paragraph 1,My mother's mother said "pie-anna" for "piano." Like her daughter, she sat at the instrument in the intervals of housework and played hymns. Her voice had the reediness that comes to the throat after a hard life. I know a lot about my grandmother, but they're things a child knows, not adult information. I don't know a single sentence her parents ever said to her.
paragraph 2,My mom learned in school not to say "pie-anna," and I would wager that she never once used a phrase that was uniquely hers. She spoke, as we all do, a temporal dialect—a speech made up in the main of plain, enduring words, but also of short-lived phrases that belong to a place and a moment. My dad, for instance, knows all the expressions that mark him as a man who has lived through the eighties and nineties. To "go for it" doesn't mean to him what it would have meant to my mom. If I had told her to "go for it," she would have asked what "it" was, where it was usually kept, and why I couldn't get it myself.
paragraph 3,Words abide, but new phrases enter the tongue and old phrases exit, reflecting the way the social landscape alters. If, for example, at an old-fashioned family supper, you leaned across the tablecloth to take the yams from under your sister's nose, you were told you had a "boardinghouse reach." . . .
paragraph 4,You don't hear the phrase much anymore. It evoked a time in the West when laboring men drifted like sand, or a calm dormered establishment with apron-hem rules of behavior against which the strong young men who boarded there were constantly, if coltishly, kicking. These incarnations of the rooming life have disappeared, so we're dropping the expression. When a phrase becomes archaic, as "boardinghouse reach" almost has, an echo from the past vanishes, like coal smoke in an age of gas heat.
paragraph 5,Such phrases were only a wrinkle in time, I know, but I miss hearing them anyway. Sometimes I wish I owned a weekend cottage in the country of the old-time tongue—a little cabin near my grandma's lexicon. You could stop by for a touch of Depression wisdom and talk some farm talk. You could stay the whole summer after too much TV. You could come back replenished by speech that summoned the deep past the way the frost heaves stones to the surface of the earth.
paragraph 6,Some people believe that the power of the old-time tongue arose from the antique simplicity of living close to the land. Its homey metaphors seemed to spring, like corn, straight up from the ground. Having become a nation of city dwellers and suburbanites, we're tempted to believe that somehow speech is losing its elemental force, that ours is a febrile dialect with twelve synonyms for "rapid transmission of data" and none for "spring thaw." Now and then the grace or wit of a dying phrase strikes home and we remember it. We compare it sadly with our own thoughtless, habitual manner of talking, and the apparent smallness of the modern spirit seems all the more lamentable.
paragraph 7,But the power of common speech doesn't grow from the soil or from a simple life or from any other virtue rooted in the past. It stems only from the irrepressible human urge to talk. To find the casual poetry of the past, all you need to do is listen closely to the present. Any day, anywhere, people will say anything. And though I know that all of this is true, I'd like to go back to the past for a time in any case. Not to meet Mr. Abraham Lincoln or to interview the Buddha. I'd like to go to a small Congregational church in Iowa on a Sunday afternoon in May. Outside, my grandfather is mowing the lawn. Inside, my grandmother is practicing the Sunday organ, and my mom is sitting in the front pew with her children, singing to herself the words of the hymn my grandmother, whose name was Nellie, plays. The oldest child pretends to be coloring, but he's really waiting until the mowing and the music stop and his mother and grandparents start to talk together among themselves. He can hardly wait to hear what they'll say.
(From ,begin underline,The Rural Life,end underline, by Verlyn Klinkenborg, copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.)
Question 1
This question has two parts. Answer Part A, and then answer Part B.
,begin emphasis,Part A,end emphasis,
What connection does the author make between his father's expression "go for it" and the expression "boardinghouse reach"?
Question 1 Answer options with 4 options
1.
Both expressions reflect a specific period of time.
2.
Both expressions remind the author of his own family.
3.
The first expression refers to a past time, and the second refers to a distant place.
4.
The first expression is used by young people, and the second is used by older people.
Question 2
,begin emphasis,Part B,end emphasis,
Which excerpt from the passage ,begin emphasis,best,end emphasis, supports the correct answer from Part A?
Question 2 Answer options with 4 options
1.
"things a child knows, not adult information" (Paragraph 1)
2.
"a speech made up in the main of plain, enduring words" (Paragraph 2)
3.
"short-lived phrases that belong to a place and a moment" (Paragraph 2)
4.
"homey metaphors seemed to spring, like corn, straight up from the ground" (Paragraph 6)
Part A: The connection that the author makes between his father's expression "go for it" and the expression "boardinghouse reach" is that both expressions reflect a specific period of time.
Part B: The excerpt from the passage that best supports this answer is "These incarnations of the rooming life have disappeared, so we're dropping the expression. When a phrase becomes archaic, as 'boardinghouse reach' almost has, an echo from the past vanishes, like coal smoke in an age of gas heat." (Paragraph 4)