Interpreting a person’s mood requires good human relation skills.
Interpreting a writer’s mood requires good critical thinking skills.
Writers cannot literally frown or smile at the reader, they can ______
Example question stems:
The author’s attitude toward – is best described as
The author’s tone in the passage is best described as
The author uses the word “---” to express
The author’s perspective on – is that of
SAT writers often draw upon a small but important group of words to describe different attitudes:
CynicalSkepticalOptimismPessimism
NostalgiaScornIndifference Sarcasm
AmbivalenceCondescensionEsteemFlippant
The strategy:
- Look back and the passage and identify positive and negative words used to describe the topic.
- Narrow your choices accordingly.
- Get rid of any negative choices regarding ethnic groups.
Practice!
As soon as the Army set Michael free he went to Harvard, mostly because he was determined not to be taken in by any of the myths or legends of Harvard, either: he didn’t even care to acknowledge, let alone admire, the beauty of the place. It was “school,” a school like any other, and as grimly eager as any other to collect its share of his GI Bill of Rights money.
But after a year or two he began to relent a little. Most of the courses were stimulating; most of the books were the kind he had always wanted to read; the other students, some of them, anyway, were turning out to be the kind of men he had always craved as companions.
Michael’s attitude toward Harvard changed from:
- Disconnection to ingratitude
- Admiration to indifference
- Esteem to understanding
- Anxiety to skepticism
- Detachment to appreciation
The Federalist Party completely discounted the ability and intelligence of the ordinary citizen. Indeed, scorn and distain for the so-called “middling sort” were cornerstones of Federalist ideology. For Jefferson and his followers, the essential political question was thus, “How can we respond to these misconceptions?”
The author uses the question “How can we respond to these misconceptions?” to express Jefferson’s:
- Objections to the views of the Federalists
- Ambivalence toward the views of the Federalists
- Detachment from the views of the Federalists
- Optimistic appraisal of the views of the Federalists
- Tentative support for the views of the Federalists
It is April 1959, I’m standing at the railing of the Batory’s upper deck, and I feel that my life is ending. I’m looking out at the crowd that has gathered on the shore to see the ship’s departure from Gdynia- a crowd that, all of a sudden, is irrevocably on the other side- and I want to break out, run back, run toward the familiar excitement, the waving hands, the exclamations. We can’t be leaving all of this behind- but we are. I am thirteen years old, and we are emigrating. It’s a notion of such crushing, definitive finality that to me it might as well mean the end of the world.
Within the context of this paragraph, the author’s statement, “We can’t be leaving all of this behind- but we are,” expresses her growing mood of
- Skepticism
- Indifference
- Despair
- Exuberance
- Optimism
Your turn!
Certainly the blue crab is superbly designed for speed in the water. Its body is shallow, compressed, and fusiform, or tapering at both ends. Although strong, its skeletal frame is very light, as anyone who picks up a cast-off shell readily appreciates. At the lateral extremities are wickedly tapered spines, the Pitot tubes, one might say, of the crab’s supersonic air frame. (These spines grow very sharp in large crabs; and good sized specimens falling to a wooden deck occasionally impale themselves on them, quivering like the target knives of a sideshow artist.) This lateral adaptation is as it should be, of course, for an animal given to sideways travel.
In this paragraph, the author adopts the tone of a
- ______
- ______
- ______
- ______
- ______