Tests on Literature
Directions
: each of the questions or incomplete statements below is followed
by five suggested answers or completions. Select the one that is best in each
case.
1.
A dreamer, ever tilting at windwills, he tries to reassure his long-
suffering companion, Sancho Panza, telling him: ‘And even if
everything were to turn out exactly the opposite of what I imagine, no
malice could ever obscure the glory of having kindled this endeavour.’
A) Grendel
B) Candide
C)King Arthur
D) El Cid
E) Don Quixote
2. I seye for me, it is a greet disese
Wher-as men han ben in greet welthe and ese,
To heren of hir sodeyn fal, allas!
And the contrarie is Ioye and greet solas,
As whan a man hath been in povre estaat
And clymbeth up, and wexeth fortunat,
And there abydeth in prosperitee,
Swich thing is gladsom, as it thinketh me.
-
Chaucer
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In line 3, ‘hir’ is best glossed as
A) them
B) they
C) their
D) her
E) hers
3. Which of the following is the best paraphrase of line 8?
A) I think of myself as somewhat glad about such things.
B) such a thing is heartening, it seems to me.
C) Such things are glorious, reminding me of them.
D) Switch from being glad to thinking of me.
E) Things are made better by thinking glad thoughts.
4. The passage alludes to the
A) great chain of being
B) Neoplatonic doctrine of recollection
C) theory of the humours
D) Biblical parable of the mustard seed
E) wheel of fortune
5. Which of the following is NOT associated with the 1890s?
A) The Yellow Book
B) The Rhymers Club
C) Thomas Carlyle
D) Oscar Wilde
E) Decadence
6. Which is written by William Carlos Williams?
7. Which is by Wallace Stevens?
8. Which is by Robert Frost?
A) The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods –
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.
B) I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
C) I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
D) Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined –
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
entrance – Still, the profound change
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has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken.
E) The ‘age demanded’ chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the ‘sculpture’ of rhyme.
9. His own motivations are entirely idealistic: ‘I thought that if I could bestow
animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now
found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body
to corruption.’ Finally, as he expires in the Arctic, he makes his most forceful
statement on the dangers of scientific ambition, but he berates only himself
and his own failures, while stating that others might well succeed.
The passage above is from a discussion of
A) Edgar Allan Poe’s
The Fall of the House of Usher
B) Franz Kafka’s
Metamorphosis
C) Ann Radcliffe’s
The Mysteries of Udolpho
D) Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
E) Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
10. Philip Larkin once said, ‘Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for
Wordsworth.’ Larkin meant that, for him, deprivation was
A) a sound of anxiety
B) a stimulus to poetry
C) a transitory state
D) a petty distraction
E) an occasion for self-doubt
11. The novel he wrote about the lives of the Okies has come to symbolize the
heartbreaking plight of the dispossessed. It has been called ‘a vivid parallel’
to the situation of the American homeless today, ‘a story of people at the
bottom of the world.’
The novel under discussion above is
A) Hemingway’s
For Whom the Bell Tolls
B) Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy
C) Ellison’s
Invisible Man
D) Lewis’
Main Street
E) Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath
12. It seemed to Winterbourne that he had been in a manner presented. He got
up and stepped toward the young girl, throwing away his cigarette. ‘This little
boy and I have made acquaintances,’ he said, with great civility. In Geneva,
as he had been perfectly aware, a young man was not at liberty to speak to a
young unmarried lady except under certain rarely-occurring conditions; but
here at Vevey, what conditions could be better than these? – a pretty
American girl coming and standing in front of you in a garden. This pretty
American girl, however, on hearing Winterbourne’s observation, simply
glanced at him; she then turned her head and looked over the parapet, at the
lake and the opposite mountains. He wondered whether he had gone too far;
but he decided that he must advance farther, rather than retreat.
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In line 2, ‘presented’ most nearly means
A) restricted
B) introduced
C) dismissed
D) approved
E) observed
13. In context, Winterbourne’s decision to ‘Advance farther’ means that he
will
A) assume an attitude of haughty indifference
B) observe the code of manners of Geneva society
C) pursue a conversation with the young lady
D) get the little boy to speak to the young lady
E) change the residence from Geneva to Vevey
14. The ‘pretty American girl’ of the passage is
A) Cather’s Antonia
B) Nabokov’s Lolita
C) Crane’s Maggie
D) James’s Daisy Miller
E) Dreiser’s Carrie Meeber
15. If he do bleed,
I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal,
For it must seem their guilt.
Which of the following is used in a double sense in these lines from
Macbeth
?
A) ‘bleed’
B) ‘faces’
C) ‘grooms’
D) ‘withal’
E) ‘guilt’
16. Which speaker is Robinson Crusoe?
17. Which speaker is Lemuel Gulliver?
18. Which speaker is Oroonoko?
19. Which speaker is Tom Jones
?
A) And why (said he) my dear Friends and Fellow-sufferers, should we be
Slaves to an unknown People? Have they vanquished us nobly in Fight? Have
they won us in Honourable Battle? And are we by the Chance of War become
their Slaves? This would not anger a noble Heart; this would not animate a
Soldier’s Soul: no, but we are bought and sold like Apes or Monkeys, to be
the sport of Women, Fools and Cowards, and the Support of Rogues and
Runagades, that have abandoned their own Countries for Rapine, Murders,
Theft and Villanies. Do you not hear every day how they upbraid each other
with Infamy of Life, below the wildest Salvages? And shall we render
Obedience to such a degenerate Race, who have no one human Vertue left, to
distinguish them from the vilest Creatures?
B) I discover’d a Locker with Drawers in it, in one of which I found two or
three Razors, and one Pair of large Sizzers, with some ten or a Dozen of good
Knives and Forks; in another I found about Thirty six Pounds value in
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Money, some
European
Coin, some
Brazil
, some Pieces of Eight, some Gold,
some Silver.
I smile’d to me self at the Sight of this Money. O Drug! said I aloud, what
art thou good for? Thou art not worth to me, no not the taking off of the
Ground; one of those Knives is worth all this Heap; I have no Manner of use
for thee, e’en remain where thou art, and go to the Bottom as a Creature
whose Life is not worth saving. However, upon second Thoughts, I took it
away…
C) Sure Fortune will never have done with me till she hath driven me to
distraction. But why do I blame Fortune? I am myself the cause of all my
misery. All the dreadful mischiefs which have befallen me are the
consequences only of my own folly and vice. What thou hast told me,
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