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ACT Reading 1.1 Prose Fiction 1307 Views


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ACT Reading Prose Fiction Drill 1, Problem 1. Which of the following best describes the overall purpose of this passage?

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:04

Shmoopy question, comin' at ya... You may have already read this passage, but

00:08

if you want to check it out again, just hit pause. We're not going anywhere.

00:19

Which of the following best describes the overall purpose of this passage?

00:24

And here are the potential answers...

00:31

Ok, so what is this question asking?

00:33

It wants to know if we can read an uber-long passage, and boil the whole thing down to a single, overarching idea.

00:44

What is this passage... all about? Let's go through the answer choices, one by one.

00:51

Is it to note the superstitions surrounding birth?

00:55

Well, there was that part where the neighborhood women said that David would be able to see

01:00

dead people.

01:01

But...it doesn't seem like the whole passage focuses on superstition.

01:09

What about B... "To describe the circumstances of the narrator's birth as well as offer hints

01:14

about his family and his community?"

01:16

Uh, yeah. That's exactly what it does. We hear a lot about David's birth, and we get

01:21

a general sense of the quirks of the people in his neighborhood.

01:25

Just to make sure, let's take a look at C and D.

01:28

"To emphasize that the narrator's family and neighbors were sea-going people?"

01:33

Nope. The passage never says anything about that. Adios, choice C

01:41

Finally... D? "To foreshadow the narrator's unhappy adulthood?"

01:46

Well, there's one line where the neighborhood ladies say David will be unlucky, but it's

01:51

definitely not the main idea.

01:52

So our answer is B.

01:54

As in, "Burial seems like a bad choice."

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