High School Reading Grades 11 12 Quiz
16 questions · no time limit
0:00
READING LITERATURE
Question 1 of 16
No time limit
Current
Answered
Flagged
Not seen
PASSAGE
From a memoir:
My mother taught me to lie before she taught me to read. This is not, I know, the sort of sentence one is supposed to write about one's mother, and I hesitated for many years before I wrote it. But it is true, and its truth is not the accusation it appears to be.
We lived, in those years, in a country where certain answers to certain questions could cost a family its apartment, its ration card, sometimes more. My mother rehearsed me. If the man at the door asks where your father was last night, you say he was here. If the teacher asks what we listen to on the radio, you say we do not have a radio. She was patient. She never scolded me for forgetting; she only had me repeat it, softly, until the wrong words came out easily and the right ones did not come out at all.
When we left the country, I was eleven. In the new place, my mother sat me down and said, "Now you must learn to tell the truth. It will be harder than the other thing. But you must." She was right about the difficulty. For years I lied out of habit, small unnecessary lies, about what I had eaten or where I had been. I lied to teachers who wished me only well. I lied, once, to a doctor, and was frightened by how easily it came.
I think of my mother's two lessons as one lesson in two parts. She taught me that truth is a luxury of circumstance, and also that one must labor, when circumstance permits, to deserve it.
Which analysis best captures how two central ideas in the memoir develop in relation to each other?
YOUR PROGRESS
16
QUESTIONS
Ready when you are
Answer in any order. Your progress shows here as you go.
QUESTIONS
KEYBOARD
Pick an answer ABCD
Next question ↵→
Previous ←
Flag for review F
Answers save as you go · flagged questions come back at the end