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Essay Exercise 2
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Read this paragraph and answer the question that follows.

In many years of hiking in the East, I've happened across bears twice. Once, in Maine, I rounded a corner on a trail, and there, three feet away, as lost in thought as I had been, sat a black bear. One look at me and she dived for the bushes--total contact time, perhaps four seconds. A few years later, walking near my house with my wife, I heard a noise in a treetop, and suddenly a black bear, roughly the size and shape of a large sofa, dropped to the ground a few yards away. She glowered in our direction and then lit out the opposite way. Time of engagement: maybe seven seconds. Those were grand encounters, and they've spiced every other day I've spent in the woods--on the way up Blackberry, for instance, I sang as I waded through the berry bushes, aware that this was where any bear with an appetite would be, especially after I found fresh berry-filled scat. But if I counted as dramatic only those days when I actually saw a big fierce animal, I would think the forest a boring place indeed. (2) Even if you did go to the woods and saw a rare animal, and somehow managed to creep up real close, chances are it wouldn't be doing anything all that amazing. Chances are it would be lying in the sun, or perhaps grooming itself, or maybe, like the duck on the pond, swimming back and forth. A lot of animals are remarkably good at sitting still (especially when they suspect they're under surveillance), and this is something TV never captures. The nature documentaries are as absurdly action-packed as the soap operas, where a life's worth of divorce, adultery, and sudden death is crammed into a week's worth of watching. Trying to understand "nature" from watching "Wild Kingdom" is as tough as trying to understand "life" from watching "Dynasty."

--Bill McKibben, "Reflections: Television," The New Yorker

1
In paragraph 1 the author describes the female bear as having "the size and shape of a large sofa," by which means that she was very large and that her shape was:







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