High School Reading: Grades 11-12 Quiz: Word Choice And Tone Literature

"The new mall squatted on the old orchard, its parking lot spread like a spill." The words "squatted" and "spill" suggest the narrator sees the mall as:

In "Marisol was fine: fine with the seating, fine with the toast, fine when her brother left early," the repeated "fine" most likely suggests she is:

The contrast of "enter" and "arrived" in "She didn't enter the room; she arrived, and every conversation bent toward her" mainly suggests:

In "The committee's praise was a thin coat of varnish over the old cracks," the varnish image suggests the praise is:

From the short story "The Glasshouse" by Renata Ohl (original):

He had been, in his youth, what people politely called promising—a word Cecilia had come to distrust as she watched it attach itself to one nephew after another. Promising meant that a young man had not yet done anything, but that the family had agreed, in a kind of collective hallucination, that he would. Promising meant that his debts were loans, his idleness was contemplation, his rudeness was wit. Promising was the currency the Ashfords minted to pay for the sons they could not otherwise afford. By the time Cecilia was thirty, she had seen three cousins reduced from promising to unfortunate, and the transition, when it came, was never marked by any specific failure. One simply woke up on the wrong side of the word.

In the passage, the word promising functions primarily as:

From the poem "Late Frost" by Tomás Beringer (original):

The orchard learned humility that April, when the blossoms, having ventured out too soon, were rebuked by a wind that came down from the north with the certainty of an old schoolmaster— no malice in it, only the long habit of correction. By morning the petals lay in drifts along the furrows, and the trees stood bare as pupils at a lesson, their green ambitions folded into the earth.

As used in line 3, the word rebuked most nearly means:

From the story "Provision" by Elke Marston (original):

Aunt Sybil did not believe in waste, and by waste she meant something more expansive than her neighbors did. Waste was the crust of a loaf discarded, yes, but it was also an afternoon spent indoors when the light was good, a compliment paid but never delivered, a book bought and left unread on the shelf. She kept, in her kitchen, a small tin she called the resurrection box, into which went bacon rinds, apple peels, the ends of onions—everything that would, in another house, have gone to the pigs. From that tin, weekly, she produced a stock so rich and dark that guests asked for the recipe and went away, having been told, disappointed. There was no recipe. There was only her refusal to let anything unnamed slip past her.

In the passage, Aunt Sybil's understanding of waste is distinguished from her neighbors' primarily by its extension to include:

From the essay "On Small Republics" by Julián Coventry (original):

A family, my grandmother used to say, is a republic—by which she did not mean that it was democratic, for she herself governed ours with the settled authority of a magistrate who had never lost an election because none had ever been held. What she meant was that a family, like a republic, exists only insofar as its members continue to believe in it. Kingdoms could be inherited; empires could be conquered; but a republic had to be renewed every generation by the private assent of those who found themselves inside it. When the assent lapsed—when a son came home only from duty, when a daughter no longer troubled to argue—the republic did not fall in any dramatic way. It simply ceased, quietly, to be the thing it had claimed to be.

As the grandmother uses it in this passage, the word republic is meant to emphasize:

From the poem "Inheritance" by Séamus Toll (original):

My father left me his quiet— not the quiet of a shut door, nor the quiet that follows an argument won, but the quiet he had made, over years, by refusing to name what he could not mend: the brother lost at sea, the field sold cheap, the letter that arrived and was never opened. I keep it now as he kept it, a room in the house I do not enter, though I feel, sometimes, its cool breath under the door I have chosen not to open.

As it is developed across the poem, the word quiet most nearly refers to:

From the novel A Borrowed Season by Nnamdi Ostrower (original):

Delacroix was, above all, economical. Not with money—he spent freely, sometimes recklessly, on rare editions and small kindnesses to strangers—but with attention, with feeling, with the words he permitted himself in conversation. When his wife died, he wrote to me a single sentence: The house has become larger. When his novel won the prize he had wanted for thirty years, he sent a postcard containing only the date. It was said, and not entirely in jest, that a longer letter from Delacroix constituted a family emergency. I came, over time, to understand this restraint not as coldness but as a form of reverence: he suspected that most feelings, exposed to too much language, evaporated.

As it is used in the passage, the word economical most nearly means:

From the novel The Cartographer's Daughter by Imelda Voss (original):

Mother kept the accounts the way other women kept diaries. Each evening she would sit at the roll-top desk, unstopper the inkwell, and enter the day's small transactions in her looping, immaculate hand: three yards of muslin, a pound of sugar, the milkman's fee. My father called the ledger her scripture, and though he said it with a smile, I never doubted he meant it. When the mill failed and the creditors came in their black coats, she did not weep or plead. She produced the ledger and laid it open on the parlor table like a priest laying out the elements. The men bent over the columns, tracing her figures with a reverence that surprised me. Whatever she had written there had the force of law. One of them, a stooped man with spectacles pushed up on his forehead, finally straightened and said, quietly, that everything was in order. He tipped his hat to her, not to my father, and the black coats filed out into the November light.

As it is used in the passage, the word scripture most nearly means:

From the novel The Long Table by Priya Halberstam (original):

Uncle Ferenc's laughter was architectural. It did not spill out of him in the ordinary way; it was constructed, story by story, over the course of a joke's telling, so that by the time the final line arrived the whole company found itself already inside a building it had not noticed being raised. He would begin with a small, low chuckle—a foundation. Then a wider laugh at some incidental absurdity along the way—the walls. Then, at the crucial moment, a sudden roof of hilarity would go up and the rest of us, half-laughing already out of politeness, would find that we were laughing inside something, and could not easily get out.

The word architectural, as applied to Ferenc's laughter, primarily conveys the idea that his laughter is:

From the novel The Instrument by Corin Ashby (original):

What Marlow possessed, and what his rivals could not manufacture no matter how many hours they practiced, was touch. It had nothing to do with the strength of his fingers—several of the students at the conservatory could crush a walnut in one hand, and their playing remained wooden. Touch was a kind of listening that happened at the point where the fingertip met the key: an ability to know, in the instant before the hammer struck the string, exactly how much of himself to give and how much to withhold. The old professor, who had spent forty years failing to teach it, said that touch could not be taught because it was not a skill but a form of respect—respect for the instrument, which had its own ideas, and which would speak beautifully only to a player who consented to be interrupted by it.

As it is used in this passage, the word touch is best understood as:

From the novel Salt Marsh by Odile Renfrew (original):

The town treated Reverend Cobb with a deference that was not, strictly speaking, respect. Respect would have required them to weigh his opinions against their own and, at least occasionally, to be persuaded. Deference cost less. It consisted of standing when he entered the parlor, nodding gravely at his pronouncements on the weather, and then, once he had gone, resuming whatever they had been doing or saying before. He mistook the gestures for agreement, as men of his position often do, and left every gathering more certain of his influence than when he had arrived. The town, for its part, was grateful. Deference was the small tax it paid to keep him from noticing that no one had listened to him in twenty years.

In this passage, the distinction the narrator draws between deference and respect implies that deference is best understood as:

From the play The Auditors by Petra Klint, Act II (original):

HARROW: You call this a reform, Mr. Speaker? SPEAKER: I call it what it is. HARROW: Then let us be plain. You have taken the pension that fed my mother's mother, cut it by a third, renamed the remainder, and printed pamphlets celebrating your generosity. This is not reform. This is a reform the way a butcher's slab is a garden—the word applied where the thing is absent, in the hope that no one will look up from the ledger. SPEAKER: The gentleman is theatrical. HARROW: The gentleman is literate.

Harrow's manipulation of the word reform in his second speech is designed to reveal that the Speaker uses the term to:

From the memoir North of the River by Hattie Vane (original):

My grandfather's face, when he came in from the fields, was weathered in a way I did not, as a child, know how to read. I thought it meant old. Later I thought it meant tired. Only when I was grown, and had spent a single August pulling flax under the same sun that had polished him for sixty years, did I understand that weathered was neither of these. It was the record of what a body had refused to be defeated by. Each line was an argument the sun had lost.

As the passage develops, the word weathered comes to signify: