Read the excerpt from Ronald Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall" speech. Where four decades ago there was rubble, today in West Berlin there is the greatest industrial output of any city in Germany—busy office blocks, fine homes and apartments, proud avenues, and the spreading lawns of park land. Where a city's culture seemed to have been destroyed, today there are two great universities, orchestras and an opera, countless theaters, and museums. Where there was want, today there's abundance. Which statement best explains the use of rhetoric in this paragraph? Reagan uses repetition to focus attention on history. Reagan uses hasty generalizations to encourage hope. Reagan uses parallelism to compare the past to the present. Reagan uses hyperbole to emphasize changes that have taken place.
Answers
The correct answer is Reagan uses parallelism to compare the past to the present.
Here's why;
Parallelism is a rhetorical device that is used in literary or non-literally works to enhance the quality of a writing. They are just like the parallel lines in geometry. Paralellism is the use of grammatically same structure of clauses and phrases in sentences.
In this passage, we see the narrator uses the same structure again and again to compare the past to the present. He uses, "Where...there was..." again and again.
Makes sense?
The statement among the given options that best describes that best explains the use of rhetoric in the given extract is:
Reagan uses parallelism to compare the past to the present
He has given examples of the things that existed in the past, even 40 years ago, but now they are no longer present.
Although scarcity has been replaced with abundance, he has expressed grief in the changing cycle of events.