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A sample of passages from this courses
Questions are based on the following passages. Passage I Line I have given in to the practice, adopted long ago by many of my colleagues, known as the "beginning-of-the-year review," even though it abrades the very fiber of my being. It is,
5 fundamentally, an admission of failure. Imagine the manager of a professional baseball team spending the first few weeks of spring training reviewing the names of the positions or in what direction to run the bases. Yet the
10 students coming to us from the best high schools in America need to be reminded of the most fundamental academic tasks and tools—forming hypotheses, adding fractions, constructing a clear sentence. I can't say with
15 great certainty what is happening in our high schools, but I can say that glittering grades do not always indicate glittering minds. There seems to be no grounding, no sense of the fundamental reasoning skills and concepts of
20 academia. I often wonder if our high schools shouldn't be spending more time making sure their ladders are on secure footing before sending so many students scrambling up.
Passage 2 In every choreographed educational crisis,
25 the "back to basics" line always kicks up its heels the highest. The thinking is seemingly irrefutable: our children won't succeed without a solid foundation in basic skills. They can't do calculus before they learn long division. They
30 can't write a good college essay before they learn the five-paragraph model. They can't read Shakespeare before learning the phonetic code. The model is the pyramid: we must build a solid foundation if our children are ever to reach
35 the pinnacle of education, where the most profound questions of our era are examined. But we are losing too many students in building the pyramid. It is worth the risk to take them to the top of the pyramid, unfinished as it may be,
40 so that they might see the glorious expanse of knowledge before them, yet to be reached. If we don't take the time to show them that expanse, they will likely never learn that their hard labor has any real purpose. We are too worried about
45 failure, about not getting the right answers, that our questions and our tasks have lost almost all of their meaning.

Following are question on this passages

The first paragraph of Passage 1 reveals that the author of Passage 1
A. has recently been introduced to Fitzgerald's novels
B. has met F. Scott Fitzgerald personally
C. is writing an introduction to a book of literary criticism
D. has been critical of many of Fitzgerald's earlier works
E. is a novelist

How would the author of Passage 1 likely respond to the statement made in Passage 2 that "the novels of Scott Fitzgerald seem des- · tined again for obscurity"?
A. He would reluctantly disagree because he believes that they will continue to be a popular, but not a critical, success
B. He would strongly agree, because he believes that Fitzgerald's works are fatally flawed.
C. He would reluctantly agree because he belìeves that readers are finding it increasingly difficult to understand Fitzgerald's themes.
D. He would strongly disagree because he believes that Fitzgerald's work will continue to have strong appeal.
E. He would suggest that the statement is irrelevant because the popularity of Fitzgerald's novels is not important.