ShmoopTube

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[ musical flourish ]

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And here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by a fear of public speaking.

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Some say you should picture the audience naked, but

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we've always come to regret that choice.

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[ mumbles ]

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[ mumbling continues ]

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[ further mumbling ]

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Okay. The shift in tone from the first two paragraphs

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to the rest of the passage can be best described as... what?

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And here are the potential answers.

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[ mumbles ]

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All right. Wow, this question is vocab city. Good thing we brought a map.

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And by map, we mean the dictionary and our brains.

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All right, option E says the speaker is being enigmatic,

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or mysterious, in the first paragraph, which could be true

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with all the question-dodging he's doing.

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But E also says that in the second paragraph, the speaker acts

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indifferently, meaning that he acts like he couldn't care less.

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Well, this just isn't true. It's clear the speaker has

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thought a lot about what he's saying, so he's bound to care about it.

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If he didn't care, well, he probably wouldn't have shown up to speak in the first place, right?

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How about answer D?

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Eh. "Succinct" means short

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and to the point, while "verbose" means

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wordy, wordy, wordy. Like lots of words to describe something

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that you could've said just in two.

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So D would be a contender if it said

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verbose to more verbose, but, uh, well, zing.

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We can see where C is coming from.

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The speaker does sound a little argumentative when he begins by

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telling the committee that they asked him to speak about a stupid question.

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He doesn't get conciliatory, or apologetic, in the next paragraph, though.

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He just keeps on dissecting exactly why the question's unanswerable.

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Well, A would be plausible only if the order were reversed.

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The speaker sounds way more imperious, or arrogant,

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in the first paragraph when he's dissing the committee's question.

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But in the second paragraph, he confidently lays out the rationale behind his opinion.

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Choice B does the speaker the most justice.

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At first, his tone is searching.

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He's pulling apart the question and honestly trying to figure out

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how best to answer it.

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Then in the second paragraph, he illustrates just why he thinks

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the things he does. How much you wanna bet that half the audience

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walked out thinking he was brilliant

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and the other half thinking he was a jerk?

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[ shout ]

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