Read the following excerpts: Excerpt from My Antonia, by Willa Cather

Sometimes I went south to visit our German neighbors and to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew up out of a deep crack in the earth and had a hawk's nest in its branches.

Excerpt from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew a thick-set strip of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning yellow…

What might be the shared theme of these excerpts?

the beauty of nature

the importance of neighbors

the values of farm life

the simplicity of animals

The beauty of nature. Neither excerpt focuses on meeting the neighbors, nor the animals that lived in that area, nor the value of farming.

below i present a summary with the most relevant aspects of chapter 2, which were taken from karangan bahasa inggeris (english essays) spm: argumentative essays.

tuna wira

credit to mohana ram murugiah.

i hope to be of

teacher smiles at the students who wait for his signal to sit down. he nods briefly and the students sit down and get ready for the lesson to start. there is an air of quiet expectancy when teacher refers to the unusual things found underneath their houses that morning. whispers of bags of rice ran among the students and a student muttered reluctantly that the rice is rent for the landlord. this starts off the discussion on the issue of paying rent for the use of the landowner’s land. da wan raises the question of why the landlord owns the land rather than the farmer although they have spent a lot of time farming it. the three reasons of labour, need and inheritance are listed as reasons for the landlord’s ownership of the land. they are discussed and dismissed as inadequate reasons. they suggested a system of collective farming to the farmers. the headmaster comes down the corridor to observe the lesson. teacher very quickly changed the lesson to a geography wesson. the students followed his cue and no one gave the slightest notice < of the headmaster ‘s presence. when the headmaster leaves, teacher explains the implications of winning the scholarship. it involves bearing respontsibilities and the scholarship holder should master what is useful and return to the village. he should understand the injustices in the present system and change it to a fairer system. then, he announces the wiimnuir of the scholarship to be dawan.

1. read the following excerpt from franklin d. roosevelt's "fireside chat 19":

on the other side of the picture, we must learn also to know that guerilla warfare against the germans in, let us say serbia or norway, us; that a successful russian offensive against the germans us; and that british successes on land or sea in any part of the world strengthen our hands.

remember always that germany and italy, regardless of any formal declaration of war, consider themselves at war with the united states at this moment just as much as they consider themselves at war with britain or russia. and germany puts all the other republics of the americas into the same category of enemies. the people of our sister republics of this hemisphere can be honored by that fact.  

the true goal we seek is far above and beyond the ugly field of battle. when we resort to force, as now we must, we are determined that this force shall be directed toward ultimate good as well as against immediate evil. we americans are not destroyers — we are builders.

analyze the effectiveness of this excerpt. how does it function within the speech as a whole? how does the structure of the excerpt to convey the speech's purpose and key points? support your argument with evidence from the speech. (10 points)