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BOOK TWO

PART TWO

141

STOCK TAKING

Have you ever been in a large department store during the first days of January or of July? Did you notice an unusual stir and bustle among the clerks? Instead of standing about chatting together as they wait for customers, they are all busy. At every

counter, one of them is sitting on a stool putting down figures or adding them up. Others are taking boxes from the shelves, measuring ribbons and laces, putting tags on rolls that have already been measured, or counting buttons and other merchandise. Everybody in the store is busy taking stock. In this way the heads of the departments find out what they need to buy when their buyers go to New York, or Paris, or London.

Stock-taking is a game that you can play in school. What is your stock-in-trade? Where is the ribbon to measure? Where are the buttons to count? Perhaps you cannot guess, so here is the answer. Every day you are storing away in your minds many things: names of countries, learned in your geography; names and stories of great Americans, learned in your history; stories and poems, learned in your reading; facts about the paragraph, the sentence, and the use of the voice, learned in your language work. All these are your stock-in-trade.

It would be a good idea for you to get a note-book for keeping account of your stock-in-trade in your language work. You may call it your stock-taking book, and you may write in it what you have learned in your language lessons.

THE SENTENCE

What is your stock-in-trade in the Sentence Department?

Write in your stock-taking books the answers to the following questions.

1. What have you learned about the first word of a sentence?

2. What have you learned about the end of a sentence?

3. What have you learned about the thought expressed in a sentence?

142

REVIEWING THE SENTENCE

Arrange the following expressions in two lists.

the first, write all that are sentences.

write all that are not sentences.

In

In the second,

Write a third list consisting of sentences made out of

each expression of thought in your second list.

1. from their horns of abundance

2. for many years

3. they could sleep in peace

4. I turned and entered the house

5. it was bitter weather

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