Question

Read the excerpt from Prime Minister Winston Churchill's "Their Finest Hour" speech, delivered to the United Kingdom’s House of Commons in 1940.

During the first four years of the last war the Allies experienced nothing but disaster and disappointment. That was our constant fear: one blow after another, terrible losses, frightful dangers. Everything miscarried. And yet at the end of those four years the morale of the Allies was higher than that of the Germans, who had moved from one aggressive triumph to another, and who stood everywhere triumphant invaders of the lands into which they had broken.

The rhetorical technique used in this excerpt is

shift.
understatement.
logos.
parallelism.

Answer 1

Shift.

The passage moves abruptly from a catalogue of disasters to a surprising counterpoint ("And yet... the morale of the Allies was higher"), marking a rhetorical shift (a turn or contrast) in tone and argument.