1. What is the central idea of the passage?
2.
a. Pizza came to the United
Sates in the late 1800s and
was not very popular.
b. Pizza was only popular
among Italian immigrants. b
C. Pizza was introduced to the
U. S. in the late 1800s and
became popular after WWII.

the correct answer is b. in order to explain a point clearly in an essay, it is always better to include a clear example of your ideas. including an scenario in which a family is affected by consumerism will support your argument as well as supporting details, such as quotations from experts and statistics. option a could be correct, but statistics and quotations are supporting ideas rather than clear explanations. choices c and d are simply inadequate. they do not add information about the effects of consumerism, rather they are strategies for engaging the reader

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serve the people! ,” smoothly translated by julia lovell, offers an initial sample of yan lianke’s writing to an english-speaking audience. a bluntly drawn, mildly erotic fable, it teases mao zedong by poking fun at a true believer who obeys the chairman’s precepts too literally. to a western sensibility, the broad strokes of yan lianke’s humor would seem to pose little risk of inciting rebellion, whether of the flesh or of the body politic. but then, part of the book’s attraction is that it doesn’t have a western sensibility. it lets the reader see — or rather, intuit — what jokes chinese officials don’t consider funny, and how very little it takes for a writer to be branded an incendiary in 21st-century china, more than three decades after the death of mao, a decade after the death of deng xiaoping and seven years since china entered the world trade organization, a move that would seem to signal a willingness (however wary) to mingle with the rest of the world.

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