Text 1:
Pot O’ Gold by Kathryn Fitzgerald
We came here in search of food
across a tumultuous sea
We came here for a life that’s good;
We'd have stayed home if we could
Máthair cried after we arrived
Each day in the filth she would toil
Athair’d search each day for a wage that was good
to buy food, to buy shoes, to buy wood
They fought long and hard, became loyal and true
To forge a life from something brand new
This immigrants legacy would be seen through
Pulsing through my heart is emerald blood
My grandfather's father’s will, in me
They came here for a life that’s good
I stay here because I could.
Text 2:
Mrs. Olney stood abashed a moment. “Well, my dear,” she said deliberately, “what would you like to take up?”
“I got ideas how to make America better, only I don’t know how to say it out. Ain’t there a place I can learn?”
A startled woman stared at me. For a moment not a word came. Then she proceeded with the same kind smile. “It’s nice of you to want to help America, but I think the best way would be for you to learn a trade. That’s what this school is for, to help girls find themselves, and the best way to do is to learn something useful.”
“Ain’t thoughts useful? Does America want only the work from my body, my hands? Ain’t it thoughts that turn over the world?”
“Ah! But we don’t want to turn over the world.” Her voice cooled. “My child, thought requires leisure. The time will come for that. First you must learn to earn a good living.”
“Did I come to America for a living?”
“What did you come for?”
“I came to give out all the fine things that was choked in me in Russia. I came to help America make the new world. . . . They said, in America I could open up my heart and fly free in the air—to sing—to dance—to live—to love . . . Here I got all those grand things in me, and America won’t let me give nothing.”
1. How is the idea of the American Dream, coming to America for a better life, different in passage 1 than in passage 2?
A-In Passage One, they choose to stay while in Passage Two, she wants to leave.
B-Passage One is about working hard in America, while Passage Two is about changing America.
C-The narrator in Passage Two is ungrateful, while Passage 1 is grateful.
D-Passage Two doesn’t care about money, but Passage 2 does.
2) The speaker of the poem would disagree with the narrator of the poem because..
A-The speaker likes America.
B-The speaker thinks the narrator is stuck up.
C-The speaker works hard for her money.
D-They’d be friends.
3) Both passages discuss the theme of....
A-Immigration
B-America being great again
C-Loneliness
D-Hard work