GRE Literature in English (REA) (15 page)

Why are candles or the moon liars in line 3?

1. They give a flattering softening light so the picture they reflect is not “true.”
   
2. They change so much that the reflection they give back in the mirror can never be true.
   
3. They cannot reflect light as a mirror does, so there is no image.
   
4. Their light is too shadowy or milky to give a good reflection.
   
5. The mirror is jealous of their brightness.
   

Which is the closest paraphrase of lines 8 – 9?

1. The mirror has changed and refuses to give the young woman the reflection she ought to have.
   
2. Over time the young girl has grown old with the mirror which reflects the true image of a face now wrinkled and aged.
   
3. The woman feels as useless as a fish and thus wishes to drown herself in her rightful milieu, the lake.
   
4. The young girl is desperately unhappy, like a fish out of water, but hates to see this reflected in the mirror.
   
5. The mirror has lost its silver backing and reflects only scaled fragments of the young girl.
   

The poet is

1. Emily Dickinson.
   
2. Amy Lowell.
   
3. Ted Hughes.
   
4. Sylvia Plath.
   
5. Wallace Stevens.
   

“When I was writing the Shadow of the Glen some years ago, I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the several servant girls in the kitchen. This matter I think is of importance, for in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words and at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form.”

Who is the “I” in this passage?

1. James Joyce
   
2. John Millington Synge
   
3. Sean O'Casey
   
4. Frank O'Connor
   
5. W. B. Yeats
   

In the above passage, which best explains the writer's defense of language?

1. Writers should be allowed to use any language they like.
   
2. Writers should choose only the language of the working people.
   
3. Writers should choose only a living, vibrant language because it can express reality.
   
4. Writers should use only bright, creative words.
   
5. Writers should be allowed to use creative words even if they are “dirty” or in dialect.
   

Which is from
The Sound and the Fury?

Which is from
Go Tell It On The Mountain?

Which is from
Coming Up For Air?

Anna waits for a “real man” to come down like a deus ex machina to heal and help her.

Whose Anna is this?

1. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
   
2. Arnold Bennet's Anna of the Five Towns
   
3. Doris Lessing's in
   The Golden Notebook
   
4. Sartre's Anna in
   Nausea
   
5. Little Cloud's in
   Dubliners
   

In current usage, the term
deus ex machina
means

1. a device that descends from the top of the stage to lower a god from the “heavens.”
   
2. a Puck-like character who causes mischief and complications in the plot.
   
3. a character who begins with evil intent but softens as the plot unfolds.
   
4. a character who intervenes opportunely to avoid disasters in the plot.
   
5. a device for helping other characters descend into the “earth” below stage.
   

She is similar to unlikely writers such as Kafka and Faulkner but what is horrifying about ___ is that she creates terror amidst the hurry and flurry of females as they perform their “duties.” In
Delta Wedding
an impetuous girl prepares for her wedding, harrassed and bullied by the people she loves and who love her.

 

The author's name is

1. Flannery O'Connor.
   
2. Jane Austen.
   
3. Eudora Welty.
   
4. Joyce Carol Oates.
   
5. George Eliot.
   

The disemboweled are put back together and the dead resurrected. Victims are raped or flogged, or cut into pieces so quickly the readers have no time to sympathize.

The work described is

1. Vonnegut's
   Slaughterhouse-Five.
   
2. Gulliver's chapter on the Brobdingnagians.
   
3. Chaucer's “The Miller's Tale.”
   
4. Margaret Atwood's
   The Handmaid's Tale.
   
5. Voltaire's
   Candide.
   

Identify the famous word or catch-phrase from the last work.

1. “Something will turn up!”
   
2. “In the best of possible worlds”
   
3. “And so on”
   
4. “Live!”
   
5. “I'm ever so ‘umble”
   

Man has ideas that come not through the five senses or the powers of reasoning; but are either the result of direct revelation from God, his immediate inspiration or his immanent presence in the spiritual world.

 

Which is the term for the philosophy thus outlined?

1. Pragmatism
   
2. Humanism
   
3. Behaviorism
   
4. Transcendentalism
   
5. Spiritualism
   

Which did William James write?

Which did Emerson write?

1. I do not wish to look with sour aspect at the industrious manufacturing village, or the mart of commerce. I love the music of the water wheel; I value the railway; I feel the pride which the sight of a ship inspires; I look on trade and every mechanical craft as education also. But let me discriminate what is precious herein. There is in each of these works an act of invention, an intellectual step, or short series of steps taken; that act or step is the spiritual act; all the rest is mere repetition of the same a thousand times.
   

2. I would say that learning to know dread is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known dread or by sinking under it. He therefore who has learned rightly to be in dread has learned the most important thing... Dread is the possibility of freedom.
   

3. Through the process of evolution, human beings have put on sense organs—specialized areas where special types of stimuli are most effective—such as the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, the skin and semi-circular canals.
   

4. The universe is a system of which the individual members relax their anxieties occasionally, in which the don't care mood is also right for men, and moral holidays in order that if I mistake not, is part, at least, of what the Absolute is “known as,” that is the great difference in our particular experiences which his being true makes for us, that is his cash value when he is pragmatically interpreted.
   

5. Even when I looked at things, I was miles from dreaming that they existed: they looked like scenery to me. I picked them up in my hands, they served me as tools, I foresaw their resistance. But that all happened on the surface... all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself.
   

I' the Commonwealth I would (by contraries)
Execute all things: for no kind of traffic
Would I admit: no name of magistrate:
Letters should be not known: riches, poverty,
And use of service, none: contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard none
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil:
No occupation, all men idle, all:
And women too, but innocent and pure:
No sovereignty.

 

All things in common Nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine
Would I not have: but Nature should bring forth
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance 15
To feed my innocent people.

The speaker is

1. a garrulous old fool who talks in riddles.
   
2. a garrulous old statesman whose paradoxes describe a utopia.
   
3. a wise old counselor whose riddles advocate an ideal communism.
   
4. a sad old politician who is losing his memory.
   
5. an interesting old courtier intent on making himself ruler of a commonwealth.
   

In context, what do the words “bourn,” “bound,” and “tilth” mean in line 6?

1. Rights of way, acre of land, and taxes
   
2. Stream, boundary of land, and cultivation
   
3. Valley, acreage, and taxes
   
4. Boundaries, rights of property, and land cultivation
   
5. Stream, public property rights, and soil
   

In context, what does the word “foison” mean in line 15?

1. Plentiful crop
   
2. Harvest
   
3. Poison
   
4. Fish
   
5. Fodder
   

This commonwealth contradicts which Bible teaching?

1. Man should honor his neighbor.
   
2. Man produces by the sweat of his brow.
   
3. Man should employ his best talents.
   
4. God separates the sheep and the goats.
   
5. Woman shall bear pain in childbirth.
   

Which author owes a debt to whom for this commonwealth ideal?

1. Ben Jonson to William Perry
   
2. Shakespeare to Montaigne
   
3. Voltaire to Rousseau
   
4. Pope to Locke
   
5. Swift to Hume
   

Summertime, oh, summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fadeproof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end; this was the background, and the life along the shore was the design, the cottages with their innocent and tranquil design, their tiny docks with the flagpole and the American flag floating against the white clouds in the blue sky, the little paths over the roots of the trees leading from camp to camp and the paths leading back to the outhouses and the can of lime for sprinkling, and at the souvenir counters at the store the miniature birch-bark canoes and the postcards that showed things looking a little better than they were.

As E. B. White recalls a childhood summer, why does he employ one very long sentence?

1. To highlight the waste he feels now as an old man
   
2. To try to capture the past with a rambling “old man style,” not pausing for breath, but piling incident on incident
   
3. To give the reader an idea of the haze of the past
   
4. To capture the breathless existence of those summers with so much to see and do
   
5. To capture how excited he was then and how sad he is now reminiscing
   

Which term best defines the opening three lines?

1. Oratory
   
2. Rhetoric
   
3. Celebration
   
4. Religious
   
5. Incantation
   

Which best explains why the author uses such lines?

1. To express his joy with those past summers
   
2. To show how important those summers were to him
   
3. To show how deeply moved he is by the remembrance of those summers
   
4. To show how those summers seemed eternal to him then
   
5. To show that the summers work in a healing way for him now