High School Reading: Grades 9-10 Quiz: Theme Development Literature

WHAT THE RIVER KEEPS

The river does not remember the boy who drowned in it in 1962, nor the couple who were married on its banks the following spring, nor the drought of 1988 when it shrank to a green thread and the town council debated whether to name it something new.

The river keeps nothing. It is we who keep the river — who point and say, here, this bend, this is where my brother taught me to skip stones; this eddy is where my grandmother's ashes went.

And when the last of us is gone who remembers what we placed here, the river will still be a river, running clean of us, as it was before we came with our griefs and our namings.

Which statement best expresses a central idea developed across the poem?

When the flood came, Mr. Devers refused to leave his hardware store. His wife had left the day before with the cat and the photo albums. His son had called from Denver, then from Chicago, each call more frantic. The National Guard came at noon and told him the levee would not hold past four.

"I've been here forty-one years," he said.

"Sir, forty-one years won't stop water."

At three, he was still there, moving the expensive drills to the top shelf, as if the shelf would matter. At three-thirty, he sat down in the aisle with a can of soda and watched the front windows.

What he was doing, he understood, was not saving anything. The insurance would cover the stock. The building was already lost — had been lost, in some sense, from the moment the rain began three counties north. He was simply refusing to be the kind of man who was not present when a thing he loved was taken from him.

At four-fifteen, the water came under the door. He raised his soda can toward it, the way one greets an old acquaintance one has been expecting for a long time.

Which statement best captures a central idea developed through Mr. Devers's actions during the flood?

For three generations, the Amara family had run the town's only bookstore. When the chain store opened on the highway, everyone assumed Amara Books would close within the year. Instead, it thrived. Journalists came to ask Meli Amara, the current owner, what her secret was.

"We do not compete on price," she said. "We cannot. We do not compete on selection. We cannot. We compete on knowing."

She explained: at Amara Books, every customer was greeted by name. Meli kept a card file — begun by her grandfather in 1961 — recording what each regular had read, what they had loved, what they had returned unfinished. New customers were asked three questions and then handed a book. The book was almost always right.

"The chain store," she said, "can give you any book faster and cheaper than we can. What it cannot give you is the book you did not know you wanted. That requires a person who has been paying attention to you, sometimes for decades."

A journalist asked whether the card file could be digitized, made more efficient. Meli smiled but did not answer directly. "The file is not the point," she said. "The paying attention is the point. The file is only what paying attention looks like when you write it down."

Which statement best expresses a central idea developed through Meli Amara's explanation of her bookstore's success?

THE CARTOGRAPHER'S DAUGHTER

My father drew the world in careful lines, assigning every river to its bank, each mountain to its shadow. When he died I found his final map: a folded square of paper white as bone, and on it, nothing — no coastlines, no meridians, no names. At first I thought his hand had failed him. Then I saw, in pencil so faint I nearly missed it, a single arrow near the lower edge, pointing off the page, and underneath, in the handwriting I had known my whole life, two words: BEGIN HERE.

Which statement best captures a theme developed through the poem's central image of the blank map?

The village of Neder-Aalst held a strange festival every seven years. On the appointed day, every resident was required to trade houses with a neighbor chosen by lottery. For one week they lived among another family's furniture, ate from another family's pantry, slept in another family's beds. At week's end, they returned home.

Outsiders found the custom absurd. Anthropologists proposed explanations: it was a rehearsal for hardship, a mechanism for redistributing wealth, a ritual purification. The villagers themselves offered no theory. When pressed, an elder named Griet only said, "After the week, you love your own kitchen more, and you are gentler with your neighbor's children in the street. That is enough reason."

A young journalist visited in 2004 and wrote that the festival's true function was to prevent the villagers from forgetting that their lives were, in the largest sense, arbitrary — that they might just as easily have been born into the house across the lane. He believed this insight cultivated humility.

Griet, shown the article, laughed. "He thinks too much," she said. "But he is not entirely wrong."

Which statement best expresses a central idea developed across the passage?

The horses at the sanctuary had all been rescued from something. Some had been racehorses discarded after injury. Some had pulled carriages in cities until their knees failed. One, a gray mare named Sable, had been found in a locked barn where her owner had died three weeks before anyone thought to check.

Volunteers were told, on their first day, not to expect gratitude.

"They are not storybook animals," the director explained. "They will not nuzzle you because you saved them. Sable has bitten every person in this room at least once. What you are doing is not for them to acknowledge. It is for you to do because it is right, and then to walk away from without needing anything back."

A new volunteer, Priya, found this speech disappointing. She had come, she realized, expecting to be loved by broken creatures she made whole. Over the following months, working in the cold, mucking stalls, being ignored or nipped, she felt her expectation slowly dissolve. What replaced it was not resignation. It was something quieter — a kind of relief at being, for the first time in her life, useful without being watched.

Which statement best expresses a theme developed through Priya's experience at the sanctuary?

SCENE: A hospital cafeteria, late evening. NAOMI, mid-thirties, sits with a paper cup of coffee. Her older brother DANIEL sits across from her.

DANIEL: The doctor said she probably can't hear us anymore.

NAOMI: Probably.

DANIEL: So the things we say now — they're not really for her.

NAOMI: (after a pause) No. They're not.

DANIEL: Then who are they for?

NAOMI: Us. Whoever we're going to be after this. (She turns the cup in her hands.) When Dad died, I didn't say anything. I stood there for four hours and I didn't say one thing, because I kept thinking, he can't hear me, what's the point. And for eleven years I've been the person who didn't speak to her father while he died. I don't want to be two of those people.

DANIEL: So you'd say something even if you knew for certain she couldn't hear.

NAOMI: I'd say something because I knew for certain. Otherwise I'm just making a bet on whether it counts.

(DANIEL is quiet. He stands, folds his coat over his arm, and starts back toward the elevators. Halfway there, he stops and turns around.)

DANIEL: What are you going to say?

NAOMI: I don't know yet. But I'm going to say it out loud.

Which statement best expresses a central idea developed in this scene?

Reyna had rehearsed her resignation speech for six weeks. She had memorized the diplomatic phrases, the grateful nods to mentors, the vague references to "new opportunities" that would prevent anyone from asking questions.

When she finally sat across from Director Alvarez, the speech evaporated.

"I'm leaving," she said, "because every morning I wake up and I already know exactly what will happen. I know which reports will land on my desk. I know which arguments Kellerman will make in the ten o'clock meeting. I know what I will say back. I even know what I will eat for lunch, because I've eaten the same thing for four years."

Alvarez folded her hands. "Most people would consider that stability a gift."

"I did too," Reyna said, "until I realized I couldn't remember any single day from the last two years. They had all become the same day."

Alvarez was quiet for a long time. Then she reached into her desk, pulled out a sealed envelope, and slid it across. "I wrote my own version of that speech in 1998," she said. "I never gave it. Take it. Read it after you've been gone six months."

Which statement best expresses a central idea that emerges from Reyna's conversation with Alvarez?

Malachi had built the treehouse for his son Jonah in the summer of the divorce. He had not been a carpenter. The floor sloped. The ladder wobbled. One wall was two inches shorter than the others because he had measured wrong and refused, on principle, to start over.

Jonah, seven that summer, had loved it with a ferocity that embarrassed both of them.

Now Jonah was twenty-six and getting married, and Malachi stood in the backyard of the house he had kept in the settlement, looking up at the crooked structure the oak had slowly swallowed. Two of the walls were gone. The floor had rotted through in the middle. Only the corner where Jonah used to read remained recognizable.

"Dad," Jonah called from the porch, "the rental company's here for the chairs."

Malachi did not turn. He was thinking that he should have taken it down years ago, before it became this — a monument to the year he had done everything wrong and the one thing, somehow, right.

Which statement best expresses a theme developed through Malachi's reflection on the treehouse?

INTERVIEWER: You've said you consider your first novel a failure. Most readers would disagree — it won two major prizes.

OKAFOR: The prizes are real. The failure is also real. Both can be true.

INTERVIEWER: Explain.

OKAFOR: When I began that book, I wanted to write something that would make my mother understand why I had left home. Not forgive me — understand me. The book I wrote is a fine book. It is not that book. Somewhere in the second year of writing, I noticed the sentences were getting easier, and I realized it was because I had stopped writing toward her and started writing toward strangers who would like me. The strangers did like me. My mother read it once and put it on a high shelf.

INTERVIEWER: Is that failure, though? Or is it just — the nature of publishing? Books have to reach audiences.

OKAFOR: You are being kind. But a person can succeed at a task and still have abandoned the task they set out to do. I don't regret the book. I regret that I lost track, mid-way, of who I was writing it for.

Which statement best expresses a central idea that emerges from Okafor's responses?

The lighthouse had stood on Merrow Point for ninety-three years when Ilse arrived to catalog it for demolition. She had expected rot, rust, the smell of abandonment. Instead, she found the brass fittings polished, the log book updated in a shaking hand, and old Tomas Vale asleep in the keeper's chair.

"They pay me nothing," he said when she woke him. "They stopped paying in 1987. But the ships still come past, and someone must be here when they do."

Ilse explained, gently, that the automated beacon three miles north had made the lighthouse obsolete. The shipping lanes had shifted. No captain had steered by Merrow Light in decades.

Tomas nodded as if she had confirmed something. He poured her tea from a dented kettle. "My father kept this light. His father before him. When my father was dying, he made me promise. Not to keep the light burning — he was not a foolish man — but to keep the promise itself burning. Do you understand the difference?"

Ilse wrote nothing in her clipboard. Outside, the sea slapped against rocks that no longer needed warning.

Which statement best expresses a central idea developed in the passage?

The apprenticeship at Hollen's Bindery lasted seven years. In the first year, Wren was allowed only to sweep and to observe. In the second, she cut paper. In the third, she was permitted to mix glue but not to apply it. By the fifth year, she was making entire books — but each was inspected by Master Hollen, and any imperfection meant the book was cut apart and she began again.

Her friends outside the bindery mocked the system. "You could learn everything in eighteen months from a video," said her cousin. "There's nothing mystical about gluing paper."

Wren did not disagree. She could, in fact, have learned the physical techniques in a fraction of the time. What the seven years taught her was something the videos did not address: how to look at a completed book and know, before opening it, whether the person who made it had been rushing. How to feel, in the weight of a spine, whether the maker had cared.

"Anyone can learn the craft," Master Hollen told her at her graduation. "What takes seven years is learning to recognize it."

Which statement best expresses a theme developed through Wren's apprenticeship?