Drawing conclusions from the available information is best known as

Wade Boggs was one of the most proficient hitters in the history of baseball. He won the batting title five times and had a lifetime batting average of .363. He is also highly superstitious. Early on in his career he formed the belief that he could hit better aft er

eating chicken. For that reason, he ate chicken almost every day for twenty years when he played baseball. He is not alone in his superstitious behavior. Wayne Gretzky, the great hockey star, always tucked in the right side of his jersey behind his hip pads. Jim

Kelly, the Buffalo Bills quarterback, forced himself to vomit before every game. Bjorn Borg did not shave aft er he began to play in a major tennis tournament. Bill Parcells would buy coffee from two different coffee shops before every game when he coached

the New York Giants.

--From Don’t Believe Everything You Think by Kida

Which is the topic of the paragraph?

The answer that is the best example of vague language is

What is the author's TONE in the following passage?

Almost no feature of the interior design of our current cars provides safeguards against injury in the event of collision. Doors that fly open on impact, inadequately secured seats, the sharp-edged rear-view mirror, pointed knobs on instrument panel doors, flying glass, the overhead structure-all illustrate the lethal potential of poor design. A sudden deceleration turns a collapsed steering wheel or a sharp-edged dashboard into a bone-and-chest crushing agent. Penetration of the shatterproof windshield can chisel one’s head into fractions. A flying seat cushion can cause a fatal injury .The apparently harmless glove-compartment door has been known to unlatch under impact and guillotine a child. Roof-supporting structure had deteriorated to a point where it provides scarcely more protection to the occupants, in common rollover accidents, than an open convertible.

Ralph Nader, “The Safe Car You Can’t Buy”

What is the author's TONE in the following excerpt?

Q: I am remodeling my house and would like to know where I can find information on Jane Seymour’s home. I understand it is very beautiful. Can you help? Annie L. Rogers, Austin, Texas

A: Jane Seymour, 45, has had even more homes than husbands, so it’s hard to tell which one you have in mind. Her first two marriages – to director Michael Attenborough and businessman Geoffrey Planer – ended in divorce. During her third marriage, to business manager David Flynn, the actress split her time between a sprawling California estate in Montecito and St. Catherine’s Court, the 34-room English manor house near Bath that was featured in her 1986 book Guide to Romantic Living

From an article in “Parade Magazine” in January, 1997.

What is the author's PURPOSE in the following passage?

Car alarms are a public nuisance. Their persistent and disruptive noise has been shown to boost stress hormones that are linked to physiological illness and psychological distress. Studies also show that children regularly exposed to car alarm noise have difficulty concentrating on quiet tasks like reading. Because car alarm noise makes people irritable, it also increases the tendency to be impatient and rude. In short, noisy car alarms are helping erode public civility. And for what? For nothing. According to police, criminologists, insurance companies, auto manufacturers, and even car thieves themselves, car alarms are next to useless. A 1997 analysis of insurance claims from 73 million vehicles concluded that alarms did not deter car theft. No one pays any attention to car alarms any more because 95 to 99 percent of the alarms are false. Consequently, GM, Ford, and other manufacturers have begun to stop putting alarms in their cars. This is their way of acknowledging that the alarms are nothing but "noisemakers." It's outrageous that audible car alarms continue to needlessly reduce our quality of life. They should be made illegal immediately.

(Source of information: Aaron Friedman et al., "Alarmingly Useless: The Case for Banning Car Alarms in New York City," Transportation Alternatives, March 21, 2003, http://www.transalt.org/info/caralarms/report.pdf)

Who is the intended AUDIENCE for the following passage?

There are other biological computers besides brains, and they too consume large amounts of energy. To give one example, many cellular systems can be viewed as computers. Indeed, the comparison of thermodynamic costs in artificial and cellular computers can be extremely humbling for modern computer engineers. For example, a large fraction of the energy budget of a cell goes to translating RNA into sequences of amino acids (i.e., proteins), in the cell’s ribosome. But the thermodynamic efficiency of this computation—the amount of energy required by a ribosome per elementary operation—is many orders of magnitude superior to the thermodynamic efficiency of our current artificial computers. Are there “tricks” that cells use that we could exploit in our artificial computers? Going back to the previous biological example, are there tricks that human brains use to do their computations that we can exploit in our artificial computers?

--From Scientific American, 2018

What is the connotation of the underlined word?

What is the secret of the explosive and worldwide success of the Harry Potter books? Why do they satisfy children and -- a much harder question -- why do so many adults read them? I think part of the answer to the first question is that they are written from inside a child's-eye view, with a sure instinct for childish psychology. But then how do we answer the second question? Surely one precludes the other.

The following statement is an example of which language problem?

"The company has undergone a restructuring in the last 12 months and has redistributed its most valued assets."

The statement that expresses a fact is

"The dancer was a graceful eagle taking flight" is an example of which literary device?

An inference requires a reader to look at clues from the text and

Many cultures have their own versions of the same or similar fairy tales. For example, there are Cinderella stories from all over the world! They aren’t exactly the same, though. For instance, the fairy tale “How the Raja’s Son Won the Princess Labam” is from India. “Raja” is a title for king in India. In a Scottish version, the main character is named Rushen Coatie. Even though the details and words might be different, the basic story is similar.

What is the main idea of the passage?

What is Hyperbole?