High School Reading: Grades 11-12 Quiz: Analyzing Authors Structural Choices

In a story, the line "The house was quiet. The clock was quiet. Even Mara, at last, was quiet." repeats "quiet" mainly to:

"Leo ran. He did not look back. Behind him, the barn roared." The author's use of short sentences here mainly serves to:

"Dad said the tractor would last forever. The tractor said otherwise, every morning, in smoke." Giving the tractor a 'voice' mainly serves to:

"At the funeral, Aunt Bea corrected the priest's dates, then wept so hard she had to sit." The pairing of these actions most suggests that Bea:

Chapter One: The Arrival We came to the valley in a wagon whose axle sang like a wounded bird.

Chapter Two: The House The house had been white once. My mother said so, though I could find no evidence of it in the gray boards, and I trusted my mother in most things but not in this.

Chapter Three: The Well The well was where my father spent his hours. He lowered a bucket. He raised a bucket. He said the water tasted of iron and of something else he would not name.

Chapter Four: The Neighbors There were no neighbors.

Chapter Five: The Winter I will not write of the winter.

The author's decision to structure the opening of the novel as a sequence of very short, titled chapters most likely serves to:

Whatever the season, whatever the weather, whatever the news from the capital or the price of bread at the corner shop, Grandfather ate his soup at noon. He ate it with the same wooden spoon his own grandfather had carved during a war whose name I had to look up. He ate it slowly. He ate it without speaking. He ate it as if the soup itself required a witness, and he had been appointed.

When the doctors told him, in the spring of my fourteenth year, that he must give up salt, Grandfather nodded gravely and continued to salt his soup. When the doctors told him, in the autumn, that he must give up soup, Grandfather nodded gravely and gave up doctors.

The author's use of parallel sentence structures in the second paragraph most powerfully conveys:

The town of Merrow had two churches, three taverns, and one clock. The clock, mounted on the courthouse and visible from every corner of the square, had stopped in 1897 at eleven minutes past four. No one alive remembered why.

Strangers, passing through, sometimes asked about the clock. The townspeople had developed, over the generations, a repertoire of answers. Some said the clockmaker had died on the ladder. Some said a lightning strike. Some said the mayor of that year, a man of famously literal temperament, had ordered the clock stopped so that the town might, in his phrase, "know exactly where it stood." The stories varied. What did not vary was the pleasure the townspeople took in telling them, and the care with which they avoided ever agreeing on one.

The narrator's final observation — that the townspeople take care never to agree on a single explanation — most significantly develops the story's meaning by:

Excerpt from a novel:

There are, my grandmother used to say, two kinds of silence in a marriage. The first is the silence of a shared book: two people in one room, each turning pages, each occasionally reading a sentence aloud that neither expects the other to answer, both content. The second is the silence of a courtroom before the verdict: the same absence of speech, but pressurized, aimed, and impossible to sustain without damage.

My grandmother had, in her long life, known both. She said the tragedy was not that they sounded different — anyone could tell them apart, given time — but that they looked, from the outside, exactly the same. A photograph, she said, could not distinguish them. Neither, sometimes, could a daughter.

When my mother died and my father sat, for six months, in the armchair by the window without speaking, I remembered this, and I did not know, and I do not know still, which silence he was inside.

The author's decision to end the passage with the narrator's continuing uncertainty — "I did not know, and I do not know still" — most importantly develops the passage's central idea by:

Excerpt from a novella. The narrator is a young apprentice describing her mentor, a watchmaker:

Maestro Corvi did not repair watches. He restored them, and he insisted on the distinction with a fervor that, in my first weeks, I found excessive and, by my sixth month, found scriptural.

A repair, he told me, returns a mechanism to function. A restoration returns it to itself. The first requires competence. The second requires listening.

I watched him, once, spend eleven days on a pocket watch a widow had brought in — a watch her husband had wound every morning of a forty-year marriage. It was not, mechanically, a difficult case. Corvi could have had it running in an afternoon. Instead he took it apart slowly, in the order in which, he said, it wished to be taken apart, and he laid the pieces on the black velvet with a gentleness I have since seen only in the hands of midwives.

On the twelfth day the widow returned. Corvi placed the watch in her palm. She held it to her ear, and something in her face — I will not try to name it — settled.

"You have made it work again," she said.

"No, madam," said Corvi. "I have made it his again."

The author's development of the distinction between "repair" and "restoration" through the extended episode with the widow most importantly serves to:

A poem:

My mother's hands, which once could braid three ribbons into one clean rope, now shake above the coffee cup like birds that cannot find a branch.

I do not say: your hands are shaking. I do not say: let me pour for you. I say: the light is lovely this morning, and slide the sugar toward her side.

She lifts the spoon. She misses. Tries. The small brown grains fall on the cloth. We both pretend they are not there. We both pretend, and this is love —

not the braid, not the rope, but this: the careful, mutual, unspoken not-seeing of what neither of us can bear to have the other one have seen.

The poet's choice to build the poem around statements of what the speaker does NOT say most powerfully works to:

From a short story told in the second person:

You tell yourself you will not read the letter. You place it on the kitchen table and you make coffee. You watch the coffee brew. You count, silently, to sixty, and then to sixty again, because the first count did not feel entirely honest.

You tell yourself you will not read the letter. You take the coffee to the window. You observe that the neighbor's cat, whom you have named Cassius though you have never spoken of this to anyone, is again on the roof of the shed. You wonder how he gets down. You have wondered this for four years.

You tell yourself you will not read the letter. You are, of course, already reading it.

The author's choice to write the story in the second person and to repeat the refrain "You tell yourself you will not read the letter" most effectively:

The clock in the parlor chimed seven, and still Mrs. Halvorsen did not rise. Her tea, poured at half past six with the careful attention she had once given to her husband's cufflinks, had gone the color of river silt. On the table beside her lay a letter, unopened, its return address bearing the small printed name of a firm she had not thought of in thirty-one years.

She considered the envelope the way one considers weather: as something arriving from elsewhere, indifferent to preference. Outside, the maples had begun their annual surrender, and a squirrel, industrious and doomed, was burying something no one would ever dig up. Mrs. Halvorsen smiled at this — not warmly, but with recognition.

When at last she reached for the letter, it was not to open it. She placed it, quite deliberately, beneath a heavy blue vase her sister had once called vulgar, and she poured herself a fresh cup of tea.

The author's choice to describe the squirrel as "industrious and doomed" most directly contributes to the story by:

From a novel set in a coastal town:

The fog came in as it always did, not rolling but seeping, the way rumor seeps through a small parish. By nine the harbor was gone. By ten the fishmonger's sign, three doors down from where I stood, had become a suggestion. By eleven I could not have sworn there was a street beneath my feet, though I had walked it every morning of my forty-two years.

It was on such a morning that my brother returned. I did not see him at first — no one could have seen anything at first — but I heard the particular way his boots met the cobblestones, a rhythm I had not heard in nineteen years and had not, until that moment, realized I remembered.

He said my name. I said nothing. The fog, being generous, gave us this: that neither of us had to see the other's face before we had decided what to do with it.

The author's development of the fog from a meteorological detail into an active participant in the brothers' reunion most importantly serves to:

Consider the lighthouse keeper Ansel, who for forty-one years climbed the same one hundred and twelve steps each dusk. He climbed them when his wife was living and when she was not. He climbed them the night the mainland burned in the war and the night his son, grown and gone, sent word he would not return. Ansel did not consider himself devoted. Devotion, he would have said, if anyone had asked — and no one did — was a word for people with choices. He was simply the man on the stairs at dusk.

The villagers, from the harbor below, spoke of him as a fixed thing: the light, the rock, Ansel. Children learned his silhouette before they learned his name. When at last the automatic beacon was installed and Ansel was thanked with a small brass plaque and a pension, he stood on the pier and did not know which direction, exactly, a man was meant to face.

The narrator's insertion of Ansel's private definition of devotion — that it is "a word for people with choices" — primarily functions to:

The letter, when it came, was typed on the thin blue paper the ministry used for matters it considered neither urgent nor important. Vasari read it twice. Then he folded it into quarters and placed it in the drawer where he kept receipts, expired coupons, and a photograph of a woman whose name he could no longer be certain of.

He went to the window. Below, in the courtyard, a boy was teaching a smaller boy to whistle. The smaller boy could not do it. The larger boy demonstrated again, patiently, as if patience were a technique one could pass down like a family recipe. Vasari watched until the smaller boy produced a thin, wavering note — not quite a whistle, but the ancestor of one — and both boys laughed.

Then Vasari returned to his desk and began, at last, to write his reply.

The author's choice to interrupt Vasari's response to the letter with the extended observation of the two boys most likely serves to:

From the memoir of a retired translator:

I have spent my life moving sentences from one house to another. Some sentences travel well. They arrive in the new language with their furniture intact, their photographs still on the walls, their small habits — a preference for morning light, a fondness for the em-dash — unaltered. Others do not. Others arrive damaged, or arrive as different sentences altogether, wearing the clothes of the original but speaking with a stranger's voice.

My teacher, Professor Ivanescu, used to say that a translator is a kind of grave-robber: we take what is buried in one tongue and drag it, blinking and confused, into the daylight of another. I never liked the metaphor. I preferred to think of myself as a ferryman. But now, at seventy-three, with the manuscripts of forty-one books behind me, I confess Ivanescu may have been closer to the truth. The dead do not wish to be moved.

The author's decision to develop the central idea through a sequence of competing metaphors (moving houses, grave-robbing, ferrying) rather than through direct statement most importantly: