Passage Excerpt from A Tramp Abroad
Excerpt from A Tramp Abroad
by Mark Twain
Now and then, while we rested, we watched the laborious ant at his work. I found nothing new in him—certainly nothing to change my opinion of him. It seems to me that in the matter of intellect the ant must be a strangely overrated bird. During many summers now I have watched him, when I ought to have been in better business, and I have not yet come across a living ant that seemed to have any more sense than a dead one. I refer to the ordinary ant, of course; I have had no experience of those wonderful Swiss and African ones which vote, keep drilled armies, . . . and dispute about religion. Those particular ants may be all that the naturalist paints them, but I am persuaded that the average ant is a sham.
I admit his industry, of course; he is the hardest working creature in the world—when anybody is looking—but his leather-headedness is the point I make against him. He goes out foraging, he makes a capture, and then what does he do? Go home? No; he goes anywhere but home. He doesn’t know where home is. His home may be only three feet away; no matter, he can’t find it. He makes his capture, as I have said; it is generally something which can be of no sort of use to himself or anybody else; it is usually seven times bigger than it ought to be; he hunts out the awkwardest place to take hold of it; he lifts it bodily up in the air by main force, and starts—not toward home, but in the opposite direction; not calmly and wisely, but with a frantic haste which is wasteful of his strength; he fetches up against a pebble, and, instead of going around it, he climbs over it backwards, dragging his booty after him, tumbles down on the other side, jumps up in a passion, kicks the dust off his clothes, moistens his hands, grabs his property viciously, yanks it this way, then that, shoves it ahead of him a moment, turns tail and lugs it after him another moment, gets madder and madder, then presently hoists it into the air and goes tearing away in an entirely new direction; comes to a weed; it never occurs to him to go around it. No; he must climb it, and he does climb it, dragging his worthless property to the top—which is as bright a thing to do as it would be for me to carry a sack of flour from Heidelberg to Paris by way of Strasburg steeple; when he gets up there he finds that that is not the place; takes a cursory glance at the scenery, and either climbs down again or tumbles down, and starts off once more—as usual, in a new direction. At the end of half an hour he fetches up within six inches of the place he started from, and lays his burden down. Meantime, he has been over all the ground for two yards around, and climbed all the weeds and pebbles he came across. Now he wipes the sweat from his brow, strokes his limbs, and then marches aimlessly off, in as violent a hurry as ever. He traverses a good deal of zig-zag country, and by and by stumbles on his same booty again. He does not remember to have ever seen it before; he looks around to see which is not the way home, grabs his bundle, and starts. He goes through the same adventures he had before; finally stops to rest, and a friend comes along.
Evidently the friend remarks that a last year’s grasshopper leg is a very noble acquisition, and inquires where he got it. Evidently the proprietor does not remember exactly where he did get it, but thinks he got it “around here somewhere.” Evidently the friend contracts to help him freight it home. Then, with a judgment peculiarly antic (pun not intentional), they take hold of opposite ends of that grasshopper leg and begin to tug with all their might in opposite directions. Presently they take a rest, and confer together. They decide that something is wrong, they can’t make out what. Then they go at it again, just as before. Same result. Mutual recriminations follow. Evidently each accuses the other of being an obstructionist. They warm up, and the dispute ends in a fight. They lock themselves together and chew each other’s jaws for a while; then they roll and tumble on the ground till one loses a horn or a leg and has to haul off for repairs. They make up and go to work again in the same old insane way, but the crippled ant is at a disadvantage; tug as he may, the other one drags off the booty and him at the end of it. Instead of giving up, he hangs on, and gets his shins bruised against every obstruction that comes in the way. By and by, when that grasshopper leg has been dragged all over the same old ground once more, it is finally dumped at about the spot where it originally lay. The two perspiring ants inspect it thoughtfully and decide that dried grasshopper legs are a poor sort of property after all, and then each starts off in a different direction to see if he can’t find an old nail or something else that is heavy enough to afford entertainment and at the same time valueless enough to make an ant want to own it. . . .
Science has recently discovered that the ant does not lay up anything for winter use. . . . He does not work, except when people are looking, and only then when the observer has a green, naturalistic look, and seems to be taking notes. This amounts to deception, and will injure him for the Sunday schools. He has not judgment enough to know what is good to eat from what isn’t. This amounts to ignorance, and will impair the world’s respect for him. . . . He cannot stroll around a stump and find his way home again. This amounts to idiocy, and once the damaging fact is established, thoughtful people will cease to look up to him. It is strange beyond comprehension that so manifest a humbug as the ant has been able to fool so many nations and keep it up so many ages without being found out.
we: the author and his fictional travel companion
From A TRAMP ABROAD by Mark Twain—Public Domain
Question
The phrase “those wonderful Swiss and African ones which vote, keep drilled armies, . . . and dispute about religion” in paragraph 1 shows that the author
- Abelieves that the behavior of the ants is reflected in other living creatures.
- Backnowledges that his observations of a few do not necessarily apply to all.
- Cknows that disproving a commonly held belief is challenging.
- Daccepts that there are flaws in his interpretation of the behavior of the ants.
Show the answer
Correct answer: B
The answer is (B)
The question asks about the phrase, which highlights the behavior of ants from different parts of the world, and about what the inclusion of the phrase shows about the author.
Option B is correct because the phrase is meant to communicate a caution that while the author believes most ants are foolish, his observations in the excerpt do not apply to all types of ants.
Option A is incorrect because, in the excerpt, the author is comparing species of ants to one another and not to other living creatures.
Option C is incorrect because the author never comments in the excerpt that challenging common or strongly held beliefs is, in general, difficult.
Option D is incorrect because the author never expresses in the excerpt the idea that the conclusions drawn about the ants’ behavior are flawed; the reference to Swiss and African ants is meant to show that those ants are an exception.
Question analysis
In this Mark Twain excerpt about ants, students must decide what a mocking aside about Swiss and African ants that “vote” and “keep drilled armies” reveals about the author's point of view. The tricky part is reading past the sarcasm to see what the aside does for his larger case against ants.
- Grade level
- Grade 8 reading and task
- Compared with grade 7
- Above grade 7 Grade 7 readers usually judge a narrator's stance from direct statements. Here the stance sits inside a sarcastic aside in long nineteenth-century sentences, so students must separate what Twain means from what he mocks, which goes beyond typical grade 7 work.
- Estimated difficulty
- Hard: combines ideas, needs a plan, and has more than one tempting wrong answer.
- Thinking it demands
- Depth of knowledge 2, skills and concepts · mainly analyze
- What makes it hard
- Figurative or literary language major
- A very close wrong answer moderate
- Reading between the lines moderate
- Evidence
- Answered from one sentence or line
- Reading level
- Passage: about grade 9, 1099 words; question and choices: about grade 8, 72 words.
- Students, last 30 days
- Not enough answers yet to show (it takes 10).
Why it is hard, traps and wrong answers (shows the answer)
Why it is hard
Most misses come from reading the aside as a sincere comparison or as a confession. Twain mocks the naturalists' stories of voting, warring ants while making clear that his verdict covers only the ordinary ant he has watched, so the phrase narrows his claim without weakening it. The key's wording, “observations of a few,” is abstract and does not echo the text, and students who catch the concession but not its limits drift to the choice about flaws in his interpretation.
Figurative or literary language major Understanding the question
The aside is mock praise: “wonderful” ants that “vote” and “dispute about religion” poke fun at the naturalists, so students must see that the joke also fences off which ants his verdict covers. (Graesser, Singer & Trabasso, 1994; Kintsch, 1998)
A very close wrong answer moderate Choosing the answer
B and D both read the aside as a concession about his conclusions; they part only on its kind, since B narrows which ants his verdict covers while D admits the verdict itself is flawed. (Embretson & Wetzel, 1987; Gorin & Embretson, 2006; Ascalon et al., 2007)
Reading between the lines moderate Working it out
The phrase says nothing about the author directly; his stance comes from its frame, “I refer to the ordinary ant, of course” before it and “the average ant is a sham” after. (Graesser, Singer & Trabasso, 1994; Kintsch, 1998)
Strategy: Reread the whole sentence the quoted phrase sits in, not just the quoted words, and decide what job the aside does there; then drop any choice describing an idea the paragraph never expresses.
Traps
- Twists what the text says: Uses the text's topic and ideas but changes what it says: who did it, how much, when, or why.
- Taking figurative language literally: A choice reads a figure of speech or image at face value.
The wrong answers, classified
A Taking figurative language literally (Graesser, Singer & Trabasso, 1994)
Takes the voting, army-keeping ants at face value as a likeness between ants and people, though the aside mocks those claims and compares only kinds of ants.
C Reads too much in (Graesser, Singer & Trabasso, 1994)
Carries the closing complaint that the ant has fooled “so many nations” into this sentence and decides the author finds disproving the belief hard, which he never says.
D Twists what the text says (King et al., 2004)
Rightly hears a concession in “I have had no experience,” but turns a limit on which ants he means into an admission that his reading of ants is wrong.
Working it out, step by step
Figure out what the question asks
This question is about the author’s point of view. In paragraph 1, Twain mentions some very special ants. You need to decide what that mention shows about Twain himself.
Read the whole sentence
Don’t read only the quoted words. Read the whole sentence in paragraph 1: “I refer to the ordinary ant, of course; I have had no experience of those wonderful Swiss and African ones which vote, keep drilled armies, . . . and dispute about religion.”
Then read the next sentence: “Those particular ants may be all that the naturalist paints them, but I am persuaded that the average ant is a sham.”
Work out what the phrase means
Twain is joking. No ant really votes or argues about religion. He is poking fun at wild stories told by naturalists (people who study nature).
But the joke also does a job. Twain says his opinion is about the “ordinary ant,” the kind he has watched. He has never seen those other ants. So he limits his claim to the ants he knows. He does not say his claim is wrong.
Check each choice
- A says ant behavior shows up in other creatures. No. Twain compares kinds of ants, not ants and other animals.
- B fits. He has watched only some ants, so his verdict may not fit every ant.
- C says he finds it hard to disprove a common belief. He never says that.
- D says he admits his view of ants is flawed. He doesn’t. He stays sure the ant is a sham.
Choose the answer
The phrase shows that Twain knows what he saw in the ants he watched may not be true of all ants. So the answer is B.
Why this answer and not the closest wrong one
D is the closest trap. Both B and D hear Twain admitting something. But D says he admits he is wrong. B says only that he limits which ants he means. Right after the phrase he writes, “I am persuaded that the average ant is a sham.” He is not backing down.
More questions like this
The original DOE question
The passage “Excerpt from A Tramp Abroad” as printed (pages 62–63)
