$26 to $100
HAYWARD EARTH FILTER — 3/4 hp. asking $100. Call 555-5547
HEALTH MEMBERSHIP — Hamilton Fitness Club, $100. Call 10-8 555-7223
LAWN MOWERS — $25/up. A-1 cond. Call 555-9232
LAWNMOWER — Lawnboy, 21" self prop. $75. 555-5147
LAWNMOWER — 21" self-prop. rear bag $90. 555-8428
MEN 12 SPD BIKE — $55, brand new. Baby monitor, $20. Wood high chair, $25. 555-1561
MOVING — Computer hutch, $35. Call John in Lawrenceville. 555-8083
MOWER — Gas 21 Briggs runs good $55. 3-6PM 555-7154
$26 to $100
POSTAGE STAMP COLLECTION — Mostly U.S. $50. 555-9505
REDWOOD — 48" round table 3 benches, $50. 555-0233
REFRIG. — Washer, dryer-stove $90/bo good. 555-0076
REFRIGERATOR — Good. cond. $100. LIPTON MICROWAVE, $50. 555-2640
REFRIGERATOR — Large sideXside $95. 555-3592
REMOTE PLANE — & all to fly $100/bo Dennis. 555-1321
SEGA GENESIS GAMES — $30 ea. Like new. Call Steve at 555-6153 afternoons & eves.
SKIER ROWER — Good cond. $80. Call 555-9581
SMITH CORONA — electronic typewriter, new $75. 555-7384
SOFA — $100, Chair $50, kitchen table $10. 555-2152
SOFA — Chair ottoman, blue flowered, $100. 555-3220
SOFABED — Like new, beige, blues, browns $89. 555-6806
STEREO — HI-FI Cabinet type, 8-track AM/FM, $40. 555-4987
TABLE & 4 CHAIRS — Glass & oak top, $65. 555-9389
TATUNG MONITOR — $40. Call 555-5383
TENT — 2 person yellow/teal canvas, no flr, but incl. 2 infl. mattr, $30. 555-7503
TYPEWRITER — Electric, $40. Smith-Corona 555-8428
YAMAHA 500 DIRTBIKE — Not Running, $100. Call 555-9332
Reading Passage [9]
THANK YOU, M'AM
by Langston Hughes
She was a large woman with a large purse that had everything in it but a hammer and nails. It had a long strap, and she carried it slung across her shoulder. It was about eleven o'clock at night, dark, and she was walking alone, when a boy ran up behind her and tried to snatch her purse. The strap broke with a sudden single tug the boy gave it from behind. But the boy's weight and the weight of the purse combined caused him to lose his balance. Instead of taking off full blast as he had hoped, the boy fell on his back on the sidewalk and his legs flew up. The large woman simply turned around and kicked him right square in his blue-jeaned sitter. Then she reached down, picked the boy up by his shirtfront, and shook him until his teeth rattled.
After that the woman said, "Pick up my pocketbook, boy, and give it here."
She still held him tightly. But she bent down enough to permit him to stoop and pick up her purse. Then she said, "Now ain't you ashamed of yourself?"
Firmly gripped by his shirtfront, the boy said, "Yes'm."
The woman said, "What did you want to do it for?"
The boy said, "I didn't aim to."
She said, "You a lie!"
By that time two or three people passed, stopped, turned to look, and some stood watching.
"If I turn you loose, will you run?" asked the woman.
"Yes'm," said the boy.
"Then I won't turn you loose," said the woman. She did not release him.
"Lady, I'm sorry," whispered the boy.
"Um-hum! Your face is dirty. I got a great mind to wash your face for you. Ain't you got nobody home to tell you to wash your face?"
"No'm," said the boy.
"Then it will get washed this evening," said the large woman, starting up the street, dragging the frightened boy behind her.
He looked as if he were fourteen or fifteen, frail and willow-wild, in tennis shoes and blue jeans.
The woman said, "You ought to be my son. I would teach you right from wrong. Least I can do right now is to wash your face. Are you hungry?"
"No'm," said the being-dragged boy. "I just want you to turn me loose."
"Was I bothering you when I turned that corner?" asked the woman.
"No'm."
"But you put yourself in contact with me," said the woman. "If you think that contact is not going to last awhile, you got another thought coming. When I get through with you, sir, you are going to remember Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones."
Sweat popped out on the boy's face and he began to struggle. Mrs. Jones stopped, jerked him around in front of her, put a half nelson about his neck, and continued to drag him up the street. When she got to her door, she dragged the boy inside, down a hall, and into a large kitchenette-furnished room at the rear of the house. She switched on the light and left the door open. The boy could hear other roomers laughing and talking in the large house. Some of their doors were open, too, so he knew he and the woman were not alone. The woman still had him by the neck in the middle of her room.
She said, "What is your name?"
"Roger," answered the boy.
"Then, Roger, you go to that sink and wash your face," said the woman, whereupon she turned him loose—at last. Roger looked at the door—looked at the woman—looked at the door— and went to the sink.
"Let the water run until it gets warm," she said. "Here's a clean towel."
"You gonna take me to jail?" asked the boy, bending over the sink.
"Not with that face, I would not take you nowhere," said the woman. "Here I am trying to get home to cook me a bite to eat, and you snatch my pocketbook! Maybe you ain't been to your supper either, late as it be. Have you?"
"There's nobody home at my house," said the boy.
"Then we'll eat," said the woman. "I believe you're hungry—or been hungry—to try to snatch my pocketbook!"
"I want a pair of blue suede shoes," said the boy.
"Well, you didn't have to snatch my pocketbook to get some suede shoes," said Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones. "You could've asked me."
"M'am?"
The water dripping from his face, the boy looked at her. There was a long pause. A very long pause. After he had dried his face and not knowing what else to do, dried it again, the boy turned around, wondering what next. The door was open. He could make a dash for it down the hall. He could run, run, run, run!
The woman was sitting on the daybed. After a while she said, "I were young once and I wanted things I could not get."
There was another long pause. The boy's mouth opened. Then he frowned, not knowing he frowned.
The woman said, "Um-hum! You thought I was going to say but didn't you? You thought I was going to say, but I didn't snatch people's pocketbooks. Well, I wasn't going to say that." Pause. Silence. "I have done things, too, which I would not tell you, son. Everybody's got something in common. So you set down while I fix us something to eat. You might run that comb through your hair so you will look presentable."
In another corner of the room behind a screen was a gas plate and an icebox. Mrs. Jones got up and went behind the screen. The woman did not watch the boy to see if he was going to run now, nor did she watch her purse, which she left behind her on the daybed. But the boy took care to sit on the far side of the room, away from the purse, where he thought she could easily see him out of the corner of her eye if she wanted to. He did not trust the woman not to trust him. And he did not want to be mistrusted now.
"Do you need somebody to go to the store," asked the boy, "maybe to get some milk or something?"
"Don't believe I do," said the woman, "unless you just want sweet milk yourself. I was going to make cocoa out of this canned milk I got here."
"That will be fine," said the boy.
She heated some lima beans and ham she had in the icebox, made the cocoa, and set the table. The woman did not ask the boy anything about where he lived, or his folks, or anything else that would embarrass him. Instead, as they ate, she told him about her job in a hotel beauty shop that stayed open late, what the work was like, and how all kinds of women came in and out, blondes, redheads, and Spanish. Then she cut him a half of her ten-cent cake.
"Eat some more, son," she said.
When they were finished eating, she got up and said, "Now here, take this ten dollars and buy yourself some blue suede shoes. And next time, do not make the mistake of latching onto my pocketbook nor nobody else's. I got to get my rest now. But from here on in, son, I hope you will behave yourself."
She led him down the hall to the front door and opened it. "Good night! Behave yourself, boy!" she said, looking out into the street as he went down the steps.
The boy wanted to say something other than, "Thank you, m'am," to Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones, but although his lips moved, he couldn't even say that as he turned at the foot of the barren stoop and looked up at the large woman in the door. Then she shut the door.
"Thank You M'am" from SHORT STORIES by Langston Hughes. Copyright © 1996 by Ramona Bass and Arnold Rampersad. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
CAUTION: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Reading Passage [10]
The Sharebots
by CARL ZIMMER
NO MAN IS AN ISLAND, and Maja Matarić thinks no robot should be either. Matarić, a Brandeis University computer scientist, believes robots will do their best work only when they begin to work together. "How do you get a herd of robots to do something without killing each other?" she asks. According to Matarić, you have to put them in societies and let them learn from one another, just as seagulls and baboons and people do. Matarić has already made an impressive start at teaching robots social skills. She has gotten 14 robots to cooperate at once—the biggest gaggle of machines ever to socialize.
The Nerd Herd, as Matarić calls them, are shoe-box-size machines, each of which has four wheels, two tongs to grab things, and a two-way radio. The radio allows them to triangulate their position with respect to two fixed transmitters as they wander around Matarić's lab. It also allows them to broadcast their coordinates and other information to their neighbors. Infrared sensors help the robots find things and avoid obstacles; contact-sensitive strips tell them when they've crashed anyway.
Each robot is programmed with a handful of what Matarić calls behaviors—sets of instructions that enable the robot to accomplish a small goal, like following the robot in front of it. Set one robot on the floor with its wheels turned permanently to the left and program the others to follow, and they will all drive in a circle until their batteries go dead. But Matarić can get more interesting actions out of the herd by programming them to alternate among several behaviors. By telling them to home in on a target, to aggregate when they're too far from one another, to disperse when they're too crowded and to avoid collisions at all times, she's been able to get scattered robots to come together and migrate across her lab like a flock of birds.
More important, the robots can also learn on their own to carry out more complex tasks. One task Matarić set for them was to forage for little metal pucks and bring them home to their nest in a corner of the lab. To give the task a natural flavor, Matarić gave the robots clocks; at "night" they had to go home and rest, and in the "morning" they looked for pucks again. In addition to five basic behaviors they could choose from, she endowed them with a sort of prime directive: to maximize their individual point scores. Each time a robot did something right, such as locating a puck, it was automatically rewarded with points; each time it committed a blooper, such as dropping a puck, it lost points.
Matarić's Nerd Herd, with the pucks they now pursue collectively.
After some random experimentation, the robots soon learned how to forage but not very well, because they tended to interfere with one another in their selfish pursuit of points. "Why should you ever stop and let someone else go?" asks Matarić. "It's always in your interest to go but if everybody feels that way, then nobody gets through and they jam up and fight for space." To make her creatures more efficient, though, Matarić found she didn't have to program them with a God's-eye view of what was good for all robots. She just had to teach each robot to share to let other robots know when it had found a puck, and to listen to other robots in return. "I put in the impetus to pay attention to what other robots are doing, and to try what other robots are trying, sharing the experience," Matarić explains. "If I do some thing that's good and if I say, 'That was really great,' then you may try it."
With this simple social contract, the robots needed only 15 minutes of practice to become altruistic. They would magnanimously announce their discovery of pucks, despite having no way of knowing that this was good for the herd as a whole. At times when two robots lunged for a puck, they would stop and go through an "After you!" "No, after you!" routine, but eventually they figured out the proper way to yield. With social graces, the robot herd brought home the pucks twice as fast as without.
Matarić thinks she'll be able to produce more complex robot societies. "I'm looking at getting specialization in the society so they can say, 'I'll do this, and you do that.' If one of them has a low battery, it may become the messenger that doesn't actually carry things. And I imagine one robot might emerge as a leader because it happens to be the most efficient. But if it stops being efficient, some other robot will take over."
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Reading Passage [11]
Gary Soto
"A Fire in My Hands"
Gary Soto decided to become a poet in college after reading a bittersweet poem by Edward Field called "Unwanted." "It's about a lonely man who feels sad that no one wants him," Soto says. "He hangs a picture of himself at the post office next to the posters of dangerous criminals, hoping that people will recognize him and love him. I was inspired by this poem because it seemed to speak about my own life."
Later, Soto came upon a book of odes by Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet who celebrated the beauty and value of common objects, such as socks, scissors, and watermelons. When Soto began writing poems himself, he focused on ordinary things from his childhood: his baseball mitt, dogs, and fruit. Here, for example, is a poem about young love in which an ordinary orange becomes "a fire in my hands," a symbol of love and growing self-confidence.
ORANGES
The first time I walked
With a girl, I was twelve,
Cold, and weighted down
With two oranges in my jacket.
December. Frost cracking
Beneath my steps, my breath
Before me, then gone,
As I walked toward
Her house, the one whose
Porch light burned yellow
Night and day, in any weather.
A dog barked at me, until
She came out pulling
At her gloves, face bright
with rouge. I smiled,
Touched her shoulder, and led
Her down the street, across
A used-car lot and a line
Of newly planted trees,
Until we were breathing
Before a drugstore. We
Entered, the tiny bell
Bringing a saleslady
Down a narrow aisle of goods.
I turned to the candies
Tiered like bleachers,
And asked what she wanted ---
Light in her eyes, a smile
Starting at the corners
Of her mouth. I fingered
A nickel in my pocket,
And when she lifted a chocolate
That cost a dime,
I didn't say anything.
I took the nickel from
My pocket, then an orange,
And set them quietly on
The counter. When I looked up,
The lady's eyes met mine,
And held them, knowing
Very well what I was all
About.
Outside,
A few cars hissing past,
Fog hanging like old
Coats between the trees.
I took my girl's hand
In mine for two blocks,
Then released it to let
Her unwrap the chocolate.
I peeled my orange
That was so bright against
The gray of December
That, from some distance,
Someone might have thought
I was making a fire in my hands.
In another poem, black hair symbolizes Soto's Mexican heritage, which in turn creates a bond between him and his baseball hero, Hector Moreno:
... When Hector lined balls into deep
Center, in my mind I rounded the bases
With him, my face flared, my hair lifting
Beautifully, because we were coming home
To the arms of brown people.
(from "Black Hair")
Soto's poems focus on places as well as objects. He explains, "I saw that our [American] poets often wrote about places where they grew up or places that impressed them deeply. James Wright wrote about Ohio and West Virginia, Philip Levine about Detroit, Gary Snyder about the Sierra Nevadas and about Japan, where for years he studied Zen Buddhism. I decided to write about the San Joaquin Valley, where my hometown, Fresno, is located. Some of my poems are stark observations of human violence — burglaries, muggings, fistfights — while others are spare images of nature — the orange groves and vineyards, the Kings River, the bogs, the Sequoias. I fell in love with the valley, both its ugliness and its beauty, and quietly wrote poems about it to share with others."
. . . And this morning
After the wind left
With its pile of clouds
The broken fence steamed, sunlight spread
Like seed from one field
To another, out of a bare sycamore
Sparrows lifted above the ridge . . .
(from "October")
Each poem comes from Soto's memory of a particular event. Using all five senses, he recreates the memory and expands on it with the imagination. "Narrative poems should be credible," he explains, "though they do not necessarily have to be completely 'true'". In fact, some of Soto's best poems, like the one that follows, are inventions based on someone he's seen or met.
FINDING A LUCKY NUMBER
When I was like you I crossed a street
To a store, and from the store
Up an alley, as I rolled chocolate
In my mouth and looked around
With my face. The day was blue
Between trees, even without wind,
And the fences were steaming
And a dog was staring into a paint bucket
And a Mexicano was raking
Spilled garbage into a box,
A raffle of eggshells and orange peels.
He nodded his head and I nodded mine
And rolled chocolate all the way
To the courthouse, where I sat
In the park, with a leaf falling
For every person who passed —
Three leaves and three daughters
With bags in their hands.
I followed them under trees,
The leaves rocking out of reach
Like those skirts I would love
From a distance. I lost them
When I bent down to tie my shoes
And begged a squirrel to eat grass.
Looking up, a dog on the run,
A grandma with a cart,
And Italians clicking dominoes
At a picnic table — men
Of the Old World, in suits big enough
For Europe. I approached
Them like a squirrel, a tree
At a time, and when I was close
Enough to tell the hour from their wrists,
One laughed with hands in his hair
And turned to ask my age.
"Twelve," I said, and he knocked
My head softly with a knuckle:
"Lucky number, Sonny." He bared
His teeth, yellow and crooked
As dominoes, and tapped the front one
With a finger. "I got twelve — see."
He opened wide until his eyes were lost
In the pouches of fat cheeks,
And I, not knowing what to do, looked in.
Fifteen years ago, when he first started writing, Gary Soto had no idea that he would turn out so many poems. Yet poems feed into other poems, a process he compares to needle passing a stitch through cloth. He already has five books of poetry to his credit as well as four collections of essays. A collection of short stories for Chicano children, Baseball in April, will be published in February, and a collection of autobiographical essays, A Summer Life, will come out in June.
In the writing classes he teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, Soto advises his students to look to their own lives for inspiration. "What are your life stories?" he asks. "Can you remember incidents from your childhood? Some of you will say that your lives are boring, that nothing has happened, that everything interesting happens far away. Not so. Your lives are at work, too. Each poet works differently. But the task is always the same - to get the language right so that the subject of the poem will live."
- Suzi Mee
WO000986
Excerpt from "October" © 1997, in The Elements of San Joaquin, by Gary Soto. Reprinted by permission of the author. "Oranges," "Finding a Lucky Number," and excerpts from "Black Hair" from New and Selected Poems by Soto, Gary, © 1995, published by Chronicle Books, San Francisco. Website http://www.chronbooks.com. Literary Cavalcade, © 1990. Reprinted by permission.
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Reading Passage [12]
"The Flying Machine"
(Description of Story)*
"The Flying Machine" is a story that considers the nature of peace and progress while subtly exploring the themes of personal and political responsibility. The story recounts the events of a single day and the difficult decision made by a fictional emperor in 5 century China.
While the Emperor is enjoying the tranquility of the morning, a servant rushes in to tell him about a "miracle." After several attempts, the servant finally rouses the Emperor to look at the miracle in the sky: a man flying with wings fashioned from paper and bamboo. The emperor is stunned, then demands that the inventor be brought to him.
The Emperor decrees that the man and his invention be destroyed because the progress symbolized by the flying machine threatens both the Emperor's way of life and the well-being of his people. In order to illustrate his point to the inventor, the Emperor shows an invention of his own that mirrors the natural world: a wind-up box containing small trees and miniature flying birds. The inventor tries to convince the Emperor that his flying machine, like the Emperor's invention, is a thing of beauty. The Emperor, however, chooses to protect the peace of his dominion from the possibility of future invasion, and sacrifices the momentary beauty provided by the flying machine. The story ends with the Emperor enjoying the peaceful miniature world inside his wind-up box.
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* We did not receive copyright approval to put the actual text from the student booklet on the Website. The full text can be found in Ray Bradbury, The Golden Apples of the Sun and Other Stories. New York: Avon Books, 1997
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