ShmoopTube

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[ musical flourish ]

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And here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by unity.

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What do you call it when a bunch of short people get behind a cause?

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Punity.

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Is that bad?

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We didn't mean to be...

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All right, well, we're moving on. We're done reading.

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Which of the following lines provides the most

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unity to the passage?

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And here are the potential answers.

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All right. [ mumbles ]

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All right, well, let's go one by one.

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In the first portion of the passage, the speaker questions whether it's even

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possible to answer the question he's asked.

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In the second, he goes on about life and immortality.

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So the section that gives the most unity

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to the whole passage is the one that ties these

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two together. Get it? That's the key to answering this question.

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It'll be like the ankle rope in the three-legged race.

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In option B, the speaker spends all his time questioning

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whether the question he's been asked is too big to answer.

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For the record, AP test graders aren't impressed by this tactic.

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Choice E comes right after B in the first paragraph, and it

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keeps the same ball up in the air.

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Though these two might play nicely together, they don't do anything to unify

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the entire passage, so we can cross them both off the list.

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We've got the opposite situation with options D and C.

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In D, the speaker tells us that some people find more life

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in death than they had in life.

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Obviously a Walking Dead fan.

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[ mumbles ]

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In C, he clarifies by saying that some people live on in

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the memory of others and have more impact after they die

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than when they're alive.

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Too bad he wasn't talking directly about zombies.

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Yeah. Well, whatever the case, all this talk about life and immortality

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is totally limited to the second half of the passage.

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So neither C nor D is gonna win its merit badge for unity today.

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So it looks like choice A is our best option. The speaker says,

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"One cannot make the best of such impossibilities,

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and the question is doubly fatuous until we are

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told which of our two lives - the conscious or the unconscious -

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is held by the asker to be the truer life."

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Ugh. That was a mouthful.

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What the speaker is doing here is connecting the two sections

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by showing how it's especially impossible to answer the question

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about how best to live our lives

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until we know which kind of life we're talking about.

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Does anybody else feel their brains expanding by just talking about this stuff?

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[ zombie sounds ]

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