Meaning

1. H.M.Fox suggests that there are reasons why nature has made some animals colorblind. What are they? Can you think of any other reasons?

2. What colors can bees see? Can birds distinguish colors?

Method

1. Because the author presents his material in the same orderly fashion in which the experiments he describes were conducted, his essay is coherent, or well ordered. How would you outline this essay?

2. One method of analysis is deduction, a form of reasoning that proceeds from a general truth or theory to its proof a set of particular examples. Its opposite is induction, which draws, or infects, a general truth from a set of particulars. Which of these methods is Fox describing?

3. What makes this essay expository? How, for example, does it differ from John Steinbeck’s encounter with fish hawks in “My War with the Ospreys”?

Language: word origins

The English language has been derived from many different languages. Most of our vocabulary, however, comes from the Latin, Anglo-Saxon, and Greek languages.

According to G.Antrushina, words which consist of a root and an affix (or several affixes) are called derived words or derivatives and are produced by the process of word-building known as affixation (or derivation).

Derived words are extremely numerous in the English vocabulary. The four types (root words, derived words, compounds, shortenings) represent the main structural types of Modern English words, therefore conversion, derivation and composition the most productive ways of word-building.

For example, in this essay the author states that all wild animals are nocturnal or crepuscular. Nocturnal means active at night and comes from the Latin 49octurnes, nightly. Crepuscular means active at twilight and comes from the Latin creper, dusky, by way of Middle French crepuscule, dark, dusky.

Look in a dictionary to find out from which language each of these words in the essay came.

Bees honey spectrum technique

flower nectar syrup tropical

gobbles peacock table ultraviolet

Discovering Rhetorical Strategies

1. Which colors does the author concentrate on most in this essay? What colors are not seen by the greater part of animals?

2. What are the main similarities and differences between colorblind people and animals? Is it difficult for a person to be colorblind? If you have your own dog do you agree with H.M.Fox that all the dogs are colorblind?

Composition

The author interjected questions into his discussion in order to stimulate interest. Questions also add variety. Make a sentence outline for a composition in which you use questions for major headings. Be sure to choose a topic that will benefit from this kind of treatment.

S. MILGRAM (born 1933) and P. HOLLANDER (born 1932)

Both authors were teachers at Harvard University when they collaborated on this article. Stanley Milgram now teaches experimental social psychology at City College of the City University of New York. He is the author of “The Individual in a Social World” and “Obedience to Authority”. Mr. Hollander, a native of Hungary who fled Budapest during the 1956 uprising, teaches sociology at the University of Massachusetts. He has written Soviet and American Society: A Comparison.

“The Murder They Heard” was printed in the June 15, 1964, issue of The Nation, a monthly magazine of liberal opinion. The article examines the implications of the crime and attempts to explain why the thirty-eight witnesses failed to act. As you prepare to read this essay think about the following questions:

• Can anger provoke the crime?

• How could a person avert being charged unfairly?

• What would you do if you become a witness of the crime/robbery? Would you help the person? Would you call the police? Would be a witness in the court?