GED-SECTION-4 Exam Questions & Answers

What Happened When He Came to America? My parents lost friends, lost family ties and patterns of mutual assistance, lost rituals and habits and favorite foods, lost any link to an ongoing social milieu, lost a good part of the sense they had of themselves. We lost a house, several towns, various landscapes. We lost documents and pictures and heirlooms, as well as most of our breakable belongings, smashed in the nine packing cases that we took with us to America. We lost connection to a thing larger than ourselves, and as a family failed to make any significant new connection in exchange, so that we were left aground on a sandbar barely big enough for our feet. I lost friends and relatives and stories and familiar comforts and a sense of continuity between home and outside and any sense that I was normal. I lost half a language through want of use and eventually, in my late teens, even lost French as the language of my internal monologue. And I lost a whole network of routes through life that I had just barely glimpsed. Hastening on toward some idea of a future, I only half-realized these losses, and when I did realize I didnt disapprove, and sometimes I actively colluded. At some point, though, I was bound to notice that there was a gulf inside me, with a blanketed form on the other side that hadnt been uncovered in decades.My project of self-invention had been successful, so much so that I had become a sort of hydroponic vegetable, growing soil-free. But I had been formed in another world; everything in me that was essential was owed to immersion in that place, and that time, that I had so effectively renounced. [ . . . . ] Like it or not, each of us is made, less by blood or genes than by a process that is largely accidental, the impact of things seen and heard and smelled and tasted and endured in those few years before our clay hardens. Offhand remarks, things glimpsed in passing, jokes and commonplaces, shop displays and climate and flickering light and textures of walls are all consumed by us and become part of our fiber, just as much as the more obvious effects of upbringing and socialization and intimacy and learning. Every human being is an archeological site. Luc Sante, from The Factory of Facts (1998) The author came to America when he was

A. an infant.

B. a toddler.

C. in his early teens.

D. in his late teens.

E. a young adult.

What Has Mrs. Mallard Realized?

[Mrs. Mallard has locked herself in a room and is crying.]

She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.

She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of

reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.

There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the

color that filled the air.

Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been.

When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: "free, free, free!" The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed

keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body. She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the

suggestion as trivial.

She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years

to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome. There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers

in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of

illumination.

-

Kate Chopin, from "The Story of an Hour" (1894)

Mrs. Mallard repeats the word "free" several times. What is it that she will be free from?

A.

debt

B.

fear

C.

criticism from others

D.

having to do with what someone else wants

E.

problems with family members who can't mind their own business

What Inspires Thomas?

[Thomas Builds-the-Fire is a Spokane Indian living on the Spokane Indian Reservation.]

So Thomas went home and tried to write their first song. He sat alone in his house with his bass guitar and waited for the song. He waited and waited. Its nearly impossible to write a song with a bass guitar, but Thomas didn't know that. He’d

never written a song before. "Please," Thomas prayed. But the song would not come, so Thomas closed his eyes, tried to find a story with a soundtrack. He turned on the television and watched The Sound of Music on channel four. Julie

Andrews put him to sleep for the sixty-seventh time, and neither story nor song came in his dreams.

After he woke up, he paced around the room, stood on his porch, and listened to those faint voices that echoed all over the reservation. Everybody heard those voices, but nobody liked to talk about them. They were loudest at night, when

Thomas tried to sleep, and he always thought they sounded like horses. For hours,

Thomas waited for the song.

Then, hungry and tired, he opened his refrigerator for something to eat and discovered that he didnt have any food. So he closed the fridge and opened it again, but it was still empty. In a ceremony that he had practiced since his youth, he

opened, closed, and opened the fridge again, expecting an immaculate conception of a jar of pickles. Thomas was hungry on a reservation where there are ninety-seven different ways to say fry bread.

[. . . .]

As his growling stomach provided the rhythm, Thomas sat again with his bass guitar, wrote the first song, and called it "Reservation Blues."

Sherman Alexie, from Reservation Blues (1995)

Why does Thomas keep opening and closing the refrigerator?

A. He keeps hoping food will magically appear.

B. He can't believe that the refrigerator is empty.

C. He is angry and wants the door to break off.

D. He likes the noise the door makes.

E. He is bored.