TOEFL-Reading for Greek and Latin Root Words
Spring Quarter 2014
Instructor: Richard Alishio
Read the following passage. Highlight the words that have roots that we’ve learned.
I was in a coffee shop reading a newspaper chronicle the other day about a demagogue who
had issued an edict declaring that all of the citizens of the nation would be required to
subscribe to the same political ideas that he dictated to them. He said that this would be
compulsory pending approval by the parliament (which always did what they were told).
The story further stated that any citizen who did not comply with this edict would be deported,
a really odd declaration since the citizens had no country to be deported to! Nevertheless,
being good citizens in what they thought was a democracy, people deduced from this edict that
only bad people would not comply. They had no reason to believe that their leader had, in fact,
become psychopathic and had lost all connection to normal political conduct and that his edict
was an absolute transgression of their rights.
As I was reading the story, a patron in the coffee shop interjected her opinion into a
conversation she was having with her friends. She suddenly told them in a rather dictatorial
fashion that they shouldn’t stay any longer as she was tired. She said that in her job as a
pediatric nurse she had been awake all night dealing with victims of a pandemic. As she spoke,
this horrible cacophony from outside intruded into the café. The effect of the sound was to
divert attention away from the nurse and out towards the street. There we could see a huge
construction machine that had lost traction with the road and crashed into several parked cars.
It hit one of the cars so hard that the car was ejected from its spot and slammed into a building.
When I looked at it, all I saw was and twisted and amorphous shape—it didn’t look like a car
anymore!
Finally, someone reported the incident to the police, so I went back to reading the chronicle of
the demagogue who had turned into a psychopathic dictator. As I read about the strange things
he was doing to his people, I felt a lot of sympathy towards them. People were being told to
convert to a way of life in which freedom was retracted into nothingness. Society would
eventually revert to some kind of medieval way of life, which would be a complete digression
from modern life. As I read, I had a feeling of impending doom for these people, and no matter
what I did, I couldn’t dispel this idea from my mind. Overall, the story made me want to live
alone out in the forest and become a misanthrope!