High School Reading: Grades 9-10 Quiz: Word Choice And Tone Literature

From the poem "Late Frost":

The orchard wears a stiff white coat this morning, and every bud that dared to open early has paid the tax the season always collects. My grandfather walks the rows without speaking, his boots printing dark commas in the grass, punctuating a sentence he has read before and will read again, and does not need to finish.

The speaker's description of the grandfather's boot prints as "dark commas" that punctuate "a sentence he has read before" most strongly suggests that

From the play "House on Selby Street":

MARGO: You always say the house has "good bones," as if that fixes everything. DEV: It does mean something, Margo. Bones are what you build on. MARGO: Bones are what's left when everything else is gone. I don't want to live inside a skeleton, Dev. I want a kitchen where the drawers close and a roof that doesn't apologize every time it rains. DEV: (quietly) It rains here maybe twelve days a year. MARGO: Then twelve days a year, this house is sorry.

Margo's redefinition of "bones" in her second line most directly serves to

From the novel "River Work":

Old Henrik had spent so many decades on the ferry that the river had gotten into his walk. On land he moved as though the ground might tilt beneath him at any moment, one hand always drifting toward a railing that wasn't there. His sentences drifted too — starting in one place, curving lazily around an eddy of memory, and arriving somewhere the listener had not expected but could not, in fairness, call wrong.

The statement that "the river had gotten into his walk" is best understood to mean that Henrik

From the story "Debate Team":

On the drive home, Coach Iyer told us we had lost the round because we had argued like lawyers instead of arguing like gardeners. We stared at her. "Lawyers," she said, "win by cutting. Gardeners win by growing. You spent forty minutes trimming their case and none building your own. When the judge closed her notebook, there was nothing left on your side of the table but their weeds, very neatly pulled."

As Coach Iyer uses them, the contrasting terms "lawyers" and "gardeners" primarily distinguish between debaters who

From the novel "The Long Bench":

Coach Alvarez had a philosophy about the bench, and the philosophy was this: no one warmed it. Players rested on it, studied on it, sometimes wept quietly at the end of it, but no one warmed it, because warming implied idleness, and idleness was the one sin Alvarez had never learned to forgive. Even the boys least likely to see the field spent games leaning forward, clipboards balanced on their knees, tracking the opposing team's tendencies in a code Alvarez had invented himself.

As used in the passage, the repeated phrase "warmed it" functions to

From the novel "The Understudy":

Rosalind had been an understudy for two seasons now, which is to say she had been a rumor of an actress. On the roster she existed; in the programs her name appeared in the smallest available font, as though the printers themselves were embarrassed on her behalf. When the lead was healthy — and the lead was aggressively healthy, a woman who seemed to consume vitamins with the same appetite others reserved for gossip — Rosalind sat backstage in full costume, mouthing the lines to an audience of dust motes and one indifferent stage manager.

In context, the description of Rosalind as "a rumor of an actress" primarily conveys that she

From the story "The Cartographer's Daughter":

Mira watched her father spread the vellum across the oak table, its edges curling like autumn leaves refusing to lie flat. For thirty years he had drawn coastlines that other men would trust with their lives, and yet tonight his hand trembled as he uncapped the ink. The northern commission had asked for something impossible: a map of territory no European had crossed.

"They want certainty where none exists," he muttered. "So I will give them a beautiful lie." He began to sketch mountains he had never seen, rivers whose mouths he could only guess at, and in the blank spaces near the top he drew delicate, curling sea monsters. Mira understood then that the monsters were not decoration. They were a kind of honesty — a way of saying, here, I have run out of knowing. The beasts marked the borders of her father's courage.

As used in the final sentence, the phrase "borders of her father's courage" most nearly refers to

From the essay "Fluent":

I have spoken Bengali all my life, but until I was twenty-two I had never read a Bengali novel from cover to cover. My tongue knew the language; my eyes were foreigners in it. When I finally sat down with Tagore, the characters marched across the page like a parade I could hear but not quite see — the drums perfectly audible, the banners a blur. I understood then that fluency is not one skill but several, and that a person can be at home in a language the way a swimmer is at home in water: comfortable at the surface, entirely lost in the deeper rooms.

The author's statement that her "eyes were foreigners" in Bengali most nearly means that she

From the short story "Ledger":

Uncle Pran kept accounts the way other men kept grudges — meticulously, and forever. Every loan he had ever made, every dinner he had paid for, every umbrella that had walked out of his shop and failed to walk back — all of it lived in a green cloth notebook that he carried in his breast pocket, close to a heart that, my mother said, had been slowly hardened by its own bookkeeping.

The comparison of Uncle Pran's accounting to the way "other men kept grudges" functions in the passage primarily to

From the story "Weather Report":

By the time Dad came home, the argument between my sister and my mother had reached what he called its "barometric stage" — that quiet, pressurized silence when nothing was being said and everything was being decided. He set down his keys with the careful slowness of a man defusing something, glanced at the kitchen where Mom stood rinsing a plate she had already rinsed twice, and gave me the smallest possible nod. Storm coming, the nod said. Find somewhere else to be.

In context, describing the argument as being at its "barometric stage" primarily emphasizes that the conflict is

From the poem "Aunt Delphine's Kitchen":

She measured nothing. Flour fell from her hand in the amount the flour agreed to fall, and salt arrived in whatever pinch her fingers had negotiated with the salt that morning. Recipes, she said, were for people who did not yet trust their hands. I have three of her cookbooks on my shelf, unopened, their spines still stiff as strangers at a door.

The final image — cookbook spines "stiff as strangers at a door" — chiefly conveys that the cookbooks are

From the story "Interview":

The hiring manager asked me where I saw myself in five years, and I gave her the answer I had rehearsed on the bus — something about growth and responsibility and contributing to the mission. She wrote nothing down. She had, I realized, been fishing not for information but for a particular flavor of confidence, and my answer had come out the wrong flavor entirely: dutiful, tinned, faintly metallic.

The narrator's description of the answer as "tinned" and "faintly metallic" most nearly suggests that the answer was