| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain: he allowed it just meant outdoors and up high. Well,
that seemed sensible enough, so I was satisfied, and
said so. That pleased Tom and put him in a good
humor again, and he says:
"Well, it's all right, then; and we'll let bygones
be bygones. I don't know for certain what a welkin
is, but when we land in London we'll make it ring,
anyway, and don't you forget it."
He said an erronort was a person who sailed around
in balloons; and said it was a mighty sight finer to be
Tom Sawyer the Erronort than to be Tom Sawyer the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: varieties of the silkworm; in the eggs of poultry, and in the colour of the
down of their chickens; in the horns of our sheep and cattle when nearly
adult;--so in a state of nature, natural selection will be enabled to act
on and modify organic beings at any age, by the accumulation of profitable
variations at that age, and by their inheritance at a corresponding age.
If it profit a plant to have its seeds more and more widely disseminated by
the wind, I can see no greater difficulty in this being effected through
natural selection, than in the cotton-planter increasing and improving by
selection the down in the pods on his cotton-trees. Natural selection may
modify and adapt the larva of an insect to a score of contingencies, wholly
different from those which concern the mature insect. These modifications
 On the Origin of Species |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald: campus, followed by half a hundred village urchinsto the stifled
laughter of hundreds of alumni and visitors, half of whom had no
idea that this was a practical joke, but thought that Burne and
Fred were two varsity sports showing their girl a collegiate
time.
Phyllis's feelings as she was paraded by the Harvard and
Princeton stands, where sat dozens of her former devotees, can be
imagined. She tried to walk a little ahead, she tried to walk a
little behindbut they stayed close, that there should be no doubt
whom she was with, talking in loud voices of their friends on the
football team, until she could almost hear her acquaintances
 This Side of Paradise |