Midterm Practice Exam

True or false: Monroe's Motivated Sequence is a persuasive pattern built to end with a call to action.

True or false.

• True
• False

An illustrative campus library usually announces its closing time over the ceiling speakers. One evening the staff send the exact same sentence as a text alert to students' phones instead. Which element of the six-element model changed?

Select one.

• The message
• The channel
• The receiver
• The source

An illustrative student vets a source with the five-question credibility checklist this course teaches. Which of these are questions on that checklist? Select all that apply.

Select every option that applies.

• Relevance
• Length
• Accuracy
• Search ranking
• Currency

In an illustrative talk on later shuttle hours, a student who rides the last shuttle home every weeknight says, "I have waited in the dark at that stop all semester." What kind of supporting material is the rider's account?

Select one.

• Expert testimony
• A statistic
• Lay testimony
• A hypothetical example

True or false: A speaker who names a source out loud only at the very end of the speech, after all of the evidence, has met this course's oral-citation standard.

True or false.

• True
• False

An illustrative speaker is profiling a neighborhood association before a talk on a pedestrian crossing. Which findings come from the situational lens? Select all that apply.

Select every option that applies.

• Members chose to attend, so the audience is voluntary
• Most members are homeowners who have lived on the street for years
• The talk gets a ten-minute slot after the treasurer's report
• Many members already doubt that a new crosswalk is needed
• About forty people meet in a community-center room on folding chairs

True or false: A transition and a signpost do the same job, since each one names both the idea being left and the idea coming next.

True or false.

• True
• False

An illustrative outline for a talk on a campus coffee shop reads: "I. The coffee shop cuts waste with reusable cups. II. Cups are washed in a dishwasher behind the counter. III. The shop composts its coffee grounds." Which revision fixes the error?

Select one.

• I. The coffee shop cuts waste with reusable cups. II. The shop composts its coffee grounds. III. Cups are washed in a dishwasher behind the counter.
• I. The coffee shop cuts waste with reusable cups. II. Cups are washed in a dishwasher behind the counter. III. Customers who bring a cup get a discount. IV. The shop composts its coffee grounds.
• I. Cups are washed in a dishwasher behind the counter. A. The coffee shop cuts waste with reusable cups. II. The shop composts its coffee grounds.
• I. The coffee shop cuts waste with reusable cups. A. Cups are washed in a dishwasher behind the counter. B. Customers who bring a cup get a discount. II. The shop composts its coffee grounds.

An illustrative speaker on sleep and studying wants the central idea to be "Why do students lose sleep before big tests?" Which statement best describes that choice?

Select one.

• It is the specific purpose, because it names the speech's topic
• It works well as the central idea, because a question gets the listeners curious about the answer
• It fails only because it is too brief to carry the whole message
• It could serve as a hook, but a central idea must be a declarative sentence stating the message

In an illustrative talk, a speaker restates a news article's main finding in fresh wording and never mentions where it came from. How does the course classify this?

Select one.

• Fabrication, because the wording no longer matches the original
• Acceptable, because rewording makes the idea the speaker's own
• Lay testimony, because the speaker is passing the finding along
• Plagiarism, because a reworded idea still needs its source

An illustrative speaker compares a problem-solution outline with Monroe's Motivated Sequence for a talk urging a later campus shuttle. Which steps of the sequence have no matching part in a problem-solution speech? Select all that apply.

Select every option that applies.

• Need
• Action
• Attention
• Satisfaction
• Visualization

On an illustrative planning sheet, a student writes "Smartphone privacy settings." on the specific-purpose line. What is wrong with it?

Select one.

• It is written as a question instead of a statement
• It is a central idea, so it belongs near the end of the introduction
• It is a topic, with no infinitive phrase and no audience named
• It crams two separate ideas into one speech goal

Which of these lines from an illustrative talk on a campus coffee shop is a transition rather than a signpost?

Select one.

• Now that you know how the shop cuts cup waste, let's look at what happens to its coffee grounds.
• Next.
• Also, grounds.
• Finally.

An illustrative outline on first-aid training moves from "I. B. Practice on a dummy builds steady hands." directly to "II. Refresher sessions keep the skill sharp." What is missing between them?

Select one.

• A clincher telling listeners the talk is nearly over
• A second subpoint under point II, to satisfy the division rule
• A transition that names both main points
• An internal summary of the introduction's four functions

An illustrative speaker drafting a talk on a later library closing asks where the central idea belongs in the spoken speech. Where should it be said?

Select one.

• Near the end of the introduction, as part of revealing the topic
• Nowhere aloud, because the central idea is a planning goal kept on the page
• As the closing line of the conclusion, in place of a clincher
• As the opening sentence of the body, ahead of main point I

A speaker is profiling an illustrative nursing cohort for a talk on campus parking. Which statement is audience analysis rather than stereotyping?

Select one.

• Nursing students only care about their clinical hours, so a talk on parking will bore every one of them
• Everyone in a nursing program thinks alike about where to park
• Many in the cohort likely drive to early clinical shifts, which I can confirm with a short poll
• Nursing students are always exhausted, so the talk should skip any details

An illustrative speaker has a central idea for a talk on later library hours and is ready to draft. Which part should come first in the drafting, and why?

Select one.

• The conclusion, since the clincher is what listeners carry home
• The introduction, since listeners hear it before anything else
• All three together, since every part leans on the others equally
• The body, since the preview and summary rest on the main points

True or false: A sentence written to be read silently may need revising before it is spoken, because a listener cannot go back and hear it again.

True or false.

• True
• False

True or false: In this course, the specific purpose is a planning tool the speaker keeps on the page, while the central idea is the sentence the audience hears.

True or false.

• True
• False

An illustrative speaker turns a written report into a talk. Which features would mark the revised version as oral style? Select all that apply.

Select every option that applies.

• Nouns such as implementation and facilitation
• Short sentences a listener can follow on one hearing
• Opening clauses stacked up before the main verb arrives
• Addressing listeners directly as you and we
• Repeating key words on purpose

An illustrative student drafts specific purposes for 2 different speeches, one on campus bike parking and one on sleep and studying, and checks each draft against the course's 4 tests. How many test checks does the student run in all?

Select one.

• 4
• 6
• 8

Kennedy's inaugural address (1961) includes "Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate." Which device does the course name in this pair of sentences?

Select one.

• Metaphor, because negotiation is described as if it were fear itself
• Simile, because like or as compares negotiation with fear
• Antithesis, because the same words are reversed to set two ideas against each other
• Parallelism, because a list of three or more equal items shares the same grammatical form

An illustrative speaker gives the same talk to a club of amateur astronomers and to a group of first-year students. With the astronomers the speaker uses the term light-year with no explanation; with the first-year students the speaker explains it in plain words. Which part of appropriateness drives the change?

Select one.

• Fit to the topic, since the subject differed between the two talks
• Fit to the speaker, since the speaker's own voice and manner changed between the two rooms
• No fit at all, since the course bans jargon in every talk
• Fit to the audience, since one group shares the term and the other may not

An illustrative speaking club looks back at five things its members did in recent talks. Which of them count as plagiarism under this course's description of what a speaker does? Select all that apply.

Select every option that applies.

• Saying "according to the city's transit page" before giving a bus route's new hours
• Reading aloud a toast a cousin drafted and presenting it as the speaker's own words
• Opening with a line copied from a blog post without saying where it came from
• Repeating a survey result a chatbot produced that nobody can locate
• Borrowing another speaker's idea for an opening story and giving no credit for it

An illustrative speaker cuts "everything about sleep" down to one habit, keeping screens out of bed, because a four-minute slot can hold only one habit well. Which narrowing filter is at work?

Select one.

• Time
• Context
• Audience
• Purpose