Unit 2: Part 2 Vocabulary

Yet when morning came, they invariably discovered that a group of the finest slaves had taken to their heels.

The posters offering rewards for the fugitives could not be printed until Monday.

She had told them about the place where they would stay, promising warmth and good food, holding these things out to them as an incentive to keep going.

She managed to dispel their fear of pursuit, so that they would not become hysterical, panic-stricken.

She waited for the moment when some one of them would turn mutinous.

The climate itself made for an ease of living that could never be duplicated in this bleak, barren countryside.

The memorial had been authorized by Congress “in honor and recognition of the men and women of the Armed Forces of the United States who served in the Vietnam War."

Everyone who inquired received a booklet explaining the criteria.

● a design which would be harmonious with its site, including visual harmony with the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.

The designs were displayed without any indication of the designer's name so that they could judged anonymously.

The designer has created an eloquent place where the simple meeting of the earth, sky and remembered names contain messages for all who will know this place.

The eight jurors signed their names to the report, a unanimous decision.

The trouble with television is that it discourages concentration. Almost anything interesting and rewarding in life requires some constructive, consistently applied effort.

But television encourages us to apply no effort. It sells us instant gratification. It diverts us only to divert, to make the time pass without pain.

In short, a lot of television usurps one of the most precious of all human gifts, the ability to focus your attention yourself, rather than just passively surrender it.

Who can quarrel with the medium that so brilliantly packages escapist entertainment as a mass-marketing tool? But I see its values now pervading this nation and its life. It has become fashionable to think that, like fast food, fast ideas are the way to get to a fast-moving, impatient public.

Some years ago Yale University law professor Charles L. Black, Jr. wrote: “forced feeding on trivial fare is not itself a trivial matter.”

If I am wrong, we will have done no harm to look at the issue skeptically and critically, to consider how we should be resisting it.

I imagine that many people reading these lines from one of Walt Whitman's best-known poems tell themselves, exultantly, "How true! Science just sucks all the beauty out of everything, reducing it all to numbers and tables and measurements! Why bother learning all that junk when I can just go out and look at the stars?"

I don't deny that the night sky is beautiful and I have in my time spread out on a hillside for hours looking at the stars and being awed by their beauty (and receiving bug-bites whose marks took weeks to go away).

And some stars explode in a vast cataclysm whose ferocious blast of cosmic rays, harrying outward at nearly the speed of light, reaching across thousands of light years to touch the Earth and supply some of the driving force of evolution through mutations.

And in more and more of those galaxies, we are becoming aware of violence at the center—of great explosions and outpourings of radiation, marking the death of millions of stars, perhaps.

All these galaxies are hurrying outward from each other in a vast universal expansion that began 15 billion years ago when all the matter in the universe was in a tiny sphere that exploded in the hugest conceivable shatter to form the galaxies.

The universe may expand forever or the day may come when the expansion slows and turns back into a contraction to re-form the tiny sphere and begin the game all over again so that the whole universe is exhaling and inhaling in breaths that are a trillion years long perhaps.

Evacuees from the cabins began to arrive and had to be given blankets and hot coffee.

The smell of the burn in the air, acid and pungent and tenacious.

It is easy to love nature in its peaceful and consoling moments, but one must love it in its furies too, in its despairs and wildness, especially when the damage is caused by us.

In autumn, you can fall back into an extra hour for sleep or contemplation.

An odd feature of the colors is that they don't seem to have any special purpose. We are predisposed to respond to their beauty, of course.

Firmly tethered to earth, we love to see things rise up and fly—soap bubbles, balloons, birds, fall leaves. They remind us that the end of a season is capricious, as is the end of life.