Verbal Ability – Paragraph Organization

1. There was, to be sure, enough food, enough clothing, enough materials for housing, but these families simply did not have money to procure these necessities.
2. Once upon a time, (said the professor), there were two small communities, spiritually as well as geographically situated at considerable distance from each other.
3. They had, however, these problems in common: both were hard hit by a depression, so that in each of the towns there were about one hundred heads of families unemployed.

Source: A Semantic Parable by S. I. Hayawaka

1. On the truck’s floor is a bed of straw with tangled blankets and mussed pillows. The man says he and two friends – “three bachelors from Gary” – drove over yesterday and pulled up in line maybe half a mile outside the gate about eight o’clock last night.
2. A fat, jovial man is sitting on the tailboard of a small enclosed truck inside the first turn of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
3. His machine is four rows back from the rail, one among thousands and thousands of cars that stand, glittering under the sun, almost as far as the eye can see across this clamorous, hideous cauldron of noise, and speed, and reeking oil.

Source: Rendezvous with Danger by Red Smith

1. Indeed, in certain villages for centuries, tomb-robbing was a regular occupation; the eternally hungry many rising in reaction against the eternally well-fed few.
2. The materialistic reason for the cessation of large-scale pyramid-building was the increasing boldness of the tomb-robbers.
3. When the safety of the dead was no longer guaranteed by the pyramids, new and different protective measures became necessary, and consequently other types of tomb construction.

Source: The Pyramids by C.W. Ceran

1. In other words, most people think that some subjects are easy and some difficult and it hardly matters what language is used in explaining them.
2. When people talk about something that’s difficult to read, they are apt to say it’s “too technical.”
3. The ordinary person, when he gets bogged down in a book or article, wouldn’t think of saying. “The author of this can’t write; he will say, “A lay man like me will never understand this” and let it go at that.

1. The thin, smooth pipe and the bread can were to keep the squirrels from the little wooden platform and roof where the birds congregated to feed.
2. Whoever had erected it was a bird-lover, not a squirrel enthusiast, that much was certain.
3. It was on top of a section of thin pipe stuck upright in the ground, and over the end of the pipe half of a bread can had been inverted.
4. The bird-feeding station stood on the lawn before my bench.

Source: The Fire Apes by Loren C. Eiseley

1. Fishing is one of man’s oldest occupation and fish stories entered folklore very early.
2. Poets and nature fakers added their touches to marine superstitions that persist to our day,
3. The popular press still cannot resist unsubstantiated stories of sea monsters.

Source: Monsters We Have Met by J.Y. Costeau

1. For nearly a century the planet Mars has captivated the passionate interest of astronomers and the imagination of the public.
2. The facts, although perhaps not quite as exciting as the former speculations, are interesting enough.
3. Thanks to modern astrophysical research we now know a good bit about the physical and climatic conditions and the possibilities of life on Mars.
4. Now direct exploration of the mysterious planet is a priority item on the NASA space program.

Source: Mars by Gerard De Vaucouleus

1. About three fourths of the surface of Mars is covered with bright reddish or yellowish areas.
2. They have long been considered to be sandy deserts -bare tracts covered by a silicate dust colored red by iron oxide or some other metallic impurity.
3. This hypothesis, originally based on their resemblance to the reddish sands and sandstones of our deserts, was first proposed late in the 1th century by the great British astronomer Sir John Herschel and independently by the Frenchman Emmanuel Liais, astronomer to the Emperor of Brazil.

Source: Mars by Gerard De Vaucouleurs

1. There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils.
2. The sort of script which is used in this book can be very easily obtained by anyone who has once learned the knack; but ill-disposed or excitable people who might make a bad use of it shall not learn it from me.
3. One is to believe in their existence.
4. The other is to believe and to feel an expressive and unhealthy interest in them.
5. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.

Source: Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

1. Also, I wish to speak in the most general way possible, and to keep in the background any comparison of particular creeds, scientific or religious.
2. We have got to understand the type of connection which exists between the two spheres, and then to draw some definite conclusions respecting the existing situation which at present confronts the world.
3. The difficulty in approaching the question of the relations between Religion and Science is, that its elucidation requires that we have in our minds some clear idea of what we mean by either of the terms, ‘religion’ and ‘science’.

Source: Religion and Science by Alfred North Whitehead