HURRY PLEASEEEE
Question 12.
Read the following passage carefully before you choose your answer.
This passage is taken from a speech given by President Ronald Reagan to the people of West Berlin in 1987.
(1) Chancellor Kohl, Governing Mayor Diepgen, ladies and gentlemen: Twenty-four years ago, President John F. Kennedy visited Berlin, speaking to the people of this city and the world at the City Hall. (2) Well, since then two other presidents have come, each in his turn, to Berlin. (3) And today I, myself, make my second visit to your city.
(4) We come to Berlin, we American presidents, because it's our duty to speak, in this place, of freedom. (5) But I must confess, we're drawn here by other things as well: by the feeling of history in this city, more than 500 years older than our own nation; by the beauty of the Grunewald and the Tiergarten; most of all, by your courage and determination. (6) Perhaps the composer Paul Lincke understood something about American presidents. (7) You see, like so many presidents before me, I come here today because wherever I go, whatever I do: Ich hab noch einen Koffer in Berlin. [I still have a suitcase in Berlin.]
(8) Our gathering today is being broadcast throughout Western Europe and North America. (9) I understand that it is being seen and heard as well in the East. (10) To those listening throughout Eastern Europe, a special word: Although I cannot be with you, I address my remarks to you just as surely as to those standing here before me. (11) For I join you, as I join your fellow countrymen in the West, in this firm, this unalterable belief: Es gibt nur ein Berlin. [There is only one Berlin.]
(12) Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. (13) From the Baltic, south, those barriers cut across Germany in a gash of barbed wire, concrete, dog runs, and guard towers. Farther south, there may be no visible, no obvious wall. But there remain armed guards and checkpoints all the same—still a restriction on the right to travel, still an instrument to impose upon ordinary men and women the will of a totalitarian state. (14) Yet it is here in Berlin where the wall emerges most clearly; here, cutting across your city, where the news photo and the television screen have imprinted this brutal division of a continent upon the mind of the world. (15) Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar.
Which of the following sentences, if placed before sentence 12, would provide the most effective introduction to the topic of the paragraph?
A. For this reason, Berlin is a city with tight borders.
B. Nevertheless, this one Berlin is divided.
C. Many cities have erected walls, and Berlin is no different.
D. Take, for example, the Berlin Wall.
E. To be honest, there is one thing that makes the city unique.
