Chapter 10: Tone and Purpose
Lab Activity 46: Subjective and Objective Tone
 
Objective:
To identify the author's tone in paragraphs from college textbooks.

arrow.gifStep 2: Choose the best answer.


      6. In his now classic political treatise Leviathan (1651), Hobbes argued pessimistically that man's natural state was war. Government, Hobbes theorized, particularly a monarchy, was necessary to restrain man's bestial tendencies because life without government was a "state of nature."
—O'Connor & Sabato, The Essentials of American Government, p. 16.


According to the passage, Hobbes's tone could be described as  

 
 
 
 
      7. British-born Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) was imported to make scary melodramas and only gradually acquired the critical reputation his work continues to merit. Known first as a man who made thrillers about spies and murders among highly civilized people, he was dubbed the "master of suspense" in the late 1930s. The plots of his films were filled with unexpected twists of danger, as in the 1942 spy film Saboteur, when hero and villain have their showdown fight to the death on the torch of the Statue of Liberty.
—Janaro & Altshuler, The Art of Being Human, 6th ed., p. 348.


The underlined words indicate a tone of  

 
 
 
 
      8. "Evil," observed Hitchcock once in an interview, "is complete disorder." That his villains were overcome in the end is the price he had to pay to Hollywood's moral code. Yet his so-called happy endings are often injected with sly humor, as if to say, "The world really isn't so well run." He believed implicitly that we live in a fundamentally amoral universe in which good triumphs only by accident, in which good is a human intervention practiced successfully by a few whose survival is by no means sure, and in which chaos is the laws of nature itself.
—Janaro & Altshuler, The Art of Being Human, 6th ed., p. 348.


The tone of this passage is  

 
 
 
 
      9. A product of British society that was outwardly civilized but had fostered Jack the Ripper, a serial killer from a genteel background, as well as many other gory crimes, Hitchcock combined a civilized directing style with a zest for the bizarre and frightening. The real irony, of course, is that there was a screen auteur who believed that disorder and chaos were fundamental to both human nature and the natural world, yet who communicated his belief in a very planned, meticulously offered way, with the intricate details of each shot put down in writing before the camera was ever turned on. Perhaps Hitchcock is ultimately saying that art is the only compensation for evil.
—Janaro & Altshuler, The Art of Being Human, 6th ed., p. 350.


The underlined sentence indicates what kind of tone?  

 
 
 
 
      10. Machine or artificial intelligence (AI) is a specialty area of computer science concerned with creating machines capable of functions that, in humans, require consciousness or intelligence. Whether or not there can be machine intelligence is a hotly debated point. We suggest that if intelligence can exist to varying degrees in living beings, then machine intelligence can exist even if it is no more than equivalent to the minimal living form. Let's just be reasonable and realistic in our expectations—perhaps even suspend disbelief—and we may be rewarded for our flexibility.
—Lockard & Abrams, Computers for Twenty-First Century Educators, p. 287.


The tone in this introductory paragraph to a technology textbook is  

 
 
 
 





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