10th Grade Reading Learning Check 3

In this passage, comedian and television host Conan O'Brien speaks at a high school graduation.

Commencement

¹ Believe it or not, I actually do have some real advice for you. I don't want to freak you out, but twenty-five years ago I could have been any one of you. I was a bright, ambitious, hard-working kid who wanted more than anything to go to a good

⁵ college. The only problem is that I was much more intrested in succedding than in really learning. So I dod a lot of things in high school not because I enjoyed them but because I thought they'd look good on an application. I was going to turn college into just another step on the road to being

¹⁰ successful, whatever that meant.

And then something weird happened. My roommate was going to an orientation meeting at the school humor magazine, and I decided, for some reason to tag along. I wrote one piece, then another, then another, and before long ¹⁵ I was running the place. The only difference was, I was joyously happy. I was succeeding at something because I loved the procss, not because I was trying to get anywhere. I had found the thing I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and I honestly didn't care where it took me or what it paid.

²⁰ So when I graduated from college in 1985, I told my parents, "Thanks for the amazing Ivy League education. Now I want to be a comedian." Later, in the emergency room, after they woke up, they said they were fine with my decision, and I was on my way. If I hadn't allowed myself to experiment and risk ²⁵ doing something without a clear career payoff, I would have missed out on so much. I never would have written for Saturday Night Live. I wouldn't have performed onstage in Chicago in a diaper in 1988. I never would have spent hours crafting the Homer Simpson line "The bee bit my bottom and ³⁰ now my bottom is big."

The point is, at this moment many of you have ideas of what you want to do with your lives, but for many of you those ideas will change. And that's because you think you know who you are right now, but you don't. Trust me. When I look ³⁵ back at eighteen-year-old Conan, it's a ridiculous sight. Six feet four, of pale skin and bone. Scared of girls. Squeaky voice. Wait, I'm sorry, that's forty-three-year-old Conan. But life and the choices I've made have changed me in a thousand ways. And none of it would have happened if I had rigidly

⁴⁰ "kept my eye on the prize" or decided, with great determination, to "follow my dream." I didn't have the slightest idea what my dream was when I was eighteen. It had to find me.

Adapted from Conan O'Brien, "Stuyvesant High School Commencement Speech. 2006.

In this passage, Zeena and Ethan are a married couple. Mattie is a young woman, a relative of Zeena’s, who lives with them. This passage takes palace just after Zeena has returned from a journey.

The Pickle- Dish

Zeena came back into the room, her lips twitching with anger, a flush of excitement on her sallow face. The shawl had slipped from her shoulders and was dragging at her down-trodden heels, and in her hands she carried the fragments of ⁵ the red glass pickle-dish.

“I’d like to know who done this,” she said, looking sternly from Ethan to Mattie.

There was no answer, and she continued in a trembling voice: “It takes the stepladder to get at the top shelf, and I put Aunt ¹⁰ Philura Maple’s pickle-dish up there o’ purpose when we was married, and it’s never been down since, ‘cept for the spring cleaning, and then I always lifted it with my own hands, so’s ‘t shouldn’t get broke.” She laid the fragments reverently on the table. “I want to know who done this,” she quavered.

¹⁵ At the challenge Ethan turned back into the room and faced her. “I can tell you, then. The cat done it.”

She looked at him hard, and then turned her eyes to Mattie, who was carrying the dish-pan to the table.

“I’d like to know how the cat got into my china-closet,” she

²⁰ said.

“Chasin’ mice, I guess,” Ethan rejoined. “There was a mouse round the kitchen all last evening.”

Zeena continued to look from one to the other; then she emitted her small strange laugh. “I knew the cat was a smart ²⁵ cat,” she said in a high voice, “but I didn’t know he was smart enough to pick up the pieces of my pickle-dish and lay ‘em edge to edge on the very shelf he knocked ‘em off of.”

Mattie suddenly drew her arms out of the steaming water. “It wasn’t Ethan’s fault, Zeena! The cat did break the dish; but I

³⁰ got it down from the china-closet, and I’m the one to blame for its getting broken.”

Zeena stood beside the ruin of her treasure, stiffening into a stony image of resentment, “You got down my pickle-dish—what for?”

³⁵ A bright flush flew to Mattie’s cheeks. “I wanted to make the supper-table pretty,” she said.

“You wanted to make the supper-table pretty; and you waited till my back was turned, and took the thing I set most store by of anything I’ve got, and wouldn’t never use it, not even when ⁴⁰ the minister come to dinner, or Aunt Martha Pierce come over from Bettsbridge—” Zeena paused with a gasp, as if terrified by her own evocation of the sacrilege. “You’re a bad girl, Mattie Silver, and I always known it. I was warned of it when I took you, and I tried to keep my things where you

⁴⁵ couldn’t get ‘em—and now you’ve took from me the one I cared for most of all—”

Adapted from Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome.