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Thoreau was all about simplicity; anything that took away from his vision was the enemy. Mechanical aids were one of them. Guess he had to train a...
Thoreau wants our lives to be simplified. He claims that we gain less from life when we over-complicate things.
How does Thoreau feel about commerce? He writes, "We don't ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us." He wants and end to the war fighting for the...
SAT Reading 1.5 Sentence Completion 179 Views
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Description:
SAT Reading Sentence Completion Drill 1, Problem 5
Transcript
- 00:03
Alright, so if you're over 18, put this question in your pipe and shmoop it...
- 00:08
Which words could fill in the blanks so that the sentence below makes sense?
- 00:12
From the moment the United States was founded as a free and independent republic, dedicated
- 00:16
to the blank that "all men are created equal," slavery represented a fundamental blank to
- 00:21
the nation's most cherished values.
Full Transcript
- 00:28
The phrase "all men are created equal" is one of the self-evident truths mentioned in
- 00:33
the Declaration of Independence. So whatever goes in the first blank has to refer to a
- 00:37
statement of equality as a belief.
- 00:39
(A), (B), and (C) all might work...
- 00:42
But (D) looks a little suspect to us.
- 00:44
"Foundation" sort of makes sense because it means the basis on which something stands.
- 00:48
Still, we have to get rid of it because it doesn't organically refer to a single idea
- 00:52
in the context of this sentence.
- 00:54
Now, we'll move on to the second blank to see which answers it can help us get rid of.
- 00:59
(A) can definitely be crossed off. Embellishment is the act of decorating something or making
- 01:04
it more beautiful, which doesn't exactly jibe with the idea of slavery.
- 01:07
(B) kind of makes sense, because deviation can mean to diverge from an established belief.
- 01:13
However, we can eliminate it because the prepositions don't line up. We'd say "deviation from"
- 01:19
not "deviation to."
- 01:20
Grammar police.
- 01:22
(E) evasion almost makes sense as well. An
- 01:25
evasion can happen when something is avoided. You know... like the evasion of fulfilling
- 01:30
one of the most fundamental beliefs on which a country is based.
- 01:34
We get into preposition trouble again here, though. We'd say "evasion of" not "evasion
- 01:39
to," so choice (E)...no good.
- 01:41
OK, we've eliminated everything but (C), so hopefully this one fits the bill.
- 01:46
Uh...this bill.
- 01:48
We gave "proposition" the go-ahead earlier, and "contradiction" works too.
- 01:53
No doubt slavery was a contradiction to the idea that all people are created equal.
- 01:57
(C) it is. C for "Couldn't we just get it right in the first place?"
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