Concept Review 4:Simplifyingthe Passage
184 MCGRAW-HILL’S SAT
- What should you visualize when reading a narrative?
- What should you visualize when reading an argument?
- What should you visualize when reading an analysis?
- What questions should you answer at the end of each paragraph?
Practice paraphrasing by writing a quick summary after each paragraph.
- When examined closely, “raising standards” does not often have the effect of improving education, despite all the
rhetoric. When this game—and it is largely a game—is played right, the statistics improve, and its proponents
claim victory. But we can do all sorts of horrible things to students in order to improve educational statistics:
kick out slow learners, encourage cheating, employ superficial tests that are easily coached but reflect no real
academic skill, and so on. We think that by saying we’re “raising standards,” we are challenging our children
more intensely, and thereby producing smarter and more mature kids. For the most part, it’s a con game, and
we’re all being taken in.
- Art historians and aestheticians have long been confounded by Dadaism’s complexities and seeming paradoxes.
Few seem able to express its real meaning. Dadaism imbues art with the outrageous and the whimsical, but it
is a mistake to think that it is mere child’s play. It is a profound expression of art as life in the moment. Its works
have sadly been lost on a public that expects erudition, archetypes, and allusions in its art, rather than the exu-
berance of life that art should be.