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English 3A
Semester One Final Assessment
No matter what type of test, steps can be taken beforehand to maximize performance. As you work on
the test questions, you should apply strategies that will help you perform well. You might also want to try
using the following general strategies, which work for many people.
Taking the Test
 Glance over the test, noting the types of questions.
 Read all directions and questions carefully.
 Budget your time, making sure that you do not spend too much time on any single question.
 Read each question and answer choices before answering. Many items include choices that may seem
right at first glance but are actually wrong.
 Complete the questions that you can answer easily. Then go back to the more difficult items.
 Do not make wild guesses. Since points are deducted for incorrect answers on many standardized
tests, random guessing can harm your score. If you can eliminate one or two of the answer choices,
however, your chance of choosing the correct answer is increased.
Test Directions: Using the bubble sheet provided, select the most correct answer and
thoroughly darken in the corresponding letter. If you change an answer, erase it
completely.
Part One: Multiple Choice
1. What did the literature from the literary period known as the Rationalism/Age of Reason emphasize?
A. The role of reason and logic in human affairs.
B. A return to the fantasy and creativity.
C. The colonists’ obsession with sin and temptation.
2. Read the following selection:
Long, long ago, the Creator, the Great Chief Above, made the world. Then he made the animals and
the birds and gave them their names -- Coyote, Grizzly Bear, Deer, Fox, Eagle, the four Wolf Brothers,
Magpie, Bluejay, Hummingbird, and all the others. When he had finished his work, the Creator called the
animal people to him. "I am going to leave you," he said. "But I will come back. When I come again, I will
make human beings. They will be in charge of you." The Great Chief returned to his home in the sky, and
the animal people scattered to all parts of the world.
After twelve moons, the animal people gathered to meet the Creator as he had directed. Some of them
had complaints. Bluejay, Meadowlark, and Coyote did not like their names. Each of them asked to be
some other creature. "No," said the Creator. "I have given you your names. There is no change. My word is
law.
"Because you have tried to change my law, I will not make the human being this time. Because you
have disobeyed me, you have soiled what I brought with me. I planned to change it into a human being.
Instead, I will put it in water to be washed for many moons and many snows, until it is clean again."
This piece is most likely a:
A. trickster tale
B. creation myth
C. memoir
3. Which one of the following is not characteristic of a memoir?
A. The author will share feelings and opinions about historical events.
B. The author writes in a first-person point voice.
C. The author can make things up to make his life seem more interesting.
4. Which one of the following is NOT one of the core beliefs of Puritanism?
A. The Bible is the source of God’s Law.
B. Everyone was able to choose whether they went to heaven or hell.
C. All men are born with the burden of Adam’s original sin.
5. What is a narrative form of autobiographical writing in which a person recalls significant events in his or
her life in called?
A. a literary letter
B. an essay
C. a memoir
6. Read the following passage from a poem by Anne Bradstreet.
Thou hast an house on high erect,
Framed by that mighty Architect,
With glory richly furnished,
Stands permanent though this be fled.
It’s purchased and paid for too
By Him who hath enough to do.
A price so vast as is unknown
Yet by His gift is made thine own;
There’s wealth enough, I need no more,
Farewell, my pelf, farewell my store.
The world no longer let me love,
My hope and treasure lies above.
pelf: wealth or riches, dishonestly gained
In the previous passage, Bradstreets devotion to God implies that this piece was most likely
written during which literary period?
A. Modernism
B. Puritan
C. Realism
7. Read the following passage:
I believe I have omitted mentioning that, in my first voyage from Boston, being becalmed [moving
slowly] off Block Island, our people set about catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto [until
now] I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion considered, with my
master [employer] Tryon, the taking every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had,
or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable.
But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and, when this came hot out of the frying-pan, it
smelt admirably well. I balanced some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when
the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, "If you eat one
another, I don't see why we may not eat you." So I dined upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat
with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a thing it
is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind
to do.
The selection above was most likely written during
A. Rationalism/Age of Reason.
B. Romanticism
C. Realism.
8. What was the name of the philosophy practiced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau which
originated during the Romantic period that argued that truth existed beyond reason and experience and
urged readers to embrace nonconformity?
A. stream of consciousness
B. Realism
C. Transcendentalism
9. A folk tale about an animal or person who engages in deception, violence and magic in order to teach a
life lesson is an example of
A. Creation myth
B. Trickster Tale
C. Tragic hero
10. Read this excerpt from Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”:
During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung
oppressively low in the heaven, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract
of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the
melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was – but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of
insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit …
The atmosphere and mood of the selection above suggests it is an example of
A. Romanticism
B. Gothic Literature
C. Realism.
11. Select which function is most important in a creation myth
A. To explain how the universe, the earth and life on earth began.
B. To stress the importance of foods, rituals, and games.
C. To learn about Native Americans.
12. Which one of the literary movements below realistically exposed the dark harshness of life, including war,
poverty, racism, prejudice, disease, prostitution, filth and featured characters that are often victims of
their own instincts (e.g. survival, love), their heredity (e.g. social class, race), or their environment that
ultimately decided their fate?
A. Transcendentalism
B. Naturalism
C. Romanticism
13. The following characteristics – grotesque characters, bizarre situations, and violent events – represent
what type of literature which was popular during the 19th century, especially in the hands of such of such
notables as Edgar Allan Poe & Nathaniel Hawthorne:
A. Transcendentalism
B. Creation Myth
C. Gothic literature
14. Read the following passage from Mark Twain’s short story, “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras
County”:
Well, thish-yer Smiley had a yaller one-eyed cow that didn’t have no tail, only just a short stump like a
bannanner, and—
In this example Twain is utilizing what literary device to provide local color to his story?
A. Dialect
B. Allusion
C. Symbolism
15. All of the following are characteristics of Realism except:
A. A focus on the middle and lower classes society
B. An attempt to portray life honestly
C. An increased sentimentality about the human race
16. This was a movement in the arts that flourished in Europe and America throughout much of the 19th
century. Writers from this time period glorified nature and celebrated individuality. Their treatment of
subject was emotional rather than rational, intuitive rather than analytic. Emily Dickinson and Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow were popular American poets of this literary era. The name of this literary
movement is:
A. Modernism
B. Transcendentalism
C. Romanticism
17. A metaphor is a literary device that:
A. compares two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”
B. compares two unlike things by saying one thing is the other
C. does not compare two things at all
18. When writing a persuasive piece, and trying to make a logical argument, you would use this appeal:
A. Logarithm
B. Logos
C. Logis
19. Native American literature was largely based on the oral tradition, which meant that:
A. All of the stories were passed down through the generations by speech only
B. Everyone in the tribe was responsible for keeping their own personal log of information
C. The Native Americans painted pictures of the stories on the walls of their teepees.
20. The Age of Reason was a response to:
A. King James and his tyrannical rule over the colonies
B. The Transcendentalists
C. The strict doctrines and ideas of the Puritan era
21. In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Ambrose Bierce writes to criticize which war?
A. The American Civil War
B. The French and Indian War
C. World War I
22. In Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death,” allegory was used. An allegory is:
A. A short story that has no meaning at all.
B. A short story that uses concrete objects to represent abstract ideas, and usually has a
deeper meaning.
C. A story that is based on a biblical story.
23. An example of a simile is:
A. The sky rained from the clouds like water from a faucet.
B. The sky rained, a faucet dripping water.
C. The clouds in the sky moved back and forth, showering water everywhere.
24. Perspective is a literary device that:
A. allows authors to have their own way.
B. makes it difficult to figure out what an author is talking about.
C. allows authors to choose the point of view from which they write
25. Realism in American Literature followed which of these events?
A. World War II
B. The Civil War
C. The fall of the Berlin Wall