Assignment

Write a brief (250-300) word analysis of the selection you read from Hard Times. Use the reading comprehension practice you did in Lesson 1.1 as pre-writing to develop your ideas before you write your analysis. Turn in your pre-writing with the final draft of your analysis.

Reading Comprehension Practice:

INSTRUCTIONS: Read this opening scene from Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, practicing multi‐draft reading,

close reading, and questioning.

On the first read‐through, read mainly for a sense of plot. What is happening here? After

you’e done the first read‐through, answer question 1 below.

On the second read‐through, read for style and structure. Use a pen or highlighter as you read

to mark repeated words, phrases, and images —noticing these repetitions will help you figure

out what Dickens is really saying, what his deeper meaning is. After you’e finished your

second read‐through and marked the text, answer question 2 below.

On the third read‐through, put it all together, make connections, and ask questions as you

read. When you combine your understanding of plot and style —of what’ happening and

how Dickens is expressing it —what do you get? What is at stake here? Which characters are

in conflict? What is the conflict? Who is right . . . who do you think Dickens agrees with? Why?

After your third read‐through, answer questions 3 and 4 below.

Reading:

THOMAS GRADGRIND, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the

principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything

over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir ‐ peremptorily Thomas ‐ Thomas Gradgrind. With a

rule and a pair of scales, and

the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and

tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope

to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John

Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non‐existent persons), but into the head of Thomas

Gradgrind ‐ no, sir!

In such terms Mr. Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself, whether to his private circle of acquaintance,

or to the public in general. In such terms, no doubt, substituting the words ‘boys and girls,’ for ‘sir,’ Thomas

Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little pitchers before him, who were to be filled so full of

facts.

Indeed, as he eagerly sparkled at them from the cellarage before mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon

loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one

discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender

young imaginations that were to be stormed away.

‘Girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger,

‘I don’t know that girl. Who is that girl?’

‘Sissy Jupe, sir,’ explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and curtseying.

‘Sissy is not a name,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘Don’t call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia.’

‘It’s father as calls me Sissy, sir,’ returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and 

Cecilia.’

‘It’s father as calls me Sissy, sir,’ returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and with another curtsey.

‘Then he has no business to do it,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘Tell him he mustn’t. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is

your father?’

‘He belongs to the horse‐riding, if you please, sir.’

Mr. Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling with his hand.

‘We don’t want to know anything about that, here. You mustn’t tell us about that, here. Your father breaks

horses, don’t he?’

‘If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses in the ring, sir.’

‘You mustn’t tell us about the ring, here. Very well, then. Describe your father as a horsebreaker. He doctors

sick horses, I dare say?’

‘Oh yes, sir.’

Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and horsebreaker. Give me your definition of a horse.’

(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)

‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, for the general behoof of all the little

pitchers. ‘Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals! Some

boy’s definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours.’

The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on Bitzer, perhaps because he chanced to sit in the

same ray of sunlight which, darting in at one of the bare windows of the intensely white‐washed room,

irradiated Sissy. For, the boys and girls sat on the face of the inclined plane in two compact bodies, divided up

the centre by a narrow interval; and Sissy, being at the corner of a row on the sunny side, came in for the

beginning of a sunbeam, of which Bitzer, being at the corner of a row on the other side, a few rows in

advance, caught the end. But, whereas the girl was so dark‐eyed and dark‐haired, that she seemed to receive

a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun, when it shone upon her, the boy was so light‐eyed and lighthaired

that the self‐same rays appeared to draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed. His cold eyes

would hardly have been eyes, but for the short ends of lashes which, by bringing them into immediate

contrast with something paler than themselves, expressed their form. His short‐cropped hair might have been

a mere continuation of the sandy freckles on his forehead and face. His skin was so unwholesomely deficient

in the natural tinge, that he looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white.

‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind. ‘Your definition of a horse.’

‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty‐four grinders, four eye‐teeth, and twelve incisive.

Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron.

Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer.

‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse is.’

She curtseyed again, and would have blushed deeper, if she could have blushed deeper than she had blushed

all this time. Bitzer, after rapidly blinking at Thomas Gradgrind with both eyes at once, and so catching the

light upon his quivering ends of lashes that they looked like the antennae of busy insects, put his knuckles to

his freckled forehead, and sat down again.  

The third gentleman now stepped forth. A mighty man at cutting and drying, he was; a government officer; in

his way (and in most other people’s too), a professed pugilist; always in training, always with a system to force

down the general throat like a bolus, always to be heard of at the bar of his little Public‐office, ready to fight

all England. To continue in fistic phraseology, he had a genius for coming up to the scratch, wherever and

whatever it was, and proving himself an ugly customer. He would go in and damage any subject whatever with

his right, follow up with his left, stop, exchange, counter, bore his opponent (he always fought All England) to

the ropes, and fall upon him neatly. He was certain to knock the wind out of common sense, and render that

unlucky adversary deaf to the call of time. And he had it in charge from high authority to bring about the great

public‐office Millennium, when Commissioners should reign upon earth.

‘Very well,’ said this gentleman, briskly smiling, and folding his arms. ‘That’s a horse. Now, let me ask you girls

and boys, Would you paper a room with representations of horses?’

After a pause, one half of the children cried in chorus, ‘Yes, sir!’ Upon which the other half, seeing in the

gentleman’s face that Yes was wrong, cried out in chorus, ‘No, sir!’ ‐ as the custom is, in these examinations.

‘Of course, No. Why wouldn’t you?’

A pause. One corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing, ventured the answer, Because he

wouldn’t paper a room at all, but would paint it.

‘You must paper it,’ said the gentleman, rather warmly.

‘You must paper it,’ said Thomas Gradgrind, ‘whether you like it or not. Don’t tell us you wouldn’t paper it.

What do you mean, boy?’

‘I’ll explain to you, then,’ said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, ‘why you wouldn’t paper a

room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in

reality ‐ in fact? Do you?’

‘Yes, sir!’ from one half. ‘No, sir!’ from the other.

‘Of course no,’ said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong half. ‘Why, then, you are not to see

anywhere, what you don’t see in fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don’t have in fact. What is

called Taste, is only another name for Fact.’ Thomas Gradgrind nodded his approbation.

‘This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery,’ said the gentleman. ‘Now, I’ll try you again. Suppose

you were going to carpet a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon it?’

There being a general conviction by this time that ‘No, sir!’ was always the right answer to this gentleman, the

chorus of NO was very strong. Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes: among them Sissy Jupe.

‘Girl number twenty,’ said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of knowledge.

Sissy blushed, and stood up. 

‘So you would carpet your room ‐ or your husband’s room, if you were a grown woman, and had a husband ‐

with representations of flowers, would you?’ said the gentleman. ‘Why would you?’

‘If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,’ returned the girl.

‘And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy

boots?’

‘It wouldn’t hurt them, sir. They wouldn’t crush and wither, if you please, sir. They would be the pictures of

what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy ‐ ‘

‘Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn’t fancy,’ cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. ‘That’s

it! You are never to fancy.’

‘You are not, Cecilia Jupe,’ Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, ‘to do anything of that kind.’

‘Fact, fact, fact!’ said the gentleman. And ‘Fact, fact, fact!’ repeated Thomas Gradgrind.

‘You are to be in all things regulated and governed,’ said the gentleman, ‘by fact. We hope to have, before

long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and

of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not

to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don’t walk upon flowers

in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don’t find that foreign birds and butterflies

come and perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your

Interest rates are a fact of life that you will encounter both professionally and personally. One area of interest rates that you may be most concerned about are those applied to credit card debt. Let’s say that you had $2400 on a particular credit card that charges an annual percentage rate (APR) of 21% and requires that you pay a minimum of 2% per month. Could you determine the minimum monthly payment? The minimum monthly payment would simply be 2% times the balance as shown:

2% x $2400.00 = 0.02 x $2400.00 = $48.00

So, your monthly minimum payment would be $48.00. Do you know how much of this is being applied to the principal and how much is going to interest? To determine this, you would need to know the simple interest formula.

I = Prt

In this formula, I = interest, P = is the principal (balance), r = is the annual percentage rate, and t is the time frame. To determine the interest per month on a balance of $2400 with an APR of 21%, you would let P = $2400, r = .21, and t = 1/12 (1 month is 1/12 of a year). The interest paid each month would then be:

I = Prt = ($2400)(.21)(1/12) = $42.00

So, you are paying $42.00 per month towards interest. With a minimum payment of $48.00, that means you are paying $6.00 per month towards the balance ($48.00 – $42.00 = $6.00). No wonder it takes so long to pay off a credit card!

Research interest rates and consumer debt using the Argosy University online library resources and the Internet.

Based on the articles and your independent research, respond to the following:

• How is consumer debt different today than in the past?
• What role do interest rates play in mounting consumer debt?
• What are the typical interest rates applied to credit cards, mortgages, and other debt?
• Many of today’s interest rates are variable rather than fixed. What difference does this make to pension plans, housing loans, and other personal finances?

Write your response in 1–2 paragraphs (a total of 200-300 words).

Comment on your peers’ responses, addressing the following:

• Have the issue of consumer debt and the role of interest rates been explored?
• Does the response clearly explain the causal relationship between fixed interest rates and pension plans, housing loans, and other personal finances?
• Are statements supported by reason and research?

How did Paul universalize Christ?

Paper MUST be betwen 400-500 words with 1 resource.

Original work ONLY!!!