Analysis of "The Negro Speaks Rivers"

Book 2 Quiz 6

I. Give synonyms: (10%)
1. Those ad campaigns celebrating the Big Apple, …
2. The giant Manhattan television studios where Toscanini’s Symphony once played now sit empty most of the time, while……and the Johnny Carson show live, preempt the airways from California.
3. But no; what most excites Europeans is the city’s charged nervous atmosphere, its vulgar dynamism.
4. New York is about energy, contention, and striving.
5. Nature’s pleasures are much qualified in New York.
6. Nature constantly yields to man in New York: witness those fragile sidewalk trees gamely struggling against encroaching cement and petrol fumes.
7. The bankers and the admen, the marketing specialists and a thousand well paid ancillary service people, really set the city’s brittle tone.
8. The television generation grew up in the insistent presence of hype, delights in much of it, and has no scruples about practicing it.

II. Explain: (20%)
1. out of phase

1. beget the style

1. pacesetter

1. comeback

1. casino

1. Wasp

1. skyline

1. local-breed

1. ethnic turf

1. a large billing

III. Point out rhetorical devices: (13%)

1. While sitcoms cloned and canned in Hollywood, and the Johnny Carson show live, pre-empt the airways from California.
2. Tin Pan Alley has moved to Nashville and Hollywood.
3. New York was never Mecca to me.
4. Nature constantly yields to man in New York; witness those fragile sidewalk trees gamely struggling against encroaching cement and petrol fumes.
5. So much of well-to-do America now lives antiseptically in enclaves, tranquil and luxurious, that shut out the world.
6. So what else is new?
7. The defeated are not hidden away somewhere else on the wrong side of town.
8. the city swallows up the United Nations and refuses to take it seriously,
9. Loving and Hating New York

IV. Translate sentences: (12%) ( using expressions of take…to, measure up, ratify, be accessible