Page 5 - SpringBoard_CloseReading_Workshop_Grade6_Flipbook

Close Reading of informational/literary nonfiction Texts (continued)
key ideas and deTails
What line of paragraph 2 best explains how riding a motorcycle differs from traveling in a car? Explain your choice.
On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.
Chris and I are traveling to Montana with some friends riding up ahead, and maybe headed farther than that. Plans are deliberately indefinite, more to travel than to arrive anywhere. We are just vacationing. Secondary roads are preferred. Paved county roads are the best, state highways are next. Freeways are the worst. We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time”
and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes. Twisting hilly roads are long in terms of seconds but are much more enjoyable on a cycle where you bank into turns and don’t get swung from side to side in any compartment. Roads with little traffic are more enjoyable, as well as safer. Roads free of drive-ins and billboards are better, roads where groves and meadows and orchards and lawns come almost to the shoulder, where kids wave to you when you ride by, where people look from their porches to see who it is, where when you stop to ask directions or information the answer tends to be longer than you want rather than short, where people ask where you’re from and how long you’ve been riding.
Check your Understanding
1. Find a sentence that you think shows that the structure of this text is narrative
writing. Explain how the sentence fits within the overall structure of the text.
2. Now that you have read closely and worked to understand challenging portions of this passage, choose a sentence that you think is important to understanding Pirsig’s thinking. Explain in your own words what the sentence means and why it is important to understanding the passage.
4
SpringBoard® English Language Arts Grade 6
© 2017 College Board. All rights reserved.