| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Court Life in China by Isaac Taylor Headland: report was given and, for the first time in the history of the
empire, a great university was launched by the government,
destined, may we not hope, to accomplish the end the ambitious
boy Emperor had in view.
Kuang Hsu was aware that a single institution was not sufficient
to accomplish that end. On July 10th therefore he ordered that
"schools and colleges be established in all the provincial
capitals, prefectoral, departmental and district cities, and
allowed the viceroys and governors but two months to report upon
the number of colleges and free schools within their provinces,"
saying that "all must be changed into practical schools for the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis: Nor sin shall me besmirch.
With a rustle of starched linen skirts and stiff shirt-fronts,
the congregation sat down, and gave heed to the Reverend
Mr. Zitterel. The priest was a thin, swart, intense young
man with a bang. He wore a black sack suit and a lilac tie.
He smote the enormous Bible on the reading-stand, vociferated,
"Come, let us reason together," delivered a prayer informing
Almighty God of the news of the past week, and began to
reason.
It proved that the only problems which America had to
face were Mormonism and Prohibition:
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: --her child, for instance,--but who is weary of life. Those garments
bore witness to an elegant disgust, not reaching, however, as far as
suicide; no, she would live out her days in these earthly galleys.
She received d'Arthez as a woman who expected him, and as if he had
already been to see her a hundred times; she did him the honor to
treat him like an old acquaintance, and she put him at his ease by
pointing to a seat on a sofa, while she finished a note she was then
writing. The conversation began in a commonplace manner: the weather,
the ministry, de Marsay's illness, the hopes of the legitimists.
D'Arthez was an absolutist; the princess could not be ignorant of the
opinions of a man who sat in the Chamber among the fifteen or twenty
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