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Here’s your shmoop du jour… Hit pause and read this passage. You may experience
a bit of déjà vu… What was the author's purpose in writing this
passage? And here are the potential answers…
So… what is this question asking? Well, it’s asking us to peer inside the
author’s head and see if we can get at their reason for writing this little historical
nugget. Other than to torture us with test questions…
Was it A… to entertain? Meh. There isn’t a lot of plot development,
and there are no thrilling chase sequences… probably not.
What about B… to inform? Certainly sounds plausible. There’s a lot
of information here… meaning that we’re being informed…
How about C… to persuade? There are certain things the author is trying
to persuade us of… …such as the idea that the railroad helped
bring people together, or made travel more efficient…
…but it still seems more like the purpose was to inform us than to sway our beliefs.
And D? To argue? Not much argumentation here. Besides, “arguing”
is pretty close to “persuading”… Nope… answer B is our best bet.
As in, “Brain privacy.”