<p>I believe so.</p>
<p>Here is the whole listening passage. I don't think the last line was included in the test, but this is the whole introduction to Paulsen's book:</p>
<p>
Books saved my life.</p>
<p>First reading them, then writing them.</p>
<p>As surely as my lead dog Cookie pulled me from the bottom of a lake after I fell through the ice, books are the reason I survived my miserable childhood. As certainly as my sloop Scallywag has safely taken me through storms and huge seas, books have sustained me as an adult.</p>
<p>The awfulness of my childhood has been well covered. But I remember two women who took the time to help me when I was a boy and both women, not so coincidentally, helped me with books.</p>
<p>Because I lived from the age of seven to when I was nearly ten in the Philippine Islands and had a private military tutor, I had never been to a public school.</p>
<p>We came back to the States when I was just short of ten and moved to Washington D.C. so my father, who was in the army, could work at the Pentagon. My mother promptly enrolled me in public school, took me there the first morning, handed me over to a teacher, and left.</p>
<p>I was painfully shy, terrified at the mob of kids and could not go into the room. It was an old school and at the back of the classroom, there was a cloakroom, a shallow closet the width of the room but closed in except for one door. I went in the closet and took my coat off with the rest of the children but then I could not leave, simply could not make my legs move to walk out into the classroom. I was too frightened.</p>
<p>There were many things the teacher could have done wrong. She could have forced me out, dragged me into the classroom, could have made me leave. Instead she did everything right.</p>
<p>She looked into the closet, saw me sitting back in the corner and disappeared for a moment and said something to the children. Then she came back into the closet and sat down next to me in the corner and put her arm around me.</p>
<p>She had a book, a picture book. I cannot recall the contents of the book except that it had a horse's head on the cover and she sat next to me quietly for a time and read to me softly and let me turn the pages. I was lost in the quiet of the cloakroom, lost in the book so deeply that everything else fell away.</p>
<p>After a time, it could have been ten minutes or an hour or my whole life, she asked me if I thought I could come out into the room and take my seat at a desk. I nodded and she stood and took my hand and led me into the classroom.</p>
<p>A few years later, when I was thirteen, another woman, a librarian, gave me another book and I consider every good thing that has ever happened to me since then a result of that woman handing me that book.</p>
<p>I'd been wandering the streets of the small Minnesota town we lived in one bitter winter evening, waiting for the drunks in the bars to get juiced. I sold newspapers, trying to scrape together a little money so that I could buy better clothes, believing, as kids do, that the right clothes might somehow lift me from my wretchedly unpopular social life. And if I waited for the men who hung around in the bars to get a few drinks in them, I could hustle them for extra change.</p>
<p>I stopped in the library to warm up. The librarian noticed me, called me over, and asked if I wanted a library card. Then she handed me a card with my name on it and gave me a book.</p>
<p>Later that night back at home, or what passed for home a crummy apartment in the bad part of town I took the book, a box of crackers, and a jar of grape jelly down to the basement, to a hideaway I'd created behind the furnace where someone had abandoned a creaky old armchair under a bare lightbulb.</p>
<p>I sat in the corner, eating jelly-smeared crackers, plodding through the book. It took me forever to read. I was such a poor reader that, by the time I'd finished a page, I'd have forgotten what I'd read on the page before and I'd have to go back. That first book must have taken me over a month to finish, hunched over the pages late at night.</p>
<p>I wish I could remember the name of that first book I can't even remember what it was about. What I do remember about that evening at the library was that it marked the first of many nights the librarian would give me a book. "Here," she'd say, handing me a few battered volumes. "I think you'll like these." She would hand select books that she thought would interest me Westerns, mysteries, survival tales, science fiction, Edgar Rice Burroughs. I would take them home to hide in the basement and read, I'd bring them back and we'd talk about them, and she'd give me more books.</p>
<p>But she wasn't just giving me books, she was giving me...everything. She gave me the first hint I'd ever had in my entire life that there was something other than my drunken parents screaming at each other in the kitchen. She handed me a world where I wasn't going to get beaten up by the school bullies. She showed me places where it didn't hurt all the time.</p>
<p>I read terribly at first but as I did more of it, the books became more a part of me and within a short time they gave me a life, a look at life outside myself that made me look forward instead of backward.</p>
<p>Years later, after I'd graduated from high school, joined the army, gotten married, had children, and made a career as an electronics engineer working in satellite tracking, books once again changed the course of my life. This time, though, I wrote them.</p>
<p>I was sitting in a satellite tracking station at about nine o'clock at night when suddenly I knew that I had to be a writer. In that instant, I gave up or lost everything that had made up my life until that point my work, my family, certainly my earning potential.</p>
<p>Writing had suddenly become everything...everything...to me.</p>
<p>I stood up from the console, handed in my security badge, and headed for Hollywood. I had to go to a place where I knew writers were; I had to be near them, had to learn from them. I got a job as a proofreader of a men's magazine, going from earning $500 a week to $400 a month, and apprenticed myself to a couple of editors.</p>
<p>These two men gave me writing assignments, and in order to continue receiving their help, I had to write an article,a chapter of a book, or a short story every night, every single night, no exceptions, no excuses, for them to critique. If I missed a single day, they would no longer help me.</p>
<p>I have been writing for over thirty years, spent most of it starving, trying to make it work for me, in my mind; trying to make words come together in the right patterns, movements, what some have called the loops and whorls of the story dance, and it has always been hard. It is, sometimes, still difficult. But I love writing more now, I think, than I ever have. The way the stories dance, the rhythms and movements of them, is grandly exciting to me.</p>
<p>I remember the first acceptance letter, the first time a publisher told me my writing was worthy of publication, the first after many, many rejections. There will never be another first like this one; not first love nor first hope nor first time never, no never like this.
</p>
<p>Wow I was not expecting that stone fable thing on essay #3. I found it really hard. What was the lesson that was learned in the passage? The critical lens was pretty easy. I used Atticus Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird and John Proctor from The Crucible.</p>
<p>i dont remember all questions, but here are some answers:
captive
victor
control
____ (missing one)</p>
<p>Passage 2: thoughtfulness
"Never did I cry again after my nap." (what shows her ancestors influence)
gender roles
patriotism
her hard work (arranged marriage)
___ (missing one question)</p>
<p>same :d? and does anyone remember the 2 missing ones?</p>
<p>Passage 2:
thoughtfulness (rice cake)
"Never did I cry again after my nap." (what shows her ancestors influence)
gender roles
patriotism (something like, "we learned in school that our country is as sacred as our father's grave")
her hard work (arranged marriage)
___ (missing one question)</p>
<p>Wendy, I got those same answers, but I don't remember what the other ones were. </p>
<p>I messed my third essay up really badly. I said the lesson is that freedom isn't as it seems. I said the fable used irony to convey that the captor is captive by the "sleeping" rock (I mentioned personification). Then I said the father made historical allusions (but are allusions only made to books?) to a sturggle for freedom. It didn't have a good thesis at all, and my intro was flawed.</p>
<p>On the ciritcal lense, I disagreed with the quote. I used Antigone and Othello. I said that Creon took on the gods' law, but only wound up being hated. Then I said that Iago went up against highly ranked offcicials but also wound up being hated. This essay wasn't as bad.</p>
<p>I don't remember the second part of the mc at all, but most of the answers I got were the same.</p>
<p>That rock fable thing was just weird. I ended up making up some life lesson, like strength and character are determined by self identity or something. Haha, it sounded better when I was half asleep writing the essay.</p>
<p>As for the second essay, I think a ton of people will have used John Proctor and Atticus Finch. It was a pretty great topic but I was sad I couldn't use the Great Gatsby, I didn't prepare for using the Crucible at all.</p>
<p>oh ok i remember another mc question:
passage 1:
dialogue (which one was used to convey theme)</p>
<p>I DID use gatsby. i said that jay was a hero because he stood up to new york society's rich people even though they were "forces larger than him," which makes him a hero. he also continued to love daisy.
i also used age of innocence. countess ellen is a hero because she stood up to new york rich society as well, though forces "larger" wanted newland to marry may.</p>
<p>anyone remember the last mc question?</p>
<p>I found a way to use 1984, Gatsby, Antigone, Great Gatsby, Othello, Romeo & Juliet, Mockingbird, Crucible, and basically any book in the whole wide world except Green Eggs and Ham. I was so set an writing about it too. :/</p>
<p>Wendy, I got dialogue too! I was kind of iffy on that one because it didn't have any quotations. >_></p>
<p>the only answer that was plausible besides dialogue was description.
and there wasnt that much description...?</p>
<p>anyone know that last missing mc? its really annoying me. kthx.</p>
<p>OH! I think I might have something here. I don't remember any of the choices, but wasn't there a question that asked about "a bowl of rice, and another day to live"? Or something along those lines?</p>
<p>It was definitly dialogue, the entire passage was the mother and son talking to eachother.</p>
<p>hmmm..this session took me a bit longer to finish because I spent the first half hour sleeping at my desk, thus I had to wait for another bus.</p>
<p>Oh well, still not hard. The controlling idea I put about lessons was that parents teach them to their kids. The first passage was the mom not wanting her son to become like her (controlling) whereas the second was the dad wanting his daughter to be a hard worker like his mother, but also taught the lesson that freedom is important (I mean, I discussed that as well).</p>
<p>I tried to find the passages:</p>
<p>Passage 1:</p>
<p>A man ambushed a stone. Caught it. Made it a prisoner.
Put it in a dark room and stood guard over it for the
rest of his life.</p>
<p>His mother asked why.</p>
<p>He said, because it's held captive, because it is
captured.</p>
<p>Look, the stone is asleep, she said, it does not know
whether it's in a garden or not. Eternity and the stone
are mother and daughter; it is you who are getting old.
The stone is only sleeping.</p>
<p>But I caught it, mother, it is mine by conquest, he said.</p>
<p>A stone is nobody's, not even its own. It is you who are
conquered; you are minding the prisoner, which is yourself,
because you are afraid to go out, she said.</p>
<p>Yes yes, I am afraid, because you have never loved me,
he said.</p>
<p>Which is true, because you have always been to me as
the stone is to you, she said.</p>
<p>Parts of passage 2 can be found online, but it is recent and not public domain, so it is difficult to find the full excerpt.</p>
<p>I had a difficult time with the first essay of session two. I couldn't figure out a good unifying thesis. I eventually settled on something about lessons learned revealing personal truths. All in all, my essay was pretty terrible.</p>
<p>The critical lens was easy. I used 1984 and Huck Finn, both of which luckily fit merely with their plots and major themes. If I had known the crucible better, I would have used it instead of Huck Finn.</p>
<p>oh yea that was the last mc question!</p>
<p>i put the answer for that one: continuing struggles of the people (about the bowl of rice phrase)</p>
<p>same?
thx.
my unifying thesis for the first one was that freedom over onself is an important goal.</p>
<p>Wendy, that was my answer! Well, it seems very familiar at least.</p>
<p>oh crap. for the first one, the controlling idea had to be about "lessons learned"?</p>
<p>my thesis was both passages show that "freedom over oneself is an important goal." and in the conclusion i stated "the lesson of the day is that freedom over oneself is important." </p>
<p>does that count as answering the task given?</p>
<p>Yes it does. I belive the task was just to discuss a common lesson taught by the two passages.</p>
<p>Grade predictions anyone? I don't know how the test is graded, but I'm pretty sure I got none of hte MCQs wrong, and I'm really confident in a 6 for 3 of my essays. What does that give me?</p>
<p>I originally (during the test) thought that the assignment was to discuss the concept of learned lessons, not the actual lessons themselves. </p>
<p>Then after the test, I was worried because I thought it may have wanted a discussion of the common lesson(s) between the passages.</p>
<p>However, I am now confident that my original idea was correct based on previous years' exams. </p>
<p>For example, January's question:
After you have read the passages and answered the multiple-choice questions,
</p>
<p>This test had the same model:
</p>
<p>I think that meant it wanted something about the concept of learning lessons or the lessons one learns rather than the specific presented lessons. But the possible ambiguity might mean that teachers will accept either take on it.</p>
<p>well i hope mine counts too cuz i wrote like 3 pages lol. </p>
<p>is everybody taking us history?</p>