Deck 9: Analyzing Arguments

Question 1

For each passage, choose the appropriate letter to identify the author's tone. The truth is, if you asked me to choose between winning the Tour de France and cancer, I would choose cancer.Odd as it sounds, I would rather have the title of cancer survivor than winner of the Tour, because of what it has done for me as a human being, a man, a husband, a son, and a father.In those first days after crossing the finish line in Paris, I was swept up in a wave of attention, and as I struggled to keep things in perspective, I asked myself why my victory had such a profound effect on people.Maybe it's because illness is universal-we've all been sick, no one is immune, and so my winning the Tour was a symbolic act, proof that you cannot only survive cancer, but thrive after it.Maybe, as my friend Phil Knight says, I am hope.
(Lance Armstrong with Sally Jenkins, It's Not About the Bike.New York: G.P.Putnam, 2000, p.265.)

A) emotionally neutral
B) inspirational
C) arrogant
D) sorrowful

Answer 1

B

Question 2

For each passage, choose the appropriate letter to identify the author's tone. Company owners and executives have every right to read employees' e-mail messages when those messages are sent via the company's computer system.Employees may argue that their privacy is violated when their employers monitor their communications.However, courts of law have correctly supported companies' rights to retrieve even the personal messages their workers write.According to the court's logic, the computers and the e-mail system are company property, so companies can monitor what goes into and out of those computers.Granted, companies that check private e-mail messages risk creating a climate of suspicion and mistrust, and this climate could result in uncomfortable working conditions.Nevertheless, company administrators must make sure their employees are not wasting time and money by conducting personal business during working hours.Employers also must protect themselves from liability.When offensive content is sent via the company e-mail system, the company can be held responsible.For example, female employees have successfully sued their employers for sexual harassment after receiving messages containing sexual content via the company's internal e-mail system.Employers certainly can't monitor all messages.Still they are wise to let employees know that they will occasionally check e-mail communications in order to prevent problems from occurring.

A) emotionally neutral
B) sure and confident
C) unsure and doubtful
D) angry

Answer 2

B

Question 3

Write the appropriate letters to identify the author's purpose and tone.
On December 12, 1990, John Joseph ("Johnnie Boy") Gotti was indicted for racketeering and murder.He had previously been acquitted at three separate trials in five years, earning him the sobriquet * "the Teflon Don." Gotti's ability to avoid conviction appears to have been aided by several factors: competition between Justice Department officials; a detective on the New York City Police Department's Intelligence Unit, who in 1993 pled guilty to selling secrets; and jury tampering-one juror was convicted of selling his vote.On April 2, 1992, Gotti was found guilty of forty-three federal charges, including six murders, one being that of mob boss Paul Castellano.Gorri's acting underboss, Frank Locascio, age fifty-nine, was found guilty of racketeering and murder conspiracy charges.On June 23, 1992, both were sentenced to life imprisonment.
(Howard Abadinsky, Organized Crime.Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Learning, 2000, p.124.)
_______________
*sobriquet: nickname
The author's point is as follows:
a.Because of the incompetence of the FBI, John Gotti was able to avoid imprisonment for over a decade.
b.For years, Mafia boss John Gotti managed to avoid being convicted, but the federal government finally made its case against him in 1992.
c. Several factors contributed to John Gotti's ability to escape conviction for his crimes, but by 1992 none of those factors was working in Gotti's favor anymore, and he went to prison for life.
The author's purpose is
a.to inform readers about the conviction of John Joseph Gotti in 1992.
b.to persuade readers that John Joseph Gotti is a despicable gangster.
The author's tone is
a.disgusted.
b.cool.
c.surprised.
d.emotionally neutral.

Answer 3

c, a, d

Question 4

For each passage, choose the appropriate letter to identify the author's tone. In the last decade, women's basketball, like women's soccer, has become a lucrative and popular sport.And suddenly, what do you know, men are complaining that they don't have equal access to jobs as coaches of female basketball teams.They argue, with what they think is common sense, that at issue should be the coach's talent, not his or her gender.Voiced most publicly by Geno Auriemma, the head coach of the Connecticut Huskies, this argument has been echoed by many other men eager to coach women's basketball teams.Despite its seemingly sound logic, however, this same argument has not been applied in reverse.When it comes to coaching male basketball teams, those who are hired are almost always male.What it comes down to, then, is this: Men want access to a hundred percent of the available coaching jobs with no restrictions placed on them because of their gender, and they want this unrestricted access at the very same time that women are restricted to jobs coaching female players.The answer, then, seems to be simple.On the day when women coaches can move easily between male and female basketball teams, men should be granted the exact same fluidity of employment.But until that day comes, and it is probably a long time in the offing, * men should face the same restrictions women do.They should be limited by their gender to the coaching of men and men only.In this case, turnabout really is fair play.
__________
*offing: future

A) emotionally neutral
B) serious
C) sarcastic
D) comical

Question 5

For each passage, choose the appropriate letter to identify the author's tone. Caricatures have been used to poke fun at political leaders for hundreds of years, yet their impact is not what it used to be.In the fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci created what was called a "charged portrait" by including warts when he drew sketches of the rich and powerful.The portraits were meant as an implicit criticism of corrupt behavior.Often, they found their mark, eliciting howls of rage from those depicted.In the nineteenth century, artists like Thomas Nast and Frederick Opper published their unflattering cartoon exagger-ations of corrupt and inept leaders in magazines and newspapers.These critical portraits helped incite the public's anger against those leaders and ultimately forced many of them out of office.By the twentieth century, though, politicians seemed to have become immune to caricatures, so much so that many of them actually collected the cartoons in which they were portrayed.U.S.President Lyndon Johnson, for example, liked seeing caricatures of himself and would put his favorites on view for reporters.During the 1960s and 1970s, artists who hoped to affect political and social opinion were often disappointed to find that their drawings seemed to have little public impact.
(Source of information: Steven Heller, "A President Can Never Be Accused of a Lack of Caricature,"  The New York Times, June 11, 2001, p.16.)

A) emotionally neutral
B) sarcastic
C) disappointed
D) humorous

Question 6

Write the appropriate letters to identify the author's purpose and tone.
St.Augustine, Florida, America's oldest city, was founded by the Spanish to maintain their religious influence in the region.By 1561, Spain's King Philip had lost many good men, including explorers Juan Ponce de Leon and Hernando de Soto, to his pursuit of more territory and gold.As a result, he decided Florida wasn't worth settling.In 1564, however, the French built a fort near present-day Jacksonville, and Philip quickly changed his mind.He wasn't about to allow people he considered heretics * to take up residence in "his" Florida.By 1565, Philip had decided to take action.He sent an expedition of 2,600 men under the leadership of Pedro Menendez de Aviles to drive the French out of Florida.On September 3 of 1565, Menendez sighted a Florida harbor where his thirty ships could dock.He named the region around the harbor San Augustine after the patron saint of his hometown.Welcomed by the local Indians, the Spaniards quickly settled in and just as quickly attacked the French fort, killing all but a few professed Catholics.Then the Spanish invaders turned their attention to building the fort that became today's city of St.Augustine.
______________________________
*heretics: people who defy religious laws
The author's point is as follows
a.The Spanish settled St.Augustine in Florida because Spain's King Philip wanted to keep the region Catholic.
b.The French were no match for the Spanish when it came to settling what both called The New World.
c.Florida was a difficult region to settle because the local Indians were resentful of the new arrivals taking over land the Indians considered their own.
The author's purpose is:
a.to inform readers about how and why Florida was settled by the Spanish.
b.to persuade readers that the founding of St.Augustine was based on greed and bigotry.
The author's tone is:
a.outraged.
b.sad.
c.disgusted.
d.emotionally neutral.

Question 7

Write the appropriate letters to identify the author's purpose and tone.
A Rhode Island College freshman had a paper to write on the topic of homelessness in the United States.He fulfilled the assignment by cutting and pasting passages taken from a web site that listed and answered the most frequently asked questions about the topic. When his plagiarizing was discovered, he claimed to believe that he did not need to cite the sources because no authors were listed next to either the answers or the questions (presumably our young scholar thought the answers had materialized on the page by magic and no human involvement was needed).Another student, this one from DePaul University, got caught plagiarizing because the passages he lifted from the Web all had a different typeface from the few select passages he had written himself.When confronted by his professor, he was not especially embarrassed.He did, however, want to know how to make the type uniform in time for the next paper he needed to "write."  A similar incident occurred at the University of Maryland, where a student lifted passages from Wikipedia for a term paper and when a professor asked her if she realized she had plagiarized, she insisted that was impossible because she had taken the passages from Wikipedia, and the entries were written collectively. These students are just the tip of the iceberg, and the excuses they give are typical of many college students today. But the fact that there are lots of students making the same silly excuses doesn't make them any more legitimate.Using words you yourself did not come up with is stealing the work of others, and it doesn't matter of those words came from the collective mind of a group or the mind of a single individual, those words aren't yours to be presented as your own.
The author's point is as follows:
a.Where student writing is concerned, the Internet has been a disaster with the majority of students cutting and pasting bits and pieces of other people's work and calling it their own.
b.Although the issue has gotten a huge amount of publicity, plagiarism on college campuses is not as serious a problem as the media tries to make it.
c.Today's college students need to clearly understand that using someone else's words and putting their name to those words is plagiarism; it doesn't matter if those words were found in a book or on the Internet.
The author's purpose is:
a.to inform readers about the problem of Internet plagiarism.
b.to persuade readers that cutting and pasting passages from the Internet and putting your name on the result is  highly unethical.
The author's tone is
a.subdued.
b.humorous.
c.outraged
d.emotionally neutral.

Question 8

Write the appropriate letters to identify the author's purpose and tone.
Although the oil industry is demanding permission to go forward with plans to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, environmentalists are just as determined to prevent this disaster from happening.The refuge is a pristine *, wilderness characterized by unspoiled tundra*, sparkling rivers, and beautiful valleys that are home to magnificent animals such as bears, caribou, moose, and wolves.As the 2010 gulf spill in the Gulf of Mexico showed, oil companies go forward with drilling even when they don't have a plan in place for unforeseen accidents.The result can be an environmental disaster that causes unspeakable misery for years to come.We cannot take the chance that what happened in the Gulf be repeated, with its horrific devastation of nature and wild life, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.Drilling there will foul this lovely place and its creatures, scarring one of our country's grandest untouched landscapes.Oil development has already destroyed the air, water, and land of 1,000 square miles of Alaska's coastal plain, which has been marred by pipelines, roads, production plants, power plants, treatment plants, refineries, and aircraft runways.Similar damage to the wildlife refuge would be doubly disastrous because it might not even be fruitful.The amount of oil in the area is merely an estimate.No one is sure just how much is actually there because the government allowed oil companies to survey the area only once in 1984-1985.The technology they used at the time was woefully inadequate compared to today's sophisticated computer modeling.In the end, allowing oil companies to trample the Arctic in pursuit of oil would be a horrible crime against nature.
_______________________________________
*pristine: pure, without flaw
*tundra: treeless area with permanently frozen subsoil
The author's point is as follows:
a.There is a huge controversy concerning the oil industry's plan to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
b.It would be a terrible mistake to allow the oil industry to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
c. As the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico proved, the oil companies are not prepared to handle the disasters that can be unleashed if proper safety precautions are not taken during drilling.
The author's purpose is:
a.to inform readers about the oil industry's plans for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
b.to persuade readers that the oil industry's plans are a mistake.
The author's tone is:
a.passionate.
b.surprised.
c.relaxed.
d.emotionally neutral.

Question 9

For each passage, choose the appropriate letter to identify the author's tone. The current exhibit of paintings by the sixteenth-century artist Artemisia Gentileschi is a wonder to behold, proof positive of the artist's extraordinary talent.Less wondrous, how-ever, is the text accompanying those paintings.Written by a modern feminist, the text insists on attributing the emotional impact of Gentileschi's female figures to her biography rather than to her talent.Forced to become the mistress of her father's friend at the age of sixteen, the young Artemisia did know suffering early in life, and it may or may not have influenced her painting style.But the ability to infuse her female portraits with a passionate fury that practically jumps off the canvas made itself evident in sketches that preceded her humiliation.Thus, attributing the emotional power of Gentileschi's work to suppressed anger at men makes little or no sense.Art historians, like literary ones, need to stop looking at the past through modern lenses.When they do, the picture is invariably distorted.

A) emotionally neutral
B) sad
C) annoyed
D) solemn