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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 thing that makes commercials unrealistic?

What Has Mrs. Mallard Realized?
[Mrs. Mallard has locked herself in a room and is crying.]
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 her 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.
- Kate Chopin, from "The Story of an Hour" (1894)
Why does Mrs.
Mallard stop crying and feel joy?

What Has Mrs. Mallard Realized?
[Mrs.Mallard has locked herself in a room and is crying.]
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 her 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.
- Kate Chopin, from "The Story of an Hour" (1894)
Why is Mrs.
Mallard crying?

Whats Wrong with Biff and Happy?
[Biff is talking with his brother, Happy. They are together with their parents in the home where they grew up.] BIFF: [with rising agitation] Hap, Ive had twenty or thirty different kinds of jobs since I left home before the war, and it always turns out the same. I just realized it lately. In Nebraska, when I herded cattle, and the Dakotas, and Arizona, and now in Texas. Its why I came home now, I guess, because I realized it.
This farm I work on, its spring there now, see? And theyve got about fifteen new colts. Theres nothing more inspiring or beautiful than the sight of a mare and a new colt. And its cool there now, see? Texas is cool now, and its spring. And whenever spring comes to where I am, I suddenly get the feeling, my God, Im not gettin anywhere! What the hell am I doing, playing around with horses, twenty-eight dollars a week!
Im thirty-four years old, I oughta be makinmy future.
Thats when I come running home. And now, I get here, and I dont know what to do with myself. [After a pause] Ive always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all Ive done is to waste my life.
HAPPY: Youre a poet, you know that, Biff?

Youre a youre an idealist!
BIFF: No, Im mixed up very bad. Maybe I oughta get married. Maybe I oughta get stuck into something.
Maybe thats my trouble. Im like a boy. Im not married, Im not in business, I just Im like a boy. Are you content, Hap? Youre a success, arent you? Are you content?
HAPPY: Hell, no!
BIFF: Why? Youre making money, arent you?
HAPPY: [moving about with energy, expressiveness] All I can do now is wait for the merchandise manager to die. And suppose I get to be merchandise manager?
Hes a good friend of mine, and he just built a terrific estate on Long Island. And he lived there about two months and sold it, and now hes building another one.
He cant enjoy it once its finished. And I know thats just what I would do. I dont know what the hell Im workin for. Sometimes I sit in my apartment all alone.
And I think of the rent Im paying. And its crazy. But then, its what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, Im lonely.
Arthur Miller, from Death of a Salesman (1949)

Which of the following sentences best describes whats wrong with Happy?

What Has Happened to Gregor?
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.
What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream. His room, a regular human bedroom, only rather too small, lay quiet between the four familiar walls.
Above the table on which a collection of cloth samples was unpacked and spread out Samsa was a commercial traveler hung the picture which he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and put into a pretty gilt frame. It showed a lady, with a fur cap on and a fur stole, sitting upright and holding out to the spectator a huge fur muff into which the whole of her forearm had vanished!
. . . .
He slid down again into his former position. This getting up early, he thought, makes one quite stupid. A man needs his sleep. Other commercials live like harem women. For instance, when I come back to the hotel of a morning to write up the orders Ive got, these others are only sitting down to breakfast. Let me
just try that with my chief; Id be sacked on the spot. Anyhow, that might be quite a good thing for me, who
can tell? If I didnt have to hold my hand because of my parents Id have given notice long ago, Id have gone to the chief and told him exactly what I think of him. That would knock him endways from his desk! Its a queer way of doing, too, this sitting on high at a desk and talking down to employees, especially when
they have to come quite near because the chief is hard of hearing. Well, theres still hope; once Ive saved
enough money to pay back my parents debts to him that should take another five or six years Ill do it without fail. Ill cut myself completely loose then. For the moment, though, Id better get up, since my train goes at five.
Franz Kafka, from The Metamorphosis (1912)

Why must Gregor keep his current job for several more years?

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.

Which of the following best describes what is depicted in the painting?

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 best sums up what the speaker has learned from Alfonso?

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)

What is happening to the narrator?

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

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?