High School Reading: Grades 11-12 Quiz: Multiple Themes And Interaction Literature

"Mara laughed at the reunion's old jokes, then drove the long way home, past the house no longer hers." Which detail supports both nostalgia and displacement?

"She won the scholarship. She won the trip abroad. She won, and still her father did not call." What does repeating "won" emphasize?

"For the governor's visit, the village painted the bridge gold. No one replaced the rotted planks." Which two ideas does this contrast develop together?

"Grandpa patched every neighbor's roof, yet caught his own leaks in pans so no one would see." Which two ideas does this line connect?

Excerpt from a novel:

The committee agreed, after some debate, that the mural should be preserved. They agreed less easily on what preservation meant. Domenic, who had painted a corner of it as a boy of fourteen, argued that the wall should be sealed behind glass, untouched, "so my children's children may see what I saw." Priya, the conservator, listened with the patience of a woman who had heard variations of this sentiment in seven languages. She noted, gently, that sealing the wall would trap moisture; within a decade the pigments would bloom with mold, and Domenic's corner would be the first to go. What he called preservation, she called suffocation.

The alternative she proposed was a slow, continuous restoration: each generation would repaint the fading passages, matching pigments as best they could, so that the mural would endure by being, in some measure, remade. Domenic accepted this in principle and resisted it in every particular. When Priya's apprentices touched up the sky above his boyhood corner, he stood behind them with folded arms and pointed out, correctly, that the new blue was not the old blue.

"It cannot be," Priya said. "The old blue is gone. This is the blue that will keep the wall alive until the next blue."

Domenic did not answer. That evening he wrote in his journal: They are saving it by changing it. I do not know whether to thank them or to mourn.

Which statement best analyzes how two themes in the passage interact?

From a short story:

The town of Ashkirk held its annual footrace on the first Saturday of October. The route ran from the old mill to the river bridge and back—three miles of packed dirt, one of asphalt, and a final quarter mile of cobblestone that no one had repaired since the war. The winner received a modest purse and, more importantly, the right to have his or her name painted onto the beam above the mill door, where two hundred and eleven names already crowded for space.

Joss had trained for the race for three years. He was, by any reasonable measure, the fastest runner in the county. On the morning of the race, however, he found himself walking beside his neighbor Ren, whose knee had never quite healed from an accident the previous spring. Ren was not going to finish. Joss knew this the way one knows the weather.

He could have gone ahead. He nearly did. But as they reached the cobblestones, Ren stumbled, and Joss slowed—not to help, exactly, but to keep pace, so that Ren would not be alone at the back. They crossed the finish line together, ninth and tenth, long after the beam-painter had gone home.

Joss's name was not painted that year. It has still not been painted. He does not speak of the race, but each October he walks the route with Ren, who now uses a cane, and they stop at the cobblestones to rest.

Which pair of themes is most precisely developed by the story's ending?

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?

The philosophy department at Bell College maintained, by custom rather than rule, a small round table in the corner of the faculty lounge. At this table, and only at this table, arguments were permitted to become heated. Elsewhere—in seminars, in committee meetings, in the corridor—one was expected to disagree with a certain aristocratic mildness, as though ideas were interesting but not important. At the round table, ideas were important, and one shouted.

Professor Ahmadi, newly hired, was warned about the round table on her first day. She was told that she need not sit there, that many of her colleagues did not, that no offense would be taken. She sat there her second week and did not leave for eleven years.

What she came to understand, slowly, was that the round table was not the exception to the department's civility but its foundation. Because the round table existed, the corridors could be mild; because one had a place to shout, one did not shout everywhere. When, in her twelfth year, the college dean proposed abolishing the lounge to make room for a printer, Ahmadi wrote a memo of such controlled ferocity that the dean, who had never sat at the round table, mistook it for a personal attack. The lounge was preserved. Ahmadi returned to the round table that afternoon and shouted, happily, about Spinoza.

Which pair of themes best captures what the passage develops through the institution of the round table?

From a novel:

The translator worked in a small room at the top of the house, where the ceiling sloped low enough on one side that she had learned, over the years, to duck without thinking. She was translating a novel from a language spoken, now, by fewer than four thousand people. The novel's author had been dead for sixty-one years. His publisher had gone out of business. His descendants, if he had any, had not been located. The translator had been hired by a small press whose editor believed, against all commercial evidence, that the book deserved English readers.

She worked slowly. The language had seven words for kinds of silence, and the novel used all of them. English had, at best, three, and none of them were quite right. She invented compounds. She wrote long notes in the margins of her draft, then crossed them out; a translation, she believed, should not require its own apparatus. She let sentences sit for weeks. She reread the original aloud to no one.

When the book was finally published, it sold, in its first year, three hundred and eleven copies. The translator was not disappointed. She had done what she had come to do, which was to make it possible for an English reader—any English reader, one would have been enough—to hear, faintly, what the author had heard clearly. Three hundred and eleven readers was, in this sense, an extravagance.

Which choice best identifies two themes the passage develops and how they interact?

The apprenticeship at Havlik & Sons lasted seven years, and in the seventh year Tomas was permitted, for the first time, to sign a piece of furniture he had made. He chose a small walnut side table, its legs turned in the pattern the shop had used since his grandfather's day. He signed the underside in pencil, as was traditional; the pencil would fade within a generation, and the table would pass into the anonymous inventory of things that had simply always been.

His employer, old Havlik, examined the table and grunted approval. Then he said something Tomas had not expected. "You should sign it in ink."

"But the tradition—"

"The tradition," Havlik said, "was made by men who thought their names were less important than the shop's. I no longer believe they were right. Or rather—I believe they were right for their time, and we are no longer in their time."

Tomas signed in ink. He felt, obscurely, that he had betrayed something, and also that he had been given something he had not known he wanted. Havlik watched him and said nothing further. That night, in the ledger where the shop recorded each completed piece, Havlik wrote Tomas's full name beside the description of the table—the first time a maker's name had appeared in the ledger in one hundred and forty years.

Which choice best identifies two themes the passage develops and explains their relationship?

The lighthouse had stood on the promontory for ninety-three years when Merrin took the keeper's post. Her predecessor, old Hollis, had left behind three ledgers: one for weather, one for ships, and one—unlabeled—for what he called "the smaller record." In it he noted the arrival of terns, the cracking of a particular stair, the day a gull learned to open the bait bin. Merrin thought the smaller record foolish at first. She was a woman of instruments; she trusted the barometer more than her knees.

But in her second winter, the radio failed for eleven days. The supply boat could not cross. She found herself, one grey morning, writing down that the kettle whistled a half-tone lower in cold air, and that the third gull from the left always ate second. She filled four pages before she noticed. When the boat finally came, the deckhand asked what she had done to pass the time. "Kept the light," she said, and did not mention the ledger.

In spring, an inspector arrived to audit her logs. He praised the weather ledger, initialed the shipping ledger, and lifted the third book with a frown. "This isn't required," he said. "No," Merrin agreed. He set it down carefully, as though it might be required of someone, somewhere, and left without further comment. That night she wrote: Inspector did not confiscate the smaller record. Wind SSW, 12 knots. The stair cracked again.

Which pair of themes is most fully developed through the interaction between Merrin and the "smaller record"?

Poem: "The Cartographer's Daughter"

My father drew the coastlines of a country that no longer answered to its name. He worked by lamplight, ruling in the harbors where ships had once, he said, been welcome.

I asked him once why he did not draw the country as it was: the border shifted, the capital renamed, the northern province folded into a neighbor's colored field.

He set his pen down. "A map," he told me, "is an argument about what deserves a name. Mine is losing. That is not the same as being wrong."

He died in autumn. I keep his last map folded in a drawer I open rarely. When I travel now, I carry the official one, and find my way, and feel, at each corrected border, a small dispute I have inherited and cannot win and will not, for that reason, surrender.

Which analysis best captures how two themes in the poem develop in relation to each other?

From a novel-in-stories:

When the drought came, the village council debated whether to open the reservoir. The reservoir had been built by the villagers' great-grandparents and was, by long agreement, reserved for a crisis worse than any yet encountered. To open it now would be to declare that this drought was the crisis their ancestors had feared. To keep it closed would be to gamble that a worse one lay ahead.

The council split. The elder Vasquez argued for opening: "Our ancestors built the reservoir for us. Not for a hypothetical descendant we will never meet." The younger Vasquez, his own niece, argued for keeping it closed: "They built it for whoever needs it most. We do not yet know whether that is us."

They voted. The reservoir was opened. The fields recovered. Two years later, a worse drought came, and the reservoir was dry, and the village emptied over the following decade until only a caretaker remained to lock the gate of the reservoir that no longer held anything worth locking.

The caretaker, in her old age, was asked by a visiting historian whether the vote had been a mistake. She thought for a long time. "It was the right decision," she said, "and it was the wrong outcome. I do not know how to separate them, and I no longer believe they must be separated."

Which pair of themes is most fully developed and interrelated in the passage?

My grandmother kept two gardens. The front garden faced the street and was, she said, "for the neighbors." It bore roses in disciplined rows, a boxwood clipped to the geometry of a hatbox, and a small brass plaque bearing the family name. Visitors admired it from the sidewalk and rarely came closer.

The back garden was another country. Tomatoes leaned against stakes like tired soldiers; mint had colonized the parsley bed years before and shown no interest in a treaty. A single folding chair, its seat mended with fishing line, sat where the afternoon light collected. My grandmother took her coffee there and read letters she never answered.

When she died, my aunts argued about the roses—who would maintain them, whether the plaque should be polished or removed. No one mentioned the folding chair. I asked to have it. My eldest aunt looked at me as though I had requested the ashes of a stranger. "Take it," she said. "It isn't worth anything."

I set the chair on my own small balcony, six floors above a street my grandmother never saw. On summer evenings I sit in it with a book I do not always read. The mint, which I transplanted in a clay pot, has already begun its diplomatic overtures toward the basil.

Two central ideas emerge from the contrast between the front and back gardens. Which choice best identifies both and explains how their relationship shapes the narrator's inheritance?

The wolf was reintroduced to the valley in the autumn of 2004. There were seventeen at first, then fewer, then more. By 2019, the deer, which had grown accustomed to browsing without vigilance, moved differently through the woods. The aspens, which the deer had kept clipped to knee-height for two generations, grew past the reach of any mouth. The songbirds returned to the aspens. The beavers returned to the ponds the aspens shaded. The river, which had run straight and shallow, began, in places, to meander.

The ranchers in the valley lost, on average, four sheep a year to the wolves. This was fewer than they had expected and more than they had been promised. Meetings were held. Compensation was negotiated. A young rancher named Wells, whose father had opposed the reintroduction, testified in favor of continuing the program. He said, and the transcript records it verbatim: "I have lost sheep I loved. I have also seen the river move. I do not know how to weigh these against each other, and I do not think the weighing is my job. My job is to say what I have seen."

The program continued. The wolves multiplied. Wells's father, who had died in 2016, was not alive to hear his son testify, and Wells was, on the drive home from the hearing, uncertain whether this was a mercy or a loss.

Which pair of themes is most precisely developed and interrelated in the passage?

From a novella:

The letters arrived over the course of thirty-one years, one each spring, from an address in a city Iona had never visited. They were unsigned, but she knew, in the way one knows such things without needing evidence, who had sent them. Each letter described, in careful and unemotional prose, one day in the life of the sender: what he had eaten, what he had read, whom he had spoken to, what the weather had been. He did not mention her. He did not ask after her. He did not explain why he wrote.

She never replied. She could not have; there was no return address, only a postmark. But she kept the letters in a box beneath her bed, and each spring, when the new one came, she read the old ones through in order before opening it.

On the thirty-second spring, no letter came. She waited a month, then two. In August she wrote a letter of her own, addressed to him at the postmark's city, care of no one. She described her day: what she had eaten, what she had read, whom she had spoken to, what the weather had been. She did not mention him. She did not ask after him. She did not explain why she wrote.

She mailed it, knowing it would not arrive. This, she understood, had been the arrangement all along.

Which choice best identifies two themes the novella develops and analyzes their interaction?