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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What object did Frank create out of driveshafts, hollow metal rods, and fence wire?
(a) A jungle gym.
(b) A bathtub frame.
(c) An arbor for a grapevine.
(d) A cart to pull behind the family car.

2. What constituted Janisse's and her brothers' very favorite game within the junkyard?
(a) Making believe they were car salespeople.
(b) Pretending to be paramedics saving car accident victims.
(c) Chasing each other along the tops of salvaged cars.
(d) Playing church.

3. Why did Janisse not worry when she did not have time to clean the makeshift chalkboard she and her brothers used to play school?
(a) Because she knew she could come back out after dinner and play by herself.
(b) Because she liked to start off the next lesson by punishing her brothers for some imagined misbehavior by making them clean the chalkboard.
(c) Because she knew her brothers liked to clean the board off with the hose.
(d) Because she knew a thunderstorm would come soon and wash the board clean.

4. What did the children call their club whose purpose was to search the salvaged cars for valuable items?
(a) The Treasure Hunters.
(b) The Salvage Crew.
(c) The Thingfinders Club.
(d) The Oddfellows.

5. In Chapter 10, Timber, Janisse writes that railroads were to pines what railroads were to buffalo. What does she state that railroads were to both pines and buffalo?
(a) A savior.
(b) A means of possible survival.
(c) A means of distracting the masses from the real destruction.
(d) A means to extinction.

Short Answer Questions

1. What did Frank use to beat Janisse and her brothers after they stood by while a neighbor boy killed a snapping turtle?

2. What does Janisse say the source of southern Georgia's majesty and sublimity used to come from before that source was destroyed?

3. Because Janisse was one of her grandfather Charlie's favorite grandchildren, what two skills did he teach her?

4. What is the oldest age to which longleaf pines can live?

5. What traits does Janisse say are the two most elemental features of Frank's personality when she describes him in Chapter 7, Junkyard?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does the Thingfinders Club play into the memoir's message regarding ecology?

2. How does the passage regarding the bank robber Foster Sellers exhibit the theme of identity prevalent throughout the memoir?

3. Due to their parents' religious beliefs and their resulting family rules, what were some of the practices forbidden to Janisse and her siblings?

4. What is the effect on the reader when in the chapter entitled Junkyard, Janisse writes, "I was six the year mental illness stole my father," (77) and how does the author create that effect?

5. When Janisse wrote that her father Frank was a "mechanic in the word's truest sense," what did she mean?

6. How does Janisse Ray use her great-grandfather Pun's career progression to show how white-collar jobs can be even more damaging to the environment than can blue-collar jobs?

7. What descriptions of her homeland does Janisse give in order to support her claim that her "homeland is about as ugly as a place gets" (13)?

8. What are some ways in which Janisse shows her parents that she is a tomboy who likes to be outside in nature more than she enjoys any other activities?

9. After explaining that "Ninety-eight percent of the presettlement longleaf pine barrents in the southeastern coastal plains were lost by 1986" (16), Janisse writes that she did not know about this loss as a child. However, she states, "But it is a loss that as an adult shadows every step I take" (16). What does she mean?

10. How is foreshadowing used within Janisse's relation of how she used to love to play teacher with her brothers or even with her dolls?

(see the answer keys)

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