High School Reading: Grades 9-10 Quiz: Reading And Interpreting Literature

"Every spring the river took more of the bank, and every spring Dad moved the fence back a foot without a word." The central idea is

"We all agreed the new girl was stuck-up, though none of us had actually spoken to her yet." The final clause mainly serves to

"Grandpa's laugh was brittle now, snapping off before it reached the end of the joke." As used here, brittle most nearly means

"Lena set three plates on the table, then slowly put one back in the cupboard." What can most reasonably be inferred?

"Her apology was so measured that it sounded rehearsed rather than sorry." As used here, measured most nearly means

From "The Cartographer's Apology"

I drew your country smaller than it was. I shaded in the mountains where the plains stretched flat as any promise. And because I could not fit your rivers, I left stains

of blue where cities were, and cities where you buried what you loved. Forgive the hand that held the pen. It did not mean to swear allegiance to the empire's understand-

ing of your shape. But paper has its rules: what will not fit gets cut. What cannot bend becomes a legend at the bottom — jewels of tiny print no traveler will attend.

I drew your country smaller than it was. I drew it, still. That is the only cause.

The poem's structure — beginning and nearly ending with the line "I drew your country smaller than it was" — primarily serves to

From a contemporary short story:

Rafael's grandmother spoke four languages, but she chose, in her last years, to speak almost none of them. She had grown suspicious of words the way some people grow suspicious of strangers — not all at once, but with an accumulating attention to how often they disappoint.

"Palabras," she said once, when Rafael asked her to describe her childhood village. She held up her hand and turned it, palm up, palm down, palm up. "Sometimes they carry water. Sometimes they carry nothing. You cannot tell by looking."

After she died, Rafael inherited her books — three shelves of them, in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and a language he did not recognize and could not, at first, identify. He took the unfamiliar books to a professor at the university, who examined them for a long moment and said they were in Ladino, an old language of the Sephardic Jews, and asked, gently, whether Rafael had known his grandmother was Sephardic.

He had not.

That evening, Rafael sat on the floor of his apartment with the Ladino books arranged around him in a semicircle, like an audience waiting for a performance he did not know how to give. He could not read them. But he understood, for the first time, why his grandmother had said what she said about words. She had spent a lifetime carrying some, and choosing, at the end, not to carry others.

The comparison of the Ladino books to "an audience waiting for a performance he did not know how to give" primarily conveys

SCENE: A hospital waiting room. LENA, mid-40s, sits with a paper cup of coffee. Her brother DAVID, late 30s, enters carrying a duffel bag.

DAVID: I came as soon as I could. LENA: (not looking up) You came from Denver. DAVID: Yes. LENA: Denver is a nine-hour flight with the layover. Mom went in on Tuesday. DAVID: I know when she went in. LENA: (finally looking at him) Do you. DAVID: Lena. LENA: (standing, tossing the cup) I'm going to get more coffee. The machine's on three. DAVID: I'll come with you. LENA: No. You just sat down. (Pause.) Sit down. (She exits. DAVID does not sit. He sets the duffel bag on the chair she vacated, arranging it carefully, as if it were a person. He remains standing until the lights fade.)

The stage direction describing David arranging the duffel bag "as if it were a person" most likely functions to

A translated folk tale:

Once a young man named Kestutis went to the forest to ask the old woman who lived there for a single wise thing. He had heard she gave one wise thing to anyone who asked, but only one, and only once.

He found her sweeping the doorstep of a house that was not so much a house as an idea of a house — walls where walls belonged, a roof more or less overhead. She did not look up.

"I have come for my wise thing," said Kestutis.

"Have you," she said.

"Yes. I would like it now, please."

The old woman kept sweeping. "Come back," she said, "when you can tell me what you would do with it."

Kestutis went home. He thought for a year. He returned and said, "I would use the wise thing to become rich."

"That is not what wise things are for," said the old woman, and she shut the door.

Kestutis went home. He thought for two years. He returned and said, "I would use the wise thing to help my village."

"That is closer," said the old woman, "but it is still what you would do with it. Come back when you can tell me what it would do with you."

Kestutis went home. He did not return for a long time. When he did, he was no longer young, and he said nothing at all. The old woman nodded and gave him his wise thing.

The tale most fully develops which theme?

From a novel set in 1897:

Henrietta had been warned about the west wing. Her aunt had told her, on the first evening, that the rooms there had been closed since her uncle's death and that the closure was a matter of respect, not superstition, and that Henrietta was to consider the matter settled. Her aunt had used the phrase "a matter of respect" three times in under a minute, which Henrietta, who was fifteen and observant, found interesting.

On the sixth day of her visit, when her aunt was in the village and the housekeeper was baking, Henrietta went to the west wing.

The hallway was not dusty. This was the first thing she noticed. In a house where an entire wing had been closed for nine years, one expected dust — a soft, forgiving carpet of it, the kind that admitted footprints as evidence. But the floorboards were clean, and along the baseboard she saw the faint parallel tracks of a broom recently drawn.

She stood very still. Somewhere at the far end of the corridor, a door was closed but not, she thought, closed for nine years.

She went back downstairs. At supper, her aunt asked how she had spent the afternoon, and Henrietta answered, truthfully, that she had been reading in the library. She did not add that she had chosen a book about the natural history of dust.

The final detail about the book on "the natural history of dust" primarily functions to

The morning of the race, Tomás wrapped his ankles twice. He always wrapped them once. His coach, Ms. Vega, noticed from across the locker room but said nothing, because Ms. Vega had learned in fourteen years of coaching that a runner who is doing something unusual before a race is either preparing to win or preparing to lose, and no amount of intervention changes which.

Tomás did not look at the other runners. He did not stretch with them. When the announcer called his heat, he walked to the starting line as if he had forgotten something in the car and might, at any moment, turn around to retrieve it.

He finished fourth. It was the best time of his life — three-tenths of a second faster than he had ever run — and it was not enough to advance.

Afterward, Ms. Vega found him behind the bleachers. He was not crying. He was studying his shoes as though they had authored a book he disagreed with.

"Well?" she said.

He looked up. "I ran the race I could run."

"Yes," she said. "That is usually all anyone can do."

He nodded once, and then, after a long pause, he untied his shoes and set them on the ground between them, as if returning something borrowed.

The gesture of Tomás untying his shoes and setting them on the ground "as if returning something borrowed" most strongly implies that

The bell above the door of Petrosian's Repair Shop had not worked in years, but Mr. Petrosian refused to replace it. "A broken bell," he told his apprentice, Iris, "is still a bell. It has a shape. It has a purpose. It only needs someone to notice it."

Iris, who was seventeen and impatient, thought this was the sort of thing old men said when they did not want to admit they were cheap. She said so, once. Mr. Petrosian only laughed and handed her a pocket watch with a cracked crystal.

"Fix this," he said. "Then tell me again what old men are."

She worked on the watch for three days. The gears were fine — clean, oiled, turning as they should. The problem was the mainspring, which had been wound so tightly for so long that it had lost its tension entirely. It could not be repaired. It could only be replaced.

When she told Mr. Petrosian, he nodded as though she had answered a question he had not asked. He took the watch, set it on the shelf beside the bell, and said, "Some things break because no one lets them rest."

That night Iris walked home the long way, past the shuttered cannery where her mother had worked two shifts a day for eleven years.

The final paragraph most strongly suggests that Iris

The lighthouse keeper's daughter, Maren, had never once complained about the isolation. For sixteen years she had watched the same gray waves shoulder against the same gray rocks, and for sixteen years she had thought the sea was a kind of company. But that autumn, when the mainland ferry began arriving twice weekly instead of once, she found herself lingering at the dock. She would arrange and rearrange the mail sacks. She would ask the ferryman, Olsen, about weather he had already described. Once, when he mentioned that his niece in Bergen had started at the university, Maren nodded so quickly that she dropped the ledger she was holding.

Her father noticed. He noticed the way she began oiling the lamp with less attention, the way she left books open and abandoned on the stairs. One night, over cod and boiled potatoes, he said, "The Halversons need a girl to help with the little ones this winter. In town."

Maren looked at her plate. "I couldn't leave you with the lamp."

"The lamp," her father said, "has kept itself lit longer than either of us has been alive."

She did not answer. But that night, climbing the spiral stairs to trim the wick, she caught herself counting the steps — something she had not done since she was very small — as if measuring, for the first time, how far up she had climbed and how far down she would have to come.

Which statement best describes how Maren's characterization develops over the course of the passage?

From a short story:

Every Sunday for eleven years, Priya's father called her at exactly 4:00 p.m. He called from a landline in Chennai, and he began every conversation the same way: "Beta, are you eating enough?" Priya, who was a physician and thirty-four years old, always said yes.

On the Sunday after her father's stroke, the phone rang at 4:07. Priya, who had been standing by the phone for seven minutes, answered on the first ring. It was her mother.

"He wants to talk to you," her mother said. "He is having some difficulty. Be patient."

There was a shuffling sound. Then her father's voice, thinner than she remembered, though it had only been a week.

"Beta," he said. And then a long silence. Priya could hear him working — she recognized the labor of it, from her hospital — trying to shape a question he had asked without effort for eleven years.

"Yes, Papa," she said, before he could finish. "I'm eating enough."

There was another silence. Then her father made a small sound that might have been a laugh, or might have been something else, and her mother took the phone back.

That night, Priya cooked a meal she did not want and ate all of it, standing at the counter, as if it were an assignment she had been given and intended to complete.

The final sentence — in which Priya eats "as if it were an assignment she had been given and intended to complete" — most clearly develops which idea from earlier in the passage?

From a novella:

The new tenant on the third floor was, by all accounts, unremarkable. She was tall but not very tall. She was quiet but not conspicuously so. She wore gray, but so did half the building in November. What made the residents of 14 Belmont Street attentive to her was not any single feature but rather the peculiar fact that no two of them could agree on what she looked like.

Mrs. Kowalski, on the first floor, was certain the new tenant had dark hair, cut short. Mr. Ansari, on the second, was equally certain it was long and light brown. The Fletcher twins, whose bedroom window faced the stairwell, swore she wore glasses; the building superintendent, who had personally handed her the keys, swore she did not.

At first, the residents discussed the discrepancy with the amused interest of people who enjoy a small mystery. Then, slowly, the interest curdled. Mrs. Kowalski stopped speaking to Mr. Ansari on the stairs. The Fletcher twins were forbidden from playing near the stairwell. The superintendent, when asked about the new tenant, began to say, "I don't remember," which was untrue, and which he said in a voice that discouraged further inquiry.

The new tenant, meanwhile, went about her days.

The passage's central irony lies in the fact that

Excerpt from a short story:

When the drought entered its fourth year, the town council voted to sell the community pool. Nobody had swum in it since the second summer, when the water had turned the color of weak tea and the lifeguard, a boy named Cyrus, had quit to work at his uncle's hardware store. Still, the vote was seven to two, and the two dissenters were old.

Mrs. Ellery, who was one of them, walked past the pool every morning on her way to the post office. She did not stop, exactly — stopping would have been an admission. But she slowed. She looked. On the tiled edge, someone had spray-painted the words FOR SALE in a red so bright it seemed to be advertising the paint itself rather than the pool.

The buyer, when he came, was from the city. He wore a linen jacket and said the word "repurpose" seven times in a single conversation with the mayor. Mrs. Ellery counted. She was standing near enough to count because she had, that morning, made herself a small promise: whatever the man said, she would remember it exactly, so that later, when the town asked what had happened, she could tell them.

No one asked.

The final two-word paragraph — "No one asked." — contributes to the passage's meaning primarily by

From "Winter Orchard"

My father counted trees the way another man might count coins — not to spend them, but to know they were his. Ninety-seven apple, twelve pear, three walnut he had planted the year I was born

and which had never borne. He walked the rows in January, when the branches were black scribbles against a paler black, and I walked behind him learning the arithmetic of what survives a season.

He did not speak of loss. He spoke of pruning, of grafting, of the particular angle at which a limb should leave the trunk. And I understood, though he never said it, that these were the same subject.

In the poem, the speaker's assertion that the father's talk of "pruning, / of grafting" and his silence about loss were "the same subject" suggests that