Read the paragraph below. Then carefully consider the questions that follow, and write the letters of the best responses. The United States has always been a diverse society. In 1673, more than three centuries ago, a visitor to what is now New York City was astonished to find that eighteen languages were spoken among the city's eight thousand inhabitants. By the middle of the nineteenth century, so many people from so many lands had come to the United States that the novelist Herman Melville exclaimed, "You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world." One can only imagine what Melville would say today! The United States has become the most diverse society on the face of the Earth. For more than a century, most immigrants to the United States were Europeans---Irish, Germans, Engiish, Scandinavians, Greeks, Poles, Italians, and others. Together with African Americans, they made America the "melting pot" of the world. Today another great wave of immigration---more than one million people a year, mostly from Asia and Latin America---is transforming the United States into what one writer has called the "first universal nation," a multicultural society of unmatched diversity. 1. The primary purpose of this paragraph is to __________.