ShmoopTube

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It's time for your daily dose of shmoop...

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This passage is calling your name. It wants you to press pause and give it a read.

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Don't ask how it knew your name. We swear we didn't say a word.

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The primary purpose of lines 57 through 65 is to... what?

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And here are the potential answers...

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Well, if we want to know the purpose of something... guess we should be familiar with it first.

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Whoa. Not that familiar.

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Here are lines 57 through 65:

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"With a portion of this property Mr Godfrey Nickleby purchased a small farm, near Dawlish

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in Devonshire, whither he retired with his wife and two children, to live upon the best

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interest he could get for the rest of his money, and the little produce he could raise

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from his land. The two prospered so well together that, when he died, some fifteen years after

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this period, and some five after his wife, he was enabled to leave, to his eldest son,

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Ralph, three thousand pounds in cash, and to his youngest son, Nicholas, one thousand

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and the farm, which was as small a landed estate as one would desire to see."

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Okay, now let's take our answer choices one by one and see which one lands...

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Is this paragraph describing what Godfrey Nickleby buys with his inheritance?

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Well... yeah... but is that the purpose of it?

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Hm... not likely. We're pretty much done with the purchasing part of it by the end of the

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first sentence... there's more meat here than that...

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Is it tracing the Nickleby family's shift from poverty to prosperity?

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Bingo. Here we have an option that relates to the entire paragraph, not just a piece of it.

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We'll take a quick look at the remaining answers just to make sure there isn't a better option...

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although we're not going to bet Nicholas' farm on it.

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There's no emotional reaction discussed, so C is out...

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...there's no judgment being made about what constitutes a "moral life," so D ain't coin' it for us.

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...and there's no real difference mentioned between the two brothers... other than their different tax brackets.

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So yeah... B's our answer.

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As in, "Bet the farm."

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