Example of Expository:

Hot Hands

From "The Streak of Streaks"* by Stephen Jay Gould

Start with a phenomenon that nearly everyone both accepts and considers well
understood--"hot hands" in basketball. Now and then, someone just gets hot, and can't be
stopped. Basket after basket falls in--or out as with "cold hands," when a man can't buy a
bucket for love or money (choose your cliché). The reason for this phenomenon is clear
enough; it lies embodied in the maxim: "When you're hot, you're hot; and when you're not,
you're not." You get that touch, build confidence; all nervousness fades, you find your rhythm;
swish, swish, swish. Or you miss a few, get rattled, endure the booing, experience despair;
hands start shaking and you realize that you should stood in bed.
Everybody knows about hot hands. The only problem is that no such phenomenon exists.
The Stanford psychologist Amos Tversky studied every basket made by the Philadelphia 76ers
for more than a season. He found, first of all, that probabilities of making a second basket did
not rise following a successful shot. Moreover, the number of "runs," or baskets in succession,
was no greater than what a standard random, or coin-tossing, model would predict. (If the
chance of making each basket is 0.5, for example, a reasonable value for good shooters, five
hits in a row will occur, on average, once in thirty-two sequences--just as you can expect to toss
five successive heads about once in thirty-two times, or 0.5.)
Of course Larry Bird, the great forward of the Boston Celtics, will have more sequences of
five than Joe Air ball--but not because he has greater will or gets in that magic rhythm more
often. Larry has longer runs because his average success rate is so much higher, and random
models predict more frequent and longer sequences. If Larry shoots field goals at 0.6
probability of success, he will get five in a row about once every thirteen sequences (0.65). If
Joe, by contrast, shoots only 0.3, he will get his five straight only about once in 412 times. In
other words, we need no special explanation for the apparent pattern of long runs. There is no
ineffable "causality of circumstance" (if I may call it that), no definite reason born of the
particulars that make for heroic myths--courage in the clinch, strength in adversity, etc. You
only have to know a person's ordinary play in order to predict his sequences. (I rather suspect
that we are convinced of the contrary not only because we need myths so badly, but also
because we remember the successes and simply allow the failures to fade from memory.)
Example of Expository

The Black Death

From A Distant Mirror*, by Barbara Tuchman (1912-1989)

1 In October 1347, two months after the fall of Calais, Genoese trading ships put into the
harbor of Messina in Sicily with dead and dying men at the oars. The ships had come from the
Black Sea port of Caffa (now Feodosiya) in the Crimea, where the Genoese maintained a trading
post.
The diseased sailors showed strange black swellings about the size of an egg or an apple in the
armpits and groin. The swellings oozed blood and pus and were followed by spreading boils and
black blotches on the skin from internal bleeding. The sick suffered severe pain and died quickly
within five days of the first symptoms. As the disease spread, other symptoms of continuous
fever and spitting of blood appeared instead of the swellings or buboes. These victims coughed
and sweated heavily and died even more quickly, within three days or less, sometimes in 24
hours. In both types everything that issued from the body--breath, sweat, blood from the
buboes and lungs, bloody urine, and blood-blackened excrement--smelled foul. Depression and
despair accompanied the physical symptoms, and before the end "death is seen seated on the
face."(1)

2 The disease was bubonic plague, present in two forms: one that infected the
bloodstream, causing the buboes and internal bleeding, and was spread by contact; and a
second, more virulent pneumonic type that infected the lungs and was spread by respiratory
infection. The presence of both at once caused the high mortality and speed of contagion. So
lethal was the disease that cases were known of persons going to bed well and dying before
they woke, of doctors catching the illness at a bedside and dying before the patient. So rapidly
did it spread from one to another that to a French physician, Simon de Covino, it seemed as if
one sick person "could infect the whole world."(2) The malignity of the pestilence appeared
more terrible because its victims knew no prevention and no remedy.
Example of a Graphic organizer