<p>I found the Jefferson passage online!! Here it is:</p>
<p>Before editorial changes were made by the Continental Congress, Jefferson's early draft made it even clearer that his intention was to express a spiritual vision: ' We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & unalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness." These are the core articles of faith in the American Creed. Jefferson's authorship of these words is the core of his seductive appeal across the ages, his central claim, on posterity's affection. What, then, do they mean? How do they make magic?
Merely to ask the question is to risk being accused of some combination of treason and sacrilege, since self-evident truths are not meant to be analyzed; that is what being self-evident is all about. But when these words are stripped of the patriotic haze, read straightaway and literally, two monumental claims are being made here. The explicit claim is that the individual is the sovereign unit in society; his natural state is freedom from and equality with all other individuals; this is the natural order of things. The implicit claim is that all restrictions on this natural order are immoral transgressions, violations of what God intended; individuals liberated from such restrictions will interact with their fellows in a harmonious scheme requiring no external discipline and producing maximum human happiness.</p>
<h2>This is a wildly idealistic message, the kind of good news simply too good to be true. It is, truth be told, a recipe for anarchy. Any national government that seriously attempted to operate in accord with these principles would be committing suicide. But, of course, the words were not intended to serve as an operational political blueprint. Jefferson was not a profound political thinker. He was, however, an utterly brilliant political rhetorician and visionary. The genius of his vision is to propose that our deepest yearnings for personal freedom are in fact attainable. The genius of his rhetoric is to articulate irreconcilable human urges at a sufficiently abstract level to mask their mutual exclusiveness. Jefferson guards the American Creed at this inspirational level, which is inherently immune to scholarly skepticism and a place where ordinary Americans can congregate to speak the magic words together. The Jeffersonian magic works because we permit it to function at a rarefied region where real-life choices do not have to be made.</h2>
<p>Ok... so perhaps we can use this to answer some of those questions.</p>
<p>1) Why did people say those words to themselves? (they respected it)
2) What is it considered when people asked those questions? (heretical)
3) What are the monumental claims being made? (I don't remember my answer)
5) Is the author of the passage dismissive or skeptical about the implict claim?
6) What is the 'rarefied region'?</p>
<p>I put skeptical, that seems to be a huge one peopel are arguing over.</p>
<p>Could somebody repeat the choices/question of this 'rarefied region' question? I'm a bit fuzzy on what it was about. I'd remember my answer if people refreshed my memory.</p>
<p>Yeah, I put skeptical because he says it's just something that is too good to be true. He isn't dismissing the idea altogether. He just thinks that it can't work in today's world.</p>
<p>"This is a WILDLY IDEALISTIC message, the kind of good news SIMPLY TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. It is, truth be told, a RECIPE FOR ANARCHY...inherently IMMUNE to scholarly SKEPTICISM"</p>
<p>Using this, I still think it's dismissive. He never really gives it much ground in the real world, but only a fictional world, and the only way he gives it much weight is in the rhetorical sense. He also cites them as irreconcilable ideas. He never states that the idea can work, as it is impossible in the real world. He never explicitly states that it can't work in today's world, which would imply that it may someday. He outright says it can never work and that its only merit lies in the rhetorical sense.</p>
<p>I think I put that for being unlike America's realities.</p>
<p>So far I am positive I got 3 wrong (2 vocab - docile and profundity/inclusiveness, and the analogy for the poets). 1 is debateable (dismissive/skeptical).</p>
<p>I would like to see collegeboard's reasoning for which ever one is right to do better for the October test. </p>
<p>I also think that skeptical leaves the possibility of being either right or wrong. If you're skeptical then you're open to a few possibilities and can be proven wrong, but if you're dismissive you won't accept another outcome, though the problem with that is that they're talking about both the realistic world and the idealistic one.</p>
<p>AHH, I'm just going to leave it at I hate that question.</p>
<p>At my Kaplan course they said that collegeboard is very unlikely to use extreme answer choices. I am remaining hopeful that the answer is skeptical.</p>
<p>I've read that it can usually be any answer choice except for indifferent.</p>
<p>I don't know. I think his tone/attitude is dismissive because of the extreme words that he used and the emphasis (which was my main indicator), though analyzing the passage as a whole could be skeptical.</p>
<p>I used grammatix, which basically said that if you mark an answer you should be able to cite something as evidence, so I used that section as evidence. He technically does not mention the implicit claim after that extreme language again; rather, he goes back to talking about Jefferson's rhetoric.</p>