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Diction and Syntax Videos 11 videos

AP English Literature and Composition 1.3 Passage Drill 1
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AP English Literature and Composition 1.3 Passage Drill 1. In the context of the passage, what does the word "compass" in line 15 mean?

AP English Literature and Composition 1.6 Passage Drill 1
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AP English Literature and Composition 1.6 Passage Drill 1. To what idea does the phrase "my opinion" in line 49 refer?

AP English Literature and Composition 1.10 Passage Drill 1
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AP English Literature and Composition 1.10 Passage Drill 1. The speaker's diction in this passage serves to characterize him as which of the f...

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AP English Literature and Composition 1.5 Passage Drill 3 194 Views


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Description:

AP English Literature and Composition 1.5 Passage Drill 3. The term "picayune" is best understood as what?

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:03

Shmoop, there it is...

00:05

Hm... wonder what that pause button does... maybe you should hit it and see what happens...

00:37

The term "picayune" is BEST understood as... what?

00:41

And here are the potential answers...

00:48

Vocab time, boys and girls. Of course, we don't just want to look this puppy up on dictionary.com...

00:55

...instead, we need to take a look at how it's used here in the passage and make a judgment

00:59

call based on context.

01:01

Ugh... dictionary.com would be so much easier...

01:04

Okay, so the word is used on line 29:

01:08

"I don't ask you to think of your family or friends, because I know they don't count a

01:13

picayune with you beside your sense of duty..."

01:17

If we replace our vocab word with each of the answer choices, which one makes the most sense?

01:21

Well, first off we can pretty much eliminate A, B and D because... they all mean the same thing, more or less.

01:27

And they all mean roughly the opposite of what we're looking for... we want something

01:31

that translates to: "I know you couldn't care less about your family"...

01:34

...so we certainly don't want words that make it sound as if Burne cares strongly, greatly,

01:39

or a large amount about them.

01:41

Plugging in E -- an insufficient amount -- sorta fits... but it creates a double negative situation

01:47

and doesn't quite make sense grammatically.

01:50

So we're looking for answer C -- a small amount.

01:53

And we get a sentence that roughly says, "I know your family only matters to you a small

01:57

amount, except when it comes to duty."

02:01

Hopefully there will be only a small amount of duty.

02:03

We're running out of plastic bags.

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