EXERCISES ON PARALLELISM

-Our beagle loves to hunt. When someone opens the back door for her, she barrels down porch steps into the yard. Then she runs back and forth across the lawn in ecstasy.  Her nose cruises the wet grass for smells. These are smells of cats, rabbit smells, and other presences which are too subtle for human detection.  She sniffs and spins her tail in quick circles.  First it spins clockwise, then it spins counterclockwise.  These two activities  sniffing and spinning which seem to propel her along always occur together.

-Few people know about The Government Printing Office, source of much useful information, in Washington D.C. It is the official publishing house for the federal government. The GPO publishes pamphlets and books on a vast number of subjects which range from the dangers of X-rays from home TV sets to the identification of mushrooms.  About 27,000 publications are offered through the Superintendent of Documents.  Many of them are inexpensive. Even there is no charge at all for some of them.

-John Jacob Astor was a  German immigrant who reaped America’s first fortune. He made his initial money by trading Indian furs.  He was lowborn, uneducated, and never learned to speak English properly.  However, he carried on his business to the end in an accent which was redolent of the Hamburg gutters.