Tuesday 11-01-11

TUESDAY

Today we will practice the first three: Chronological Order, Comparison and Contrast, and Cause and Effect.

Activity 1

Identify the pattern used in each sentence below.

1.      Because Lee came to the interview in jeans, he wasn’t even considered for the job.

2.      Benjamin Franklin served as an apprentice for five years in his brother’s print shop. Then, at the age of seventeen, Franklin went to New York. Failing to find work, he soon went on to Philadelphia.

3.      Rain forests are a major source of oxygen for the atmosphere. Therefore, when rain forests are chopped down, the oxygen supply is also cut down.

4.      Both diet soft drinks and seltzer water are low in calories. However, diet soft drinks contain artificial sweeteners and are not really thirst-quenching, while seltzer water refreshes without being sickeningly sweet.

Activity 2

           Identify the pattern used in each paragraph below.

1.      Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809, the son of actress Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe and actor David Poe, Jr. His father abandoned their family in 1810. His mother died a year later from tuberculosis. Poe was then taken into the home of John Allan, a successful tobacco merchant in Richmond, Virginia. Although his middle name is often misspelled as "Allen" (even in encyclopedias), it is actually "Allan," after this family.

2.      Recent studies indicate that male and female babies act very differently after only a few months of life. Baby girls seem to be more interested in people. They can distinguish between individual faces and voices at four months, well before baby boys can. In addition, they begin to smile and speak earlier than boys, and their vocabularies are larger. In contrast, bay boys react to objects with as much interest as they react to human beings. They will try to talk to the brightly colored toys that hang over their cribs just as often as they will try to talk to a parent. And before long, they will attempt to take these objects apart.

3.      Earthquakes are caused by sudden slips of rock along a break in the earth’s crust. Such breaks result when the pressure on rock layers becomes too great. The earthquakes that follow can cause great loss of life and millions of dollars of damage.

4.      In 1912, Sherlock Holmes retired to a farm, where he took up bookkeeping. He later came out of retirement long enough to break up a World War I spy ring. According to one Holmes scholar, Holmes died in 1951, from a bee sting.