Final Exam Study Guide s6

English 11 Academic Final Exam Study Guide

Your final will consist of 50 multiple choice questions on:  A short story

 A cartoon

 Excerpt from a speech

 A print advertisement

 Op-ed Writing

 Grammar

Part One: Figurative Language

Type of Figurative Language Definition Example Metaphor

Simile

Onomatopoeia

Hyperbole

Allusions

Part 2: Literary and Rhetorical Terms

Literary or Rhetorical Term Definition Example Foreshadowing

Characterization

Point of View

Counterargument

Rhetorical Question

Repetition (of words, phrases, images, or ideas) Part 3: Practice with SOAPStone and Ethos/Pathos/Logos

Op Ed: Learning to Read on Zero Dollars a When she found out, last spring, that this year’s budget for Day the district libraries would be zero, Pat held brainstorming meetings, wrote grants, sold coupon books and organized By ANTHONY DOERR the school’s calculator rental program. For alphabetizing MEET Pat St. Tourangeau, a school librarian at Boise High. and distributing student photos, the library got the Her eyes are pale blue; her hair is straight; she has an Associated Student Body Fund to pay $1 a packet. indomitable look, as though this morning, while you slept, she might have baked a mean batch of cookies, towed Including income from fines, the library staff managed to someone out of a ditch and repaired a snowmobile. raise almost $20,000 last year. That’s the budget for everything: buying books, videos and magazines; replacing I ask her how the library is doing. furniture; subscribing to newspapers; and updating technology. “Our budget next year is going to be zero,” she says. “Again.” Zero? That last one is critical: all of their computers are five years old, and some are seven or eight. “And they’re busy Our two local papers, like yours perhaps, are awash in all the time,” says Pat. “This is the only place in the school articles about embattled teachers, increased class sizes kids can drop in and use computers.” and diverted education money. But I had foolishly assumed school libraries were something sacred. Picking on But that was last year; now the library faces another year libraries is like picking on premature babies: what sort of with no budget. person would actually do it? “It has been very difficult to continually write grants and Apparently my naïveté knows no bounds. Pat makes a send out pleas for donations,” Pat says. “I think we all have circle with her thumb and forefinger. “Zero,” she repeats. post-traumatic fund-raising syndrome, an almost chronic inability to face a grant application — again! — or set up Boise High and its more than 1,400 students sit four blocks another book fair.” from the Idaho Statehouse, where the Legislature votes on budgets. Its library is a bright little place full of posters; When I was a kid, my mother, a schoolteacher, turned to there are aisles of metal shelves, wooden chairs at the library to solve basically any problem. How should we veneered tables, twin rows of outdated computers with big make costumes for Halloween? What’s that rash on your black monitors. But this is not the school library of 20 leg? What phylum do trilobites belong to? Off to the years ago: Pat blogs, uses Twitter and teaches students to library! make video book trailers; she throws out the names of online databases as if they’re ice cream flavors. Thanks to her, in my imagination libraries were little holy lands, as integral to a school as functioning toilets, or “Twenty years ago,” she says, “we had challenges helping lockers, or bad pizza. They were a place where a child kids find enough information. Now we have the opposite could learn that books could be mind-blowing, problem. There’s plenty of information out there. Now it’s unpredictable, bawdy and frightening, that books could a matter of training students to think critically about what break down the divisions between nations, between they find. Because 90 percent of what they find on the foundations of thought, and between fantasy and reality. Internet is garbage.” I sit in the Boise High library for a half-hour or so and It’s not as if the research skills that students learn, online watch. Classes come and go with waves of noise. A boy or off, are becoming less relevant, or are in less demand. peers into a computer screen; two girls work on a project There’s a little counter on the turnstiles into the Boise High together. It is a glorious spring day: little silver clouds library: in February 2010, it had 6,787 visitors. A year blow past the windows. later, it had 7,331. From last September through February, students logged over 110,000 minutes just on reference And in the corner, at a back table, one boy I hadn’t noticed databases from Gale Cengage, a library information sits alone: a lean, muscular kid. Hunched over his knees. service. With a book open in his lap. Pat’s job title is teacher-librarian. She says she thinks of herself as an information specialist. Except lately, her job title might more appropriately be fund-raising specialist. Subject

Occasion

Audience

Purpose

Speaker Tone

Appeals Example from text Ethos

Pathos

Sample Question: The author’s primary purpose for ending the passage with the image of the young boy hunched over a book is to

a. display a positive image of a young reader in order to show the continued need for libraries. b. display a negative image of reading, to show how the students have been negatively affected by library budget cuts. c. leave the audience questioning the need for libraries d. leave the audience happy that at least one child is reading

Part 4: Grammar Topics

 Parallel Structure

 Semicolon Usage

 Subject-Verb Agreement

 Pronoun Antecedent Agreement

 Correct citation of quotes

 Smoothly embedding a quotation

 Homonyms: There, They’re, Their  Proper Nouns

 Misplaced Modifiers

 Commas