AP English Language and Composition 4.2 Passage Drill

We didn't mean to be...

All right, well, we're moving on. We're done reading.

Which of the following lines provides the most

unity to the passage?

And here are the potential answers.

All right. [ mumbles ]

All right, well, let's go one by one.

In the first portion of the passage, the speaker questions whether it's even

possible to answer the question he's asked.

In the second, he goes on about life and immortality.

So the section that gives the most unity

to the whole passage is the one that ties these

two together. Get it? That's the key to answering this question.

It'll be like the ankle rope in the three-legged race.

In option B, the speaker spends all his time questioning

whether the question he's been asked is too big to answer.

For the record, AP test graders aren't impressed by this tactic.

Choice E comes right after B in the first paragraph, and it

keeps the same ball up in the air.

Though these two might play nicely together, they don't do anything to unify

the entire passage, so we can cross them both off the list.

We've got the opposite situation with options D and C.

In D, the speaker tells us that some people find more life

in death than they had in life.

Obviously a Walking Dead fan.

[ mumbles ]

In C, he clarifies by saying that some people live on in

the memory of others and have more impact after they die

than when they're alive.

Too bad he wasn't talking directly about zombies.

Yeah. Well, whatever the case, all this talk about life and immortality

is totally limited to the second half of the passage.

So neither C nor D is gonna win its merit badge for unity today.

So it looks like choice A is our best option. The speaker says,

"One cannot make the best of such impossibilities,

and the question is doubly fatuous until we are

told which of our two lives - the conscious or the unconscious -

is held by the asker to be the truer life."

Ugh. That was a mouthful.

What the speaker is doing here is connecting the two sections

by showing how it's especially impossible to answer the question

about how best to live our lives

until we know which kind of life we're talking about.

Does anybody else feel their brains expanding by just talking about this stuff?

[ zombie sounds ]