High School Reading: Grades 11-12 Quiz: Reading Literature 11 12

In "The house was quiet. Too quiet. Even the clock held its breath," the fragment "Too quiet" mainly serves to:

"The city swallowed her whole the morning she arrived, all horns and elbows." The word "swallowed" most strongly suggests that she:

Claim: Nora admires the painting. Does "Nora praised her brother's painting warmly, then turned it to face the wall once he left" support it?

"He waited. He waited through the rain, through the dark, through the last bus home." The repetition mainly serves to:

The lighthouse keeper Elias had long since stopped counting the ships. In his forty-third winter on the island, he simply lit the lamp, cleaned the lens, and watched. The mainland had sent letters, at first weekly, then monthly, then not at all. A young inspector had come the previous spring, clipboard in hand, and pronounced the automated beacon on the northern cape 'a triumph of modern navigation.' Elias had nodded politely and poured him tea.

When the storms came in October, they came as they always had: without apology. The wind pried at the shutters like a thief testing locks, and the sea gnawed the black rocks below. Elias moved through the tower with the unhurried gravity of a priest at vespers. He trimmed the wick. He wound the clockwork. He noted the barometer's fall in a ledger no one would read.

On the third night, the automated beacon failed. Elias did not know this — could not have known — but he felt, in the peculiar way of men who have listened to a coast for four decades, that something offshore had gone wrong. A trawler, perhaps. A schooner running late for harbor. He climbed to the lamp room and turned the great lens by hand when the mechanism stuttered, and he kept turning it, hour after hour, until his shoulders burned and the glass grew warm beneath his palms.

In the morning, the wireless brought news of a freighter saved off the northern shoals. The captain, interviewed by a mainland paper, credited 'the good light' that had guided him through. The reporter assumed he meant the automated beacon. Elias, reading the account a week later by his kitchen window, folded the paper carefully and set it aside. He did not smile. He did not frown. He simply rose to check the wick, because evening was coming, and the sea, as ever, was waiting.

The narrator's decision to end the story with Elias rising 'to check the wick' rather than reacting to the newspaper article most directly serves to:

I have kept my mother's recipe box for eleven years now, though I do not cook.

It sits on the highest shelf of my kitchen, a tin thing painted with faded strawberries, and inside are cards in her looping hand: pound cake, brisket, the peculiar cucumber salad my father pretended to like. The cards are stained. Butter has darkened the corners. A rust-colored comet — tomato, probably — streaks across the recipe for chicken paprikash.

My sister asked once why I keep them if I never use them. I told her I might, someday. This was not exactly a lie, but it was not the truth either. The truth is that when I open the box, I can smell the kitchen on Delaney Street — the yeast, the onions, the particular sweetness of a Sunday afternoon in 1987 — and I am not yet the woman I have become. I am eight years old, and my mother is humming, and the linoleum is cool against my bare feet, and nothing terrible has happened yet, or if it has, I do not yet know.

My sister uses her copies. She has scanned them, laminated them, taped them inside her cabinet doors. She makes the brisket for her children every Passover and the pound cake for birthdays. This is, I think, the healthier way. She has taken what was given and carried it forward. I have taken what was given and sealed it in a tin.

Still, some evenings, I climb onto a chair and lift the box down and read them like poems.

The contrast the narrator draws between herself and her sister most strongly develops which of the following ideas?

From the play The Cartographer's Daughter, Act II, Scene iii. LENA, a young woman, confronts her father PIETER, a mapmaker, who has been redrawing borders for a colonial ministry.

LENA: You told me once that a map is a promise.

PIETER: I told you many things when you were small enough to believe them.

LENA: You said: here is the river, and here is the mountain, and here — (she taps the table) — here is the village where your grandmother was born. A map, you said, is what a place would say about itself if a place could speak.

PIETER: Charming. I don't remember saying it.

LENA: I remember.

PIETER: (turning away) Then remember also that I fed you. That the ink which drew those charming rivers also bought your schoolbooks and your winter coat and the piano you no longer play.

LENA: And the villages, Father? What did the ink do to the villages?

PIETER: (a long pause) The villages were already gone, Lena. I did not remove them. I merely — declined to draw them.

LENA: That is the same thing.

PIETER: No. It is a smaller thing. And a man survives by knowing the difference.

Pieter's final line — 'It is a smaller thing. And a man survives by knowing the difference' — functions in the scene primarily to:

Adapted from a 19th-century novel of manners.

Mrs. Ainsworth possessed, in the general estimation of the parish, every quality requisite to universal admiration — a comfortable fortune, a countenance that had not yet surrendered to time, and, most crucially, three unmarried daughters upon whom she lavished the ceaseless attentions of a general marshalling troops. That the daughters themselves might have preferred a less strategic upbringing was a consideration which had never entered her calculations, and would, had it been raised, have been dismissed as sentimental nonsense of the sort circulated by novelists and other unreliable persons.

The eldest, Cecilia, had learned to smile in the manner her mother recommended: a smile that suggested amusement without committing to it, warmth without heat, interest without curiosity. The second, Harriet, had rebelled by reading — a habit her mother tolerated only because gentlemen were said to admire, in principle if not in practice, an educated wife. The youngest, Beatrice, had rebelled more dangerously: she had begun to say precisely what she thought, and had thereby ruined, in the space of a single dinner, her mother's careful cultivation of Mr. Havershaw.

'You must understand, Beatrice,' Mrs. Ainsworth had said afterward, closing the drawing-room doors with the deliberate softness that in her signaled fury, 'that a young woman's opinions are like her pin-money. She may possess them, but she must not be seen to spend them freely.'

The narrator's tone toward Mrs. Ainsworth is best characterized as:

From a short story, 'The Interview'

The candidate sat with her hands folded in her lap, exactly as she had been taught. Her résumé — three pages, single-spaced, printed on the heavy cream paper the guidebook recommended — lay before the panel, and the panel had not yet looked at it.

'Tell us,' said the woman in the middle chair, 'about a time you failed.'

The candidate had prepared for this question. She had, in fact, prepared six answers of varying length and severity, each calibrated to a different reading of the room. She had rehearsed them in the mirror; she had timed them; she had removed the phrase 'in retrospect' from three of them and reinserted it in two.

She opened her mouth.

What came out was not any of the six answers. What came out was the truth — the actual, unrehearsed, unflattering truth — about the summer she had lied on a project report, and had not been caught, and had been promoted, and had spent the following year unable to sleep before Wednesday meetings because Wednesday was when the report was reviewed.

She finished. The room was silent. The woman in the middle chair made a small mark on her legal pad. The man on the left, who had not spoken, tilted his head slightly, the way one does when a familiar song is playing in another room and one is trying to remember the words.

The candidate did not know, and would not know for eleven days, whether she had ruined everything or saved herself.

The detailed account of the candidate's six rehearsed answers most directly heightens the impact of her actual response by:

From the short story 'Inheritance'

When my grandfather died, he left me his watch, his books, and a debt of eleven hundred dollars owed to a man named Corbin whom I had never met.

My mother, sorting papers at the kitchen table, discovered the note among his tax records. It was written in her father's careful hand on the back of a feed-store receipt, and it acknowledged the sum, the date (August of 1971), and the promise — signed, initialed, and, I noted with something like awe, notarized — that the debt would be repaid 'at such time as my circumstances permit, or, failing that, by my heirs.'

'He never mentioned it,' my mother said.

'No,' I said.

'Fifty-one years.'

'Yes.'

We sat with the receipt between us. My mother was not a sentimental woman, and neither was I, and yet the thing had a weight neither of us had expected. It was not the amount. Eleven hundred dollars in 1971 was considerable, but I could pay it now without difficulty. It was the fact that my grandfather — a man who had, in my memory of him, been irreducibly whole, complete in himself, self-sufficient to the point of aloofness — had once, in a summer I could not imagine, needed help from someone, and had accepted it, and had carried the acknowledgment of it, notarized and folded, for the rest of his life.

I found Corbin's grandson in Kentucky. I wrote him a letter. I enclosed a check.

The watch keeps excellent time. The books I have not yet read. But the receipt I have framed, and it hangs above my desk, because it is the only thing my grandfather left me that told me something about him I did not already know.

The narrator's decision to frame the receipt rather than the watch most centrally reflects which of the following ideas developed by the story?

From a novel set in a research university.

Professor Halloway had been, in his youth, a promising scholar of Middle English lyric. He had published, in his thirty-third year, a slender monograph on the Harley manuscript that had been praised in the Times Literary Supplement by a reviewer whose name he still remembered. The monograph was, in the department's collective memory, his masterwork. It was also, though this was less often mentioned, his only work.

What had happened between the monograph and the present — the intervening thirty-one years — was a question Halloway himself could not have answered with any precision. There had been committees. There had been a marriage, and then no marriage. There had been the year he spent 'blocked,' which had become two years, which had become the decade during which he stopped describing himself as blocked because the word implied that something was, in principle, on the other side of the block.

He still went to conferences. He still spoke, at those conferences, with the fluency of a man whose learning had not decayed but merely settled, like sediment, into layers he no longer disturbed. Younger scholars, meeting him, were often startled to discover that the Halloway of the famous monograph was still alive; a few, more startled still, discovered that he was in the room.

And yet — and this was the thing his colleagues could never quite explain to visiting deans — the students loved him. Not the ambitious students, who saw through him within a semester, but the others: the quiet ones, the uncertain ones, the ones who had come to graduate school because they loved something and did not yet know what to do with the loving. To these students, Halloway gave what he could no longer give himself: the permission to sit with a poem for an entire afternoon and produce nothing but attention.

The narrator's characterization of Halloway is best described as:

Excerpt from a novella set in a coastal fishing village.

The men of Portaferry did not speak of the sea in the way outsiders expected. Visitors from the capital, arriving in summer with their sketchbooks and their theories, often remarked upon the villagers' 'stoicism' — a word the villagers themselves would not have used, and would not have recognized if they had heard it, and would have found faintly insulting if it had been explained to them.

The truth was simpler and less picturesque. The men did not speak of the sea because there was nothing to say about the sea that the sea had not already said, more fluently, in the language it had been speaking since before there were men to hear it. To describe the sea was to insult it; to complain of the sea was to insult oneself, since no one had compelled anyone to build a village on its edge; to praise the sea was to invite its attention, and its attention was not a thing a wise man invited.

So the men spoke of other things. They spoke of the price of rope. They spoke of a cousin in Halifax who had bought, unwisely, a motorcar. They spoke of the priest's new spectacles, and of the widow Callaghan's rhododendrons, and of a dog in the next village that was said to open doors with its paws. And when a boat did not return, they spoke, for a while, of the man who had captained it — his kindnesses, his debts, the way he had laughed — and then, by unspoken agreement, they spoke of him no more, because to speak of him was to speak, obliquely, of the sea, and of the sea there was nothing to say.

The passage's extended explanation of what the villagers refuse to say about the sea most fundamentally serves to:

The last passenger pigeon in the world died in a zoo in Cincinnati in 1914. Her name — because the keepers had given her a name, as if that might undo what had been done — was Martha.

Before she was Martha, before she was a specimen, before her body was packed in ice and shipped by rail to the Smithsonian, she had been one of billions. Her ancestors had darkened the skies of the eastern forests for hours at a stretch; a single flock, John James Audubon wrote in 1813, took three days to pass overhead. Farmers had shot them from wagons. Boys had knocked them from branches with sticks. Nets the size of barn roofs had been strung across their migration routes. It was, everyone agreed, an inexhaustible resource.

What interests me is not the fact of the extinction, which is a matter of arithmetic, but the language surrounding it. In the newspaper archives of the 1870s — when the flocks had already thinned to a shadow of their former darkness — one finds no alarm. One finds recipes. One finds, in the sporting journals of 1889, complaints that the birds have become 'inconveniently scarce,' as if scarcity were a rudeness the pigeons had committed against their hunters.

By the time anyone thought to protect them, there were not enough left to protect. Martha lived alone in her cage for four years, calling occasionally, though no one answered. She died on a September afternoon. The keeper who found her wrote in his log that she had been, in her final weeks, 'a quiet bird.'

The author's discussion of the newspaper archives and sporting journals primarily functions to:

A poem: 'The Second Frost'

My father, at seventy, learned to prune the apple tree— the one my mother planted the year I was born, the year he was gone, the year he came back, the year we did not speak of what he had done in the war.

He learned late. He learned badly at first. He cut the leader; he cut the water-sprouts he should have kept; he cut, one April, a branch so essential that the tree gave no fruit for two seasons after.

My mother, watching from the porch, said nothing. She had waited longer than two seasons for other things.

When the tree bore again — small apples, sour, few — my father stood beneath it for a long time. He did not call us out to see. He simply stood, one hand on the trunk, as a man stands beside a grave he has, at last, been permitted to visit.

The simile in the final two lines — 'as a man stands beside a grave / he has, at last, been permitted to visit' — most powerfully suggests that the father:

The bees came back to the orchard in April, as they always did, but fewer.

Marisol counted them the way her grandfather had taught her — not one by one, which was impossible, but by the sound. A healthy hive sang a certain chord, low and steady, like a cello held on a single note. A dying hive faltered. It cracked. It went sharp in the mornings when the cold sat heaviest on the frames.

She pressed her ear to the white box behind the pear trees and listened for a long time.

'Well?' her brother Tomás called from the fence. He had flown in from the city for the weekend, wearing shoes that were not made for orchards.

'They're here,' she said.

'That's good, then.'

'They're here,' she said again, and did not turn around.

Tomás waited. He had learned, over years, that his sister's silences were not empty. They were the shape of things she could not yet say, or would not, or should not have to. He looked at the rows of trees — his grandfather's trees, and his mother's, and now, he supposed, his sister's — and at the pale spring light falling between them, and at Marisol's small figure with her ear against the hive, and he understood, without being told, that 'here' was not the same as 'enough.'

The repetition of Marisol's phrase 'They're here' most effectively conveys:

A short story, 'The Translator'

For twenty-three years, Ines had translated the poems of Amaru Quispe from Quechua into Spanish, and for twenty-three years she had done so under a single, self-imposed rule: she would not meet him.

Her reasons were not mysterious to her. She had watched, in graduate school, what happened to her friend Ceci — brilliant Ceci, who had translated the great Bolivian novelist and then befriended him, and then, six years and one lawsuit later, could no longer read his prose without hearing his voice pronouncing her name in the wrong tone at a dinner party in 2009. Ines had resolved not to know Amaru Quispe as a man. She would know him only as the voice on the page, the arrangement of syllables, the particular way he broke a line before a verb to give the verb its full and terrifying weight.

He had invited her, over the years, to Cuzco. He had invited her to Lima, to Madrid, to a festival in Cartagena where they might have been photographed together on a small stage. She had declined each invitation with a courtesy that grew, she suspected, insulting through its very consistency.

When he died in November — quietly, of an ordinary illness, in a hospital she had never seen — she went to her study and took down the twelve volumes she had translated, and she arranged them on her desk in the order of their publication, and she sat with them for a long time.

She had been right, she thought. She had also been wrong. Both things were true, and neither canceled the other, and this — she understood now, too late to tell him — was itself the kind of thing his poems had always known.

The final sentence — 'this...was itself the kind of thing his poems had always known' — most effectively resolves the story by: