EXTENSION SELECTION TEST

The Immigrant Contribution

1
Name:       Date:      

The Immigrant Contribution

John F. Kennedy

DIRECTIONS: Complete each item, responding to the prompt or identifying the choice
that best answers the question. Your teacher may instruct you to respond to prompts on a
separate sheet of paper.
      1. Read the following passage from “The Immigrant Contribution.”

Oscar Handlin has said, “Once I thought to write a history of the

immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were
American history.” In the same sense, we cannot really speak of a
particular “immigrant contribution” to America because all Americans
have been immigrants or the descendants of immigrants; even the
Indians, as mentioned before, migrated to the American continent. We
can only speak of people whose roots in America are older or newer.
Yet each wave of immigration left its own imprint on American society;
each made its distinctive “contribution” to the building of the nation and
the evolution of American life.

Which quotation from the text does not directly support Kennedy’s
statement that all Americans are immigrants?

a. Oscar Handlin has said, “Once I thought to write a history of the

immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were
American history.”
b. In the same sense, we cannot really speak of a particular “immigrant
contribution” to America… because all Americans have been
immigrants or the descendants of immigrants; even the Indians, as
mentioned before, migrated to the American continent.
c. We can only speak of people whose roots in America are older or newer.
d. Yet each wave of immigration left its own imprint on American society;
each made its distinctive “contribution” to the building of the nation and
the evolution of American life.

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 EXTENSION SELECTION TEST
The Immigrant Contribution

2. The following question has two parts. Answer Part A first, and then Part B.

      Part A Read the following paragraph from “The Immigrant Contribution.”

Significant as the immigrant role was in politics and in the economy, the
immigrant contribution to the professions and the arts was perhaps
even greater. Charles O. Paullin’s analysis of the Dictionary of
American Biography shows that, of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century figures, 20 percent of the businessmen, 20 percent of the
scholars and scientists, 23 percent of the painters, 24 percent of the
engineers, 28 percent of the architects, 29 percent of the clergymen, 46
percent of the musicians and 61 percent of the actors were of foreign
birth—a remarkable measure of the impact of immigration on American
culture. And not only have many American writers and artists
themselves been immigrants or the children of immigrants, but
immigration has provided American literature with one of its major
themes.

How does the paragraph develop the key idea that immigrants make
important contributions to America?

a. by providing data about the percentage of important contributions to

America that were made by immigrants
b. by showing that immigrants’ histories have been included in texts about
American history
c. by providing data that demonstrate that immigrants make up a large
percentage of the population
d. by giving an example of an immigrant’s scholarly analysis as evidence of
their professional contributions

      Part B How does the paragraph refine the key idea in Part A?
a. by including data that show the wide variety of fields in which
immigrants have made important contributions
b. by emphasizing that immigrants’ contributions extend beyond their
professional contributions
c. by establishing the idea that immigrants’ children have also made
important contributions to America
d. by suggesting that immigrants’ importance in America has been firmly
established because they have become a topic of scholarly research

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 EXTENSION SELECTION TEST
The Immigrant Contribution

3. The following question has two parts. Answer Part A first, and then Part B.

      Part A What can you infer about Kennedy’s perspective on America as a
“melting pot” in “The Immigrant Contribution”?

a. Kennedy believes that America has become a true melting pot with one,
common national identity.
b. Kennedy believes that becoming a true melting pot will erase ethnic
traditions and identities.
c. Kennedy believes that America cannot become a true melting pot
because many ethnic groups will not assimilate.
d. Kennedy believes that America is not yet a melting pot because not all
groups in America share the same opportunities.

      Part B Which quotation from the text best supports the correct answer to
Part A?

a. But the very problems of adjustment and assimilation presented a

challenge to the American idea—a challenge which subjected that idea
to stern testing and eventually brought out the best qualities in American
society.
b. The ideal of the “melting pot” symbolized the process of blending many
strains into a single nationality, and we have come to realize in modern
times that the “melting pot” need not mean the end of particular ethnic
identities or traditions.
c. Only in the case of the Negro has the melting pot failed to bring a
minority into the full stream of American life. Today we are belatedly,
but resolutely, engaged in ending this condition of national exclusion
and shame. . . .
d. Sociologists call the process of the melting pot “social mobility.” One of
America’s characteristics has always been the lack of rigid class
structure.

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 EXTENSION SELECTION TEST
The Immigrant Contribution

4. Write a paragraph that explains Kennedy’s main purpose in “The Immigrant

Contribution” and how he uses persuasive language to develop that purpose
in the passage below.

Sociologists call the process of the melting pot “social mobility.” One of
America’s characteristics has always been the lack of a rigid class
structure. It has traditionally been possible for people to move up the
social and economic scale. Even if one did not succeed in moving up
oneself, there was always the hope that one’s children would.
Immigration is by definition a gesture of faith in social mobility. It is the
expression in action of a positive belief in the possibility of a better life.
It has thus contributed greatly to developing the spirit of personal
betterment in American society and to strengthening the national
confidence in change and the future. Such confidence, when widely
shared, sets the national tone. The opportunities that America offered
made the dream real, at least for a good many; but the dream itself was
in large part the product of millions of plain people beginning a new life
in the conviction that life could indeed be better, and each new wave of
immigration rekindled the dream.

    

DIRECTIONS: Complete each item, identifying the choice that best answers the question.
5. Write a short paragraph about immigration that includes one simple, one
compound, one complex, and one compound-complex sentence.

    

      6. Read this sentence from “The Immigrant Contribution.”

When poor, ill-educated and frightened people disembarked in a

strange land, they often fell prey to native racketeers, unscrupulous
businessmen and cynical politicians.

Based on your understanding of the Latin root -nat-, what does the word
native mean?

a. made without artificial ingredients

b. related to ships, especially warships

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 EXTENSION SELECTION TEST
The Immigrant Contribution

c. from or born in a specified place

d. dangerous

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 EXTENSION SELECTION TEST
The Immigrant Contribution

Texts

DIRECTIONS: Respond to this item if you have also read Anna Quindlen’s “A Quilt of a
Country.” Your teacher may instruct you to respond to the prompt on a separate sheet of
paper.
7. In Anna Quindlen's “A Quilt of a Country” and John F. Kennedy’s “The
Immigrant Contribution,” the writers’ diction, or word choice and
arrangement, helps develop a particular tone in each text. Read the
following passages from each text. Then write a short paragraph that
compares the tones of the two passages. Support your response with specific
word choices from each passage.

from “A Quilt of a Country”

America is an improbable idea. A mongrel nation built of ever-changing
disparate parts, it is held together by a notion, the notion that all men
are created equal, though everyone knows that most men consider
themselves better than someone. “Of all the nations in the world, the
United States was built in nobody’s image,” the historian Daniel
Boorstin wrote. That’s because it was built of bits and pieces that seem
discordant, like the crazy quilts that have been one of its great folk-art
forms, velvet and calico and checks and brocades. Out of many, one.
That is the ideal.

from “The Immigrant Contribution”

This is the spirit which so impressed Alexis de Tocqueville, and which
he called the spirit of equality. Equality in America has never meant
literal equality of condition or capacity; there will always be inequalities
in character and ability in any society. Equality has meant rather that, in
the words of the Declaration of Independence, “all men are created
equal . . . [and] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
rights”; it has meant that in a democratic society there should be no
inequalities in opportunities or in freedoms.

    

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