Rhetorical Questions

1. What is Luce’s attitude toward the American press?
Luce’s attitude towards the American press is disapproving.

1. How does the use of rhetorical questions help express this attitude? In other words, how do the rhetorical questions help set the tone?
The rhetorical question expresses Luce’s disapproving tone by emphasizing the responsibility of the American press ‘to give the American people more tasteful and more illuminating reading matter.’

2. Write an answer to the rhetorical questions in the passage. Adopt a tone of sneering derision as you express the attitude that the American press can indeed be excused from responsibility in order to make more money. Use at least one rhetorical question in your reply.
Indeed, American people seem to prefer sensationalism over important news, a celebrity’s newest scandal instead of the fracas in the Middle East or the starving children suffering in Africa. Does this reflect our culture’s values and character? One might say we almost deliberately remain ignorant, and immerse ourselves in scandal and melodrama, in order to keep our conscience still.
It is formed by a voluntary appropriation of fixed symbols to internal acts, to processes and results of imagination, the greater part of which have no place in the consciousness of uneducated man; though in civilized society, by imitation and passive remembrance of what they hear from their religious instructors and other superiors, the most uneducated share in the harvest which they neither sowed nor