Questions 1-10 are based on the following
passage.
This passage is excerpted from Theodore Roosevelt’s speech to the workers on the Panama Canal, originally written in 1906. The Panama Canal, which provides a passageway for ships traveling between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, is one of the largest and most difficult engineering projects ever undertaken. Roosevelt gave this speech during his visit to the Canal zone to check on the progress of the work.
It was without precedent for a president to leave the
United States, but this work is without precedent. You are
doing the biggest thing of the kind that has ever been done,
and I wanted to see how you are doing it. I am profoundly
5 thankful that I shall be able to take back to the United
States the message that the nation's picked sons are
carrying themselves so well here that I can absolutely
guarantee the success of the mighty work which they are
doing. It is not an easy task. Mighty few things that are
10 worth doing are easy. . .
I want to say this word to you men,--right through,--to
all of you who are engaged in the work of digging this
canal, whether you are here as superintendent, foreman,
chief clerk, machinist, conductor, engineer, steam-shovel
15 man (and he is the American who is setting the mark for
the rest of you to live up to, by the way), whoever you are,
if you are doing your duty, you are putting your country
under an obligation to you just as a soldier who does his
work well in a great war puts the country under an
20 obligation to him. As I have seen you at work, seen what
you have done and are doing, noted the spirit in which you
are approaching the task yet to be done, I have felt just
exactly as I should feel if I saw the picked men of my
country engaged in some great war. I am weighing my
25 words when I say that you here, who do your work well in
bringing to completion this great enterprise, will stand
exactly as the soldiers of a few, and only a few, of the most
famous armies of all the nations stand in history. This is
one of the great works of the world; it is a greater work
30 than you, yourselves, at the moment realize. Some of you, a
good many of you, are sons of men who fought in the Civil
War. When your fathers were in the fighting, they thought
a good deal of the fact that the blanket was too heavy by
noon and not quite heavy enough by night; that the pork
35 was not as good as it might be; and the hardtack was
sometimes insufficient in amount; and they were not
always satisfied with the way in which the regiments were
led.
Those were the things they talked about a good deal of
40 the time. But when the war was done--when they came
home, when they looked at what had been accomplished--
all those things sank into insignificance, and the great fact
remained that they had played a part like men among men;
that they had borne themselves so that when people asked
{l:45]what they had done of worth in those great years, all they
had to say was that they had served decently and faithfully
in the great armies. So you men here, in the future, each
man of you, will have the right to feel, if he has done his
duty and a little more than his duty right up to the handle
50 in the work here on the Isthmus, that he has made his
country his debtor; that he has done more than his full
share in adding renown to the nation under whose flag the
canal is being built.
. . .
55 In closing, all I have to say is this: You are doing the
work the like of which has not before been seen in the ages,
a work that shall last through the ages to come, and I
pledge to you as President of the United States, every
ounce of support and help and assistance, that it is in my
60 power to give you, so that we together, you backed by the
people of the United States, may speedily bring this
greatest of works to a triumphant conclusion.