ShmoopTube

00:03

Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by metal fingers. Great when we want to swiftly

00:08

make fortune cookies, bad when we want a nice massage.

00:30

If the writer were to delete the underlined phrase "fold the cookie in half to trap the

00:36

fortune inside," the sentence would primarily lose:

00:41

And here are the potential answers...

00:45

This one's a no-brainer. All we have to do is read the underlined phrase, remember what

00:48

it says, and match it with an answer choice that says the same basic thing.

00:52

We could do this with our eyes closed.

00:54

Well, that would probably make it hard for us to read, so we'll keep them open.

01:00

Option (A) is a definite no. The underlined phrase says nothing about how fortunes are

01:04

printed.

01:05

It would be cool if an ancient sage wrote them, but we bet they pop out of a printer.

01:10

Choice (B) is incorrect because the speed of the machine isn't mentioned.

01:14

We're guessing it's pretty fast, though. Chances are the Fortune III doesn't give a flip about

01:18

the Slow Food Movement.

01:21

(C) is wrong too; the phase doesn't fill us in on how many fortunes go into a cookie.

01:27

Though...we assume the number is one. Two fortunes seems greedy.

01:31

Looks like (D) wins the day. The underlined phrase describes exactly how the fortunes

01:36

are trapped inside the cookies. This is a detail of how the machines work, so (D) is

01:40

the correct answer.

01:41

We feel bad for the fortunes trapped inside the cookies.

01:44

Thus, we consider it an act of liberation every time we order Chinese.

Full Transcript