Perhaps the one who is most honest and hard-working.
DOMAIN: No, the cheapest. The one whose needs are the smallest. Young Rossum invented a worker with the minimum amount of requirements. He had to simplify him. He rejected everything that did not contribute directly to the progress of
work. In this way he rejected everything that made man more expensive. In fact, he rejected man and made the Robot. My dear Miss Glory, the Robots are not people. Mechanically they are more perfect than we are, they have an enormously
developed intelligence, but they have no soul. Have you ever seen what a Robot looks like inside? HELENA: Good gracious, no!
DOMAIN: Very neat, very simple. Really a beautiful piece of work. Not much in it, but everything in flawless order. The product of an engineer is technically at a higher pitch of perfection than a product of nature.
HELENA: Man is supposed to be the product of nature.
DOMAIN: So much the worse.
Karel C apek,
from R.U.R. (1923, translated by P. Selver)
Based on the passage, Rossum is most likely
A. a robot.Nowadays, the certification exams become more and more important and required by more and more enterprises when applying for a job. But how to prepare for the exam effectively? How to prepare for the exam in a short time with less efforts? How to get a ideal result and how to find the most reliable resources? Here on Vcedump.com, you will find all the answers. Vcedump.com provide not only Test Prep exam questions, answers and explanations but also complete assistance on your exam preparation and certification application. If you are confused on your GED-SECTION-4 exam preparations and Test Prep certification application, do not hesitate to visit our Vcedump.com to find your solutions here.