Read the following passage from The Merchant of Venice:
"Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? . . If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not get revenge?"
In this passage, Shylock is using rhetorical questions to express his main point. According to this passage, what is his main point?
a. Jews have always been mistreated by others
b. Shylock will get his revenge
c. Jews are no different from any other religious person
d. He is predicting a great catastrophe that will befall his character
Scroll down for the answer.
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b. is the correct answer. Any rhetorical device is designed to make the recipient of the speech or text to consider something from a different perspective. In this case, these questions are not meant to be answered out loud. Instead, the answer to all of them are yes, so that when he gets to his main point, the revenge he seeks, the answer, by the pattern established, is yes.
We think it is B and C
ReplyDeleteC is a tricky wrong answer. Yes, he is different, but he is not comparing Jews to other religious groups specifically. He could be using the term Jew as a group of people regardless of religious belief. This would certainly be in line with how Shakespeare's time would look at Jews (as both religious group and as an ethnic group). This is one of those times where the test has two answers that could be correct, but only one of them is fully correct. When you encounter this on the EOC - and you will - pick the one you like the best and move one. Don't look back. You can drive yourself crazy and lose your focus by spending too much time on the ones that seem to have more than one answer.
DeleteAt least, that is my take on it. If you still disagree, we can chalk it up to a bad question - and you WILL get plenty of those on the EOC. :)