part three ap english
TRANSCRIPT
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1. Barbara Ehrenreichs main argument is that it would be impossible to be a singlemother and her children to live off of low wage. She proves that by making a new
life for herself and she takes on multiple jobs, which require no skill, at the same
time. Soon she realizes that no jobs are considered unskillful. Barbara realized
early on through her research that she needed a way to keep herself from
becoming homeless, so she set herself rules. Thus, showing how hard low wage
paying jobs were (Page: 27). One these rules were soon broken for she had to
accept the highest paying job offered. She declined an offer to work plumbing,
which was $10 but declined it to stay working at Wal-Mart for $7(Page: 29). Or
maybe its low-wage work in general that has the effect of making you feel like a
pariah (outcast). This is an example because it shows that if you have a low
paying job, you are more likely to become someone your peers look down upon
or be the last person to be invited to a social gathering (Page: 117).
2. This book is organized by the events that Barbara goes through during research onthe life of being a regular person, when the government was going through issues
with the economy. The author builds her argument by stating all her past
experiences in chronological order thus building her argument to the fullest extent
with time being the main component in the book. The book starts out with
Barbara thinking about what she should do for her next journal. Then her friend,
Lewis Harperstated, When the conversation drifted to one of my more
familiar themes, poverty. How does anyone live on the wages available to the
unskilled?(Page 2) And so thats how Barbara got into the research of low wage
paying jobs. In the middle of the story, Barbara then suffers through even more
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poverty problems than what she had to do during the beginning of the story. So
Barbara then has to break her rules even more to survive the horrible poverty that
she is gathering research for. At the end of the book, Barbara sums up the end and
final results of her research experiment. Such as when she stated, The first thing
I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly, "unskilled.(Page 193)
3. The author uses two main types of evidence that support her main argument,which was an anecdote and personal experience. One example of an anecdote was
when Barbara talked about the cruelty of her superiors from Hearthside. She
used her personal experience throughout the story to show how to do minimum
wage jobs and how to cope with it as well. This whole story was revolved around
Barbara Ehrenreich and her experience throughout her whole experience during
her research. And this shows how Barbara Ehrenreich used different types of
evidence to support her main argument.