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The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1:

“No, thanks,” said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, “I’m absolutely in training.”
Her host looked at her incredulously. “You are!” He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. “How you ever get anything done is beyond me.”
I looked at Miss Baker, wondering what it was she “got done.”

What is it that she "got done"?

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  • I found what I'm pretty sure is the correct answer with a quick Google search for "The Great Gatsby Miss Baker", but it's located on what I think might be a site for helping students cheat, so I don't feel comfortable linking it in an answer.
    – nick012000
    Jul 19, 2021 at 9:38
  • @nick012000 Hi, Could you please send me the website plz
    – YuerWu
    Jul 19, 2021 at 10:23

1 Answer 1

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There's two levels to this. What she "got done" is golfing.

“Jordan’s going to play in the tournament tomorrow,” explained Daisy, “over at Westchester.”

“Oh—you’re Jordan Baker.”

I knew now why her face was familiar—its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago.

Nick recognized her vaguely, but otherwise saw her as a pretty rich girl, unlikely to actually do much in society, and that's the second level to the reference. While initially, it seems that Jordan is actually doing something with her life, even if it's participating in a sport reserved for the rich, it turns out that her ability is, at least in part, based on a lie.

When we were on a house-party together up in Warwick, she left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied about it—and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded me that night at Daisy’s. At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers—a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semifinal round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal—then died away. A caddy retracted his statement, and the only other witness admitted that he might have been mistaken. The incident and the name had remained together in my mind.

This site discusses how she, like many characters in the book, is carelessly destructive, relying on her money to fix her problems, never minding all of the trouble they cause for others.

[By] the end of the novel ... Nick realizes that Daisy, Tom and even Jordan Baker all represent the careless people, who

. . . smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . ."

So, in short, she doesn't really get much done, supporting Nick's initial evaluation.

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