ENGLISH 1: BASIC COLLEGE ENGLISH

I. Using coordination, subordination, and embedding, revise this string of choppy simple sentences into a
more varied and interesting paragraph.
The first modern miniature golf course was built in New York in 1925. It was an indoor course
with 18 holes. Entrepreneurs Drake Delanoy and John Ledbetter built 150 more indoor and outdoor
courses. Garnet Carter made miniature golf a worldwide fad. Carter built an elaborate miniature golf
course. He later joined with Delanoy and Ledbetter. Together they built more miniature golf courses.
They abbreviated playing distances. They highlighted the games hazards at the expense of skill. This
made the game much more popular. By 1930, there were 25,000 miniature golf courses in the United
States. Courses grew more elaborate. Hazards grew more bizarre. The craze spread to London and Hong
Kong. The expansion of miniature golf grew out of control. Then, interest in the game declined. By 1931,
most miniature golf courses were out of business. The game was revived in the early 1950s. Today, there
are between eight and ten thousand miniature golf courses. The architecture of miniature golf remains an
enduring form of American folk art.
II. Revise the compound sentences in this passage so the sentence structure is varied. Be sure that the
writers emphasis and the relationships between ideas are clear.
Dr. Alice I. Baumgartner and her colleagues at the institute for Equality in Education at the
University of Colorado surveyed two thousand Colorado schoolchildren, and they found some startling
results. They asked, If you woke up tomorrow and discovered that you were a (boy) (girl), how would
your life be different? and the answers were sad and shocking. The researchers assumed they would find
that boys and girls would see advantages in being either male or female, but instead they found that both
boys and girls had a fundamental contempt for females. Many elementary school boys titled their
answers, The Disaster or Doomsday, and they described the terrible lived they would lead as girls,
but the girls seemed to feel they would be better off as boys, and they expressed feelings that they would
be able to do more and have easier lives.
III. Each of these sentences begins with the subject. Revise each so that it has a different opening
1. Momaday was taken as a very young child to Devils Tower, the geological formation in Wyoming that
is called Tsoai (Bear Tree) in Kiowa, and there he was given the name Tsoai-talee (Bear Tree Boy)
2. The Kiowa myth of the origin of Tsoai is about a boy who playfully chases his seven sisters up a tree,
which rises into the air as the boy is transformed into a bear.
3. The boy-bear becomes increasingly ferocious and claws the bark of the tree, which becomes a great
rock with a flat top and deeply scored sides.
4. The sisters climb higher and higher to escape their brothers wrath, and eventually they become the
seven stars of the Big Dipper.
5. This story, from which Momaday received one of his names, appears in his works The Way to Rainy
Mountain, House Made of Dawn, and The Ancient Child.