What is the theme of Taking the Plunge*? How does the theme emerge and develop over the course of the passage? Use evidence from the text to support your response. Your response should be at least three
complete paragraphs.

When i walked through arlington cemetery, i had a sense of reverence—a respect for the courage, dedication, and sacrifice of the souls buried here. using context clues, what is the meaning of reverence in the passage?

Read the excerpt from "mother tongue." those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as “even though tom was mary thought he was ” and the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of thoughts, for example, “even though tom was foolish, mary thought he was ridiculous.” well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what tom could have been and what mary might have thought of him. so i never did well on tests like that. how does tan build a central idea of her story in the excerpt? tan discusses the types of questions on achievement tests to support the idea that the tests limit students’ ability to write well. tan explains a question on a language achievement test to support the idea that the tests should include more interesting content. tan gives an example of her experience with achievement tests to support the idea that they are not always accurate measures of language ability. tan considers how her mother might answer a question on a test to support the idea that nonstandard english limits a person’s ability to communicate.

One conclusion that a reader might draw from the excerpt from "there's a man in the habit of hitting me on the head with an umbrella" is that the man with the umbrella is persistent in his mission. provide two details from the text to support this conclusion.