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

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It's defined as the willingness to endure for the sake of exploration. [pioneer faces bear]

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Sounds like a lot of effort... we would have just stayed in bed. All right, check

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out the excerpt. "It appears..." [excerpt shown]

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All right, here's our question: The trend described in the excerpt reflects which of the [question shown]

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following developments? And here your potential answers... [answers shown]

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Well, this excerpt is about Americans and exploring the Wild West. A bold move, [Pioneer and Native American fight]

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seeing as people were already living there. The urge to go west was definitely

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not limited to privileged groups like A suggests, so we know this isn't our answer. [A ruled out]

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A lot of folks who headed west were actually hanging out on the bottom rung

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of settler society and went west looking for something better... probably In-N-Out. [poor settlers pictured]

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And you definitely need some serious motivation to go deal with hungry bears,

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hostile American Indians, threat of starvation, and nasty diseases. Well, maybe [pioneer fights off threats]

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that motivation was animal style fries, or maybe some just didn't know what they

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were getting themselves into. C tells us that westward expansion created

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culturally homogenous communities, which

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means communities made up of the same [homogenous community shown]

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kinds of people. This isn't true. Lots of different kinds of people headed west, [C ruled out]

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from recent European immigrants to people whose families had been in North

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America since the colonial days, and when all these people started hobnobbing out [diverse group of people]

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west, well, totally new and diverse cultures began to flower. We'd like to [unsettling clown family]

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tell you choice D is true--that when all the diverse cultures met out west, they [D ruled out]

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created a magical happy land where everybody got along. We'd also like to [people eat peacefully]

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tell you that we found the answer to world peace and the cure for all disease,

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but we can't. The West was full of social and ethnic tension, just like everywhere [people jumping with flags]

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else in the world. Maybe one day, we'll figure out how to achieve that magical

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happy land. All right, well, the correct answer is B. As the excerpt tells us, all [rainbow utopia]

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types of Americans were heading west. The key word here is "inherent." The author is

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making the claim that all Americans just naturally wanted to enlarge their [B chosen as correct answer]

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dominion. In other words, it's a universal trend... like eating In-N-Out for every [people want to expand]

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meal. That might just be an us trend, come to think of it... yeah. [people at In-N-Out]

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