The case for a broken toaster: warm-up · Grade 9

The passage and its 4 questions

Directions: Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions in full sentences.

• Somewhere in your home there is probably a drawer of dead things: a lamp that flickers, headphones with one silent side, a zipper that slips off its track. Most of us treat these objects as finished. When something breaks, we replace it. I want to argue that schools should require every student, before graduating, to complete a short course in repairing everyday objects.
• The first reason is practical. Repair skills save money, and they save it most for the families who have the least to spare. A replacement cord for a lamp costs a fraction of a new lamp; a needle and thread cost almost nothing compared with a new jacket.
• Knowing how to make a simple fix is a form of wealth that cannot be taxed or stolen.
• The second reason is environmental. Discarded electronics are among the fastest-growing kinds of household waste in the world, and many contain metals that were costly to mine and refine. Every repaired object is one less thing in a landfill and one less new thing that has to be manufactured, packaged and shipped.
• The third reason is less obvious but perhaps the most important. Repair teaches a way of thinking. To fix a toaster, you must observe carefully, form a guess about what has failed, test that guess and try again if you were wrong. That is the scientific method, practiced with a screwdriver. It also teaches patience, and the quiet confidence that comes from making a dead thing work again.
• Critics will say that the school day is already full, and that many modern devices are designed to be impossible to open. Both points are fair. But a repair course need not be long; a few weeks in a single semester would be enough to cover the basics. And sealed devices are an argument for teaching repair, not against it. A generation that understands what repair requires is a generation that will demand products that allow it.
• Not every student will become an expert. Most will not. But almost all of them will one day face a broken thing and a choice. I would like them to have more than one option.
• 1. What is the writer's claim, and what three reasons support it?
• 2. Why does the writer call repair skills 'a form of wealth that cannot be taxed or stolen'?
• 3. In paragraph 4, what does the phrase 'practiced with a screwdriver' suggest about the scientific method?
• 4. Write a counterargument or alternative view and respond to it.