Question

read the excerpt from ronald reagans \tear down this wall\ speech.
where four decades ago there was rubble, today in west berlin there is the greatest industrial output of any city in germany—busy office blocks, fine homes and apartments, proud avenues, and the spreading lawns of park land. where a city’s culture seemed to have been destroyed, today there are two great universities, orchestras and an opera, countless theaters, and museums. where there was want, today there’s abundance.
which statement best explains the use of rhetoric in this paragraph?
○ reagan uses repetition to focus attention on history.
○ reagan uses hasty generalizations to encourage hope
○ reagan uses parallelism to compare the past to the present.
○ reagan uses hyperbole to emphasize changes that have taken place.

Explanation:

The paragraph uses the repeated structure "Where [past condition], today [present condition]" to draw clear, side-by-side comparisons between West Berlin's ruined past and thriving present. This structural repetition is parallelism. Repetition is too broad; the specific paired structure is parallelism. There are no hasty generalizations (broad claims without evidence) or hyperbole (exaggerated overstatements) here.

Answer:

C. Reagan uses parallelism to compare the past to the present.