Two themes that build on each other
Grade 11 Reading Worksheet - Challenge Me
Circle the best answer.
Read this first
The Color of the Boat (first-person story about an invented oral-history project)
[1] For the county's oral-history project I recorded Teodor Mazur, who was eighty-eight and the last living member of the 1957 river rescue, and who told the story of the night the levee broke so smoothly that I suspected he had told it often. [2] In his version his brother Ansel rowed out alone in a red boat, a red as bright as a fire engine, and brought eleven people off the roof of the grain store before the current took the boat. [3] He told it with the ease of a man who has learned where the laughter goes. [4] Back at the library I checked his account against the newspaper, as the project's guidelines required, and found in the weekend edition a photograph of the rescue and, beside it, the boat, plainly dark green.
[5] I telephoned the next morning and asked whether he might be remembering the color from another year. [6] There was a pause on the line long enough that I heard a clock behind him, and then he said, "It was green. It was always green." [7] He explained that red had been the color of Ansel's sweater, which was found on the bank, and that somewhere in the telling over sixty years the sweater had climbed into the boat. [8] He asked me, not unkindly, whether the project required me to write down the color of the boat or the color of the night. [9] I said the guidelines required both, and he laughed, and I could not tell whether he had meant to.
[10] The transcript, as filed, carries Teodor's account word for word, with a footnote on the boat's color citing the newspaper. [11] Teodor read the footnote at his kitchen table and said it was accurate, and thanked me, and then asked whether a researcher in fifty years would see the red or the footnote first. [12] I said I did not know. [13] He kept the photograph, which I had copied for him, and propped it against the sugar bowl, where, he said, he could see Ansel's boat as it had been and Ansel's sweater as he remembered it. [14] On my way out he told me to come back on the anniversary and bring the recorder, and that he would tell it the way it happened, if I could say which way that was.
The story's two lines are loyalty to the record, and loyalty to what a memory is for. Bo reads sentences 13 and 14. Which reading of the ending fits both lines?
- The ending reverses the story: Teodor gives up his red boat for good, since the photograph and the footnote have settled what happened that night.
- Both survive unmerged: the photograph holds the fact, the sweater holds the loss, and Teodor's closing promise rests on a question the narrator cannot answer.
- The ending sets up a return visit: the narrator will come back on the anniversary with the recorder to hear the whole story told again from the very beginning, word for word.
- The ending turns to loneliness: Teodor, alone with a photograph at his kitchen table, shows how old age slowly empties a life of company.
Suppose the story cut Teodor's explanation of the sweater and his question (sentences 7 and 8). Jun asks what the memory line would lose. Which answer is best?
- The record line, since sentences 7 and 8 are where Teodor first accepts that the newspaper has the color right and he does not.
- A detail of the plot, how the color changed, and nothing more, because the sweater explains an error and the memory line would otherwise stand as it is.
- Its reason: sentences 11 and 13 would still show Teodor prizing his version, but nothing would say why the red boat matters to him.
- The whole line: with sentences 7 and 8 gone, nothing else in the story shows Teodor valuing his own version of that night.
Noah tests the two lines of the oral-history story, the record and what a memory is for, on a new situation. Which one shows them meeting in the same way?
- A librarian copies a photograph of an old rescue for a man who keeps it on his kitchen table, propped against a mug of tea.
- A historian checks a veteran's date against army files, then archives his wrong date beside the correct one, labeled, since it marks when the war ended for him.
- A museum corrects the date on a plaque after a historian shows it wrong, and visitors from then on read just the corrected date there.
- A grandmother insists on the date she remembers, and the family agrees to change each record in the house to match her memory of it.
Insurance (story about an invented theater company)
[1] For nine weeks Marguerite Alder had sat in the dark of the third row during every rehearsal of the Winter Street Theater's revival of The Lantern Keeper, learning the part of Ingrid by learning the whole play, including the cues that belonged to the lighting board. [2] She was the understudy, which in the company's phrase meant insurance, and she had accepted the title on the understanding that insurance is paid for and never used. [3] The lead, Cordelia Voss, was a brilliant actress with a weakness for her own speed, who took the second act's long speech so quickly that its quietest line, the one about the lamp, was lost in the applause already gathering. [4] Marguerite could not say this to her. [5] She could, however, mouth the line in the dark the slow way it needed, and every night Voss, glancing out between speeches, began to see a pair of lips shaping the words and to follow them without admitting it.
[6] By the fourth week the lamp line had become the performance's quietest and most praised moment. [7] The reviewers wrote that Voss had found a new patience in the role. [8] The director, who had never once glanced at the third row, quoted one of them in the program.
[9] On the second-to-last night Voss lost her voice an hour before curtain, and Marguerite, who had waited nine weeks to be needed, went on in a costume taken in at the waist with safety pins. [10] She played the second act as she had been mouthing it, slowly, and the lamp line landed in a silence so complete that the stage manager, listening on the headset, forgot to call the next cue. [11] The audience stood. [12] Backstage Voss, hoarse and wrapped in a blanket, took both of Marguerite's hands and said that was how it went, and added, with the generosity of a person certain of her place, that the cast party was at eight and Marguerite should bring a friend. [13] The morning paper reviewed the previous night's performance, which was Voss's, and the program for Sunday's matinee listed the understudy, in small type, as insurance.
Zee tests the two lines of the understudy story, uncredited work and the wish to be seen, on a new situation. Which one shows them meeting in the same way?
- An understudy waits through a long run, goes on for one night, and discovers that nerves, not talent, are the hardest part of the job.
- A proofreader repairs the dates in a historian's book and reviewers praise its accuracy; the historian thanks her in a private note, but the credits list her only as staff.
- A volunteer sets out chairs before each meeting, and no one ever thinks to ask who does it, or to say a word of thanks.
- A choir member's harmony makes a soloist's piece famous, and the paper praises the choir member by name while the soloist goes unmentioned.
The Warden (story about an invented city library)
[1] In the thirty years that Perpetua Hale had worked the desk at the Calder Street branch, she had enforced three rules without once raising her voice: no food at the tables, no telephones in the reading room, and no conversation louder than a turning page. [2] Her patrons, who ranged from graduate students to men who spent the day beside the radiators because the library was the only public building heated until nine, understood that her silence was a courtesy she extended to everyone equally. [3] The regulars called her the Warden, with an affection she pretended not to hear. [4] She kept a tin of lozenges under the desk, which she distributed by claiming to have found them.
[5] In January a man known only as Mr. Dunmore began arriving at opening and talking, under his breath at first and then not under it, to someone who was not at the table. [6] Complaints reached the desk by afternoon. [7] Perpetua walked the length of the reading room, which took the attention of every reader in it, and told him in the voice that had never been raised that the rule was quiet and that she would have to ask him to leave. [8] He gathered his coat without argument and said only that the radiator by the third table was the one that worked. [9] She stood with the rule still in her mouth.
[10] The next morning she moved the third table into the corner behind the periodicals, set a card on it that read Reserved, and told the complainants, who had not asked, that it was for quiet reading. [11] Mr. Dunmore sat there until March and spoke to no one in a voice no louder than breathing, and the reading room, though it was never again quite as silent as before, grew gentle in a way the regulars attributed to the weather. [12] In April the lozenge tin was empty.
[13] On the last day of the month the library board circulated a memo reminding all branches that reading rooms were for reading. [14] Perpetua pinned it to the corkboard beside the tin, where it curled in the heat of the radiator.
The story's two lines are quiet kept as a shared courtesy, and the room kept as a shelter. Luz reads sentences 13 and 14. Which reading of the ending fits both lines?
- Neither is given up: the memo is posted, not obeyed to the letter, and it curls in the same heat that sheltered Mr. Dunmore.
- The ending settles the matter for order: the board's memo confirms the rule, and Perpetua posts it as a reminder to the regulars.
- The ending turns on the board: its memo wins, and the shelter Perpetua made for Mr. Dunmore is quietly closed down by April.
- The ending is about age: after thirty years at the desk, Perpetua quietly accepts that her time as the Warden is coming to an end.
Suppose the story cut the reserved table and its result (sentences 10 to 12). Ren asks what the shelter line would lose. Which answer is best?
- Only the story's plot, since the table and its result tell what happens to Mr. Dunmore, and the shelter line itself is untouched.
- All of the line: without these sentences nothing shows the library as a shelter, and the line disappears from the story.
- Nothing, since the radiators in sentence 2 and the lozenges in sentence 4 already show the library as a shelter for the cold.
- Its action: sentences 2, 4 and 8 would still show a shelter, but Perpetua would never be seen choosing it over the rule.
Bo tests the two lines of the reading-room story, quiet as courtesy and the room as shelter, on a new situation. Which one shows them meeting in the same way?
- A branch librarian moves the evening reading hours to begin an hour earlier, so that students can study before their shifts at the nearby shops and cafes.
- A restaurant owner who enforces closing time for everyone sets a table by the kitchen door for a regular with nowhere warm, and calls it staff seating.
- A librarian enforces the no-food rule at every table, without exception, even for a patron who has not eaten since the morning.
- A librarian pins a memo beside a lozenge tin, near a radiator in the corner of a quiet reading room on a winter afternoon.
Saved String (story about an invented street and a cleared house)
[1] After Imogen Rhys's death, her niece was sent to clear the house on Tanner Row, a task the family had delegated with the confidence of people who had never seen the inside of it. [2] Every drawer in the kitchen was full of saved things: bread bags folded into triangles, rubber bands wound around a doorknob into a ball the size of a grapefruit, and string, and string, and more string, coiled and tied off and sorted by thickness into jam jars. [3] Imogen had been known on Tanner Row for two things, a thrift that was a family joke at every holiday and a refusal to accept thanks that was not a joke at all. [4] The niece, who had been taught as a child that Aunt Imogen took the last roll and the smallest slice of cake and the chair by the draft, filled four bags before noon with what she thought of as the evidence.
[5] She stopped at the pantry shelf. [6] Behind the jars of string stood a row of shoeboxes, each marked in pencil with a name: the Okafor boy, Mr. Lindqvist, the twins at number nine, the woman from the bakery. [7] Inside were mended gloves, a spool of good thread, a pair of reading glasses with a new lens, a savings certificate with a note that said only for school, and, around each box, a length of string tied in a bow that no one had ever seen her tie in public. [8] The niece sat on the pantry floor with the Okafor boy's box in her lap. [9] She remembered that he had arrived at his graduation in a suit that fit him exactly, and that nobody on the street had ever explained where the suit had come from. [10] She remembered Aunt Imogen in the back row that day, in the chair by the draft, applauding with her hands held low, as though she did not want the sound traced.
[11] The jam jars were another matter. [12] The niece took the shoeboxes to the funeral home, where they stood on a side table through the service and were collected by the end of the afternoon, one by one, by people who did not ask who had sent them. [13] On the drive home she threw out the bread bags and kept a single ball of string, which she could not have said was the one she wanted.
The story's two lines are thrift as self-denial, and giving that hides itself. Noah reads sentences 12 and 13. Which reading of the ending fits both lines?
- The ending settles the thrift as generosity: the boxes show that each saved object was meant for someone, so the family joke is withdrawn at last.
- The two stay linked and unsettled: the boxes reach their people unsigned, and the niece keeps string without knowing what it stands for.
- The ending reverses the opening: the niece, who began by dismissing the thrift, ends by throwing out the evidence and the string.
- The ending finishes the errand: the house is cleared, the boxes are delivered, and the niece drives home with nothing more to do.
Suppose the story cut the graduation memory (sentences 9 and 10). Jun asks what the hidden-giving line would lose. Which answer is best?
- The thrift line, because the graduation shows Aunt Imogen taking the draft chair as she always had, in the back row.
- Its one witnessed act: the boxes name recipients, but only the graduation shows Imogen giving and shrinking from thanks.
- Nothing, because the labeled shoeboxes in sentences 6 and 7 already show the giving, and the niece can work out the rest from them.
- Only a background memory, since the niece's feeling about the boxes would be the same whether or not the suit were explained.
Bo tests the two lines of the string story, thrift as self-denial and giving that hides itself, on a new situation. Which one shows them meeting in the same way?
- A retired teacher keeps a tidy house on a quiet street, and the neighbors admire how well she keeps up appearances.
- A retired mail carrier wears one coat for twenty years, and after her death the neighbors find receipts for the heating bills she paid for the family downstairs.
- A miser hoards coin after coin and gives away nothing, and after his death the neighbors learn how much he saved by living alone.
- A niece clears an aunt's kitchen and finds drawers of string, jars of buttons and a ball of rubber bands, and laughs about it.
