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Direction: Choose the best inference for each story
1. A small-town lawyer from Illinois, tall and lanky with an Adam's apple that could have gone down in the
Guinness Book of Records had it existed in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, he changed the face of
American history, steering it through a civil war that left both sides bloody. Who knows what more he could
I have done had an assassin's bullet not cut him down.
a. He had a big Adam's apple.
b. He steered the nation through a civil war.
2. In the early nineteenth century, Shakespeare was the most widely performed playwright in both the
North and Southeast. In the first half of the nineteenth century, English and American actors could always
earn money by performing Shakespeare in towns both big and small. American audiences were famous for
their participation in performances of Shakespeare's plays: They hurled eggs and tomatoes at the villains
and cheered and whistled for the heroes. By the end of the nineteenth century, theater owners claimed
that most ordinary people couldn't understand Shakespeare, and they were refusing to stage his plays. In
the early 1800s, theater goers in big cities could often choose between three different productions of
Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet; by the end of the nineteenth century, it was hard to find production
of a Shakespeare play, let alone several.
a. Early American audiences embraced Shakespeare's plays enthusiastically because they wanted to prove
that they were as clever and sophisticated as their former British rulers.
b. The role of Shakespeare in America changed dramatically as the nineteenth century drew to a close.
