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Copywork
About This Passage
Four sentences of pure reportage that carry a whole social satire without one word of editorial. The first sentence holds the sharpest irony in the chapter — the rich paying a hundred dollars for the food the poor eat free — delivered as plain fact, dependent clause and all. Then the celebrity machinery: a famous man's biography lending the event its glamour, shoes worth five thousand dollars because of whose feet wore them. Copy the paragraph attending to its restraint: every sentence reports; none condemns; and the final short sentence — the good cause — is allowed to stand as true. The craft worth absorbing is how deadpan reporting lets absurdity convict itself, while honesty about the cause keeps the satire fair.
That evening rich people were going to come to the shelter and pay a hundred dollars to eat the food that the poor people ate every day for free. Clyde Livingston, who had once lived at the shelter wh...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Summarize the chapter's two layers in order — the camp evening and the courtroom memory — then state the chapter's thesis as you read it: the single claim about belief, value, or justice that every scene enforces. Defend your formulation against one rival reading, holding the order of events as your evidence.
Discussion Questions
- Stanley reports his own motive honestly: 'He ran. Thinking back now, he wasn't sure why he ran.' The chapter offers two maybes — hurrying the shoes to his father, or fleeing his 'miserable and humiliating day.' Explain what the chapter gains by leaving Stanley's motive double and unsettled, and what that kind of honest uncertainty does to the case against him. Use the chapter's words about the run as your evidence.
- The fundraiser paragraph reports without comment that rich people pay 'a hundred dollars to eat the food that the poor people ate every day for free,' while Clyde Livingston's shoes are expected to bring five thousand dollars. How does that flat reporting shape your judgment of the scene, and why might the chapter keep 'all the money would go to help the homeless' in view at the same time? Use the chapter's words from the paragraph as your evidence.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Entertaining; funny — a word that reveals whose comfort the laughter serves.
Item 2
Formal statements that something is wrong — reports that ask to be taken seriously.
Item 3
An arrangement of objects set out to be seen — exhibition rather than use.
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Critical Thinking
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