This is the second post in my Reading Critically series. The article that follows is a bit longer than the first (its hard to find articles that are as short as SAT passages), but it is a pretty interesting piece. I will pose the questions below, but first a couple of things to note:
The passage is long, but some parts of it can definitely be skimmed, especially once you get a sense for what the author is trying to say. Again this is one of the advantages of reading critically – once you understand the author’s overall purpose and can get a sense for the function of things in the passage (like the paragraphs) it allows you to really speed up because although you might gloss over some of the details, you will know why those details are there. This is a key skill both on the SAT and in real life (especially college). Once you realize that you should not be reading in order to memorize all of the details (which you wouldn’t be able to do anyway) it allows you to read much more quickly and focus on the big picture.
The other thing to point out with this passage is to pay close attention to the author’s tone. The tone on this passage may be obvious to you or it may not, but the author’s tone is always directly related to his or her overall purpose. Ok, the link is below and the questions are below that…
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/millennial-mongers_805310.html?nopager=1
1) What is the author’s overall purpose?
2) How would you characterize the author’s tone in this passage? And what words or sentences most reveal the author’s tone to you (i.e., what words or sentences help support your view of the author’s tone)?
3) In the second paragraph, why does the author put the words “public intellectual” in quotation marks?
4) In the passage, is the author more concerned with the millennial generation itself or of the work of those, such as Tanenhaus, who make sweeping statements about generations?
5) What is the purpose of paragraph 5 (“I read on.”)? Could you have inferred what the paragraph was going to about as you began it (thus allowing you to skim the paragraph) and if so, how?
6) What is the purpose of the 6th paragraph (“You thought the stock market collapse of 2008…”)?
7) What does the author think of “self-reporting”?
8) What is the purpose of the 3 examples that the author gives in paragraph 14 (“It is a cohort that embraces…….home theater in Scarsdale”)?
9) Do you agree with the author’s analysis?
For analysis of the above passage and “answers” to the above questions, see the Analysis Post.