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Choose either section A or Section B.

SECTION A

Analyze, compare and contrast the following two texts. Include comments on the similarities and differences
between the texts and the significance of context, audience, purpose, and formal and stylistic features.

Text 1

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! How easy it was to disappear:
! The women walked to work on streets that angled past bars, gambling houses, and bordellos. Vice
! thrived, with official indulgence. "The parlors and bedrooms in which honest folk lived were (as now)
! rather dull places," wrote Ben Hecht, late in his life, trying to explain this persistent trait of old
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Chicago. "It was pleasant, in a way, to know that outside their windows, the devil was still capering in
! a flare of brimstone." In an analogy that would prove all too apt, Max Weber likened the city to "a
! human being with his skin removed."
! Anonymous death came early and often. Each of the thousand trains that entered and left the city did
! so at grade level. You could step from a curb and be killed by the Chicago Limited. Every day on
10 average two people were destroyed at the city's rail crossings. Their injuries were grotesque.
! Pedestrians retrieved severed heads. There were other hazards. Streetcars fell from drawbridges.
! Horses bolted and dragged carriages into crowds. Fires took a dozen lives a day. In describing the fire
! dead, the term the newspapers most liked to use was "roasted." There was diphtheria, typhus, cholera,
! influenza. And there was murder. In the time of the fair the rate at which men and women killed each
15 other rose sharply throughout the nation but especially in Chicago, where police found themselves
! without the manpower or expertise to manage the volume. In the first six months of 1892 the city
! experienced nearly eight hundred homicides. Four a day. Most were prosaic, arising from robbery,
! argument, or sexual jealousy. Men shot women, women shot men, and children shot each other by
! accident. But all this could be understood. Nothing like the Whitechapel killings had occurred. Jack the
20 Ripper's five-murder spree in 1888 had defied explanation and captivated readers throughout America,
! who believed such a thing could not happen in their own hometowns.
! But things were changing. Everywhere one looked the boundary between the moral and the wicked
! seemed to be degrading. Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued in favor of divorce. Clarence Darrow
! advocated free love. A young woman named Borden killed her parents.
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And in Chicago a young handsome doctor stepped from a train, his surgical valise in hand. He
! entered a world of clamor, smoke, and steam, refulgent with the scents of murdered cattle and pigs. He
! found it to his liking.
! The letters came later, from the Cigrands, Williamses, Smythes, and untold others, addressed to that
! strange gloomy castle at Sixty-third and Wallace, pleading for the whereabouts of daughters and
30 daughters' children.
! It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask
! that something dark had taken root.
! This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.
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Adapted from the nonfiction book The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (2004)
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Text 2
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Chicago

! !
! Hog Butcher for the World,
! Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
! Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
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Stormy, husky, brawling,
! City of the Big Shoulders:
! !
! They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women
! under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
10 And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman
! kill and go free to kill again.
! And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I
! have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
! And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I
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give them back the sneer and say to them:
! Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and
! coarse and strong and cunning.
! Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger
! set vivid against the little soft cities;
20 Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the
! wilderness,
! Bareheaded,
! Shoveling,
! Wrecking,
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Planning,
! Building, breaking, rebuilding,
! Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
! Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
! Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
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Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of
the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud
to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and
Freight Handler to the Nation.

Carl Sandberg, Chicago (1914)

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SECTION B

Analyze, compare and contrast the following two texts. Include comments on the similarities and differences
between the texts and the significance of context, audience, purpose, and formal and stylistic features.

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Text 3
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From the www.artofmanliness.com (2013)

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Public policy can turn on a single case of grizzly predation. During the summer of 1967, in
Glacier National Park, two young women were killed by two different grizzlies on the same night, an
incident memorialized in the 1969 book Night of the Grizzlies. Both bears had fed on garbage and
associated humans with food. The National Park Service had been a bit cavalier about bears eating
rubbish; in Yellowstone, virtually all grizzlies fed at open-pit dumps. Accused of near-criminal
negligence by the press, the Park Service did an about-face. Against the advice of biologists who
urged that bears be weaned slowly, Yellowstone abruptly closed the dumps, and bears began foraging
for garbage in campgrounds and towns. Wildlife managers killed more than 200 grizzlies in a fiveyear period.
Post-Treadwell *, policies may change again. A shared view among bear observers is that bad
press following a fatal mauling leads not only to dead bears, but also to new restrictions. Already, the
growing trend is to keep people and bears separated. That's good in some ways, but I worry that we'll
take it too far.
At Alaska's McNeill River Falls, for example, observers are confined to a discrete space and
led by an armed ranger from the Alaska Department of Fish and Wildlifea practice that has kept
people and bears safe for 28 years, but can't qualify as a real wilderness experience. In Yellowstone,
seasonal closures rightly keep humans out of critical grizzly feeding grounds. But though people
can't walk in, bears can walk out: Increasingly, young bears and mothers with cubs seek food near
the park's roads, where they are hit by cars and fed by idiots. Keeping people and grizzlies distant is
partly legitimate management strategy and partly, to my mind, chickenshit. In Glacier, the din of
Park Service-recommended shouting and whistle blowing drifts down every trail. The message is
that photography is fine, but please don't interact with nature. The spectrum of backcountry
adventure is truncated at the wild extreme.
What is the value, then, of face-to-face encounters with carnivores, who on rare occasions
size up Homo sapiens as chow? The beasts that used to sweep down on a village and carry off a
person are goneso rare that maulings like this one make headlines in a way head-ons along the
Alcan Highway never will. But here's an animal essential to us all, useful to distant corners of the
soul: the grizzly roaring out an enforced humility, reminding us of our place in the food chain.
In our charge to domesticate this continent, we missed a few pockets of wildness where risk
still dwells. We could live without these beasts, though something in the imagination would stray
aimlessly. That anchor of wild risk keeps us tethered.
That risk also delivers the salient lesson of bear encounters. Timothy Treadwell was not in
control: He had a great run of luck that lasted more than a decade, and it ran out. In the grizzly
business, it happens.
From Blood Brothers: Timothy Treadwell, Doug Peacock, Outside Magazine, January (2004)

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* In 2003 a grizzly bear killed and ate Timothy Treadwell.

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