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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 does the speaker say low points tend to do in his communication with family?
(a) Make things better.
(b) Make things worse.
(c) Not change anything.
(d) Confuse the situation.

2. What does the speaker call the severed web symbol?
(a) A Hardly Acceptable Replacement.
(b) A Barely Tolerable Subsitute.
(c) A Scarcely Salvageable Sentence.
(d) An Inadequately Worded Idiom.

3. What does the severed web mean, approximately?
(a) I see you.
(b) I love you.
(c) I need you.
(d) I loathe you.

4. What did the narrator's father realize after his first fight with his wife?
(a) He loved a good fight.
(b) It's never, ever worth it.
(c) She will always win.
(d) Only fight if you can win.

5. What do the should have brackets denote?
(a) Words you know you were expected to say but could not.
(b) When you realize what you should have said after the fact.
(c) Words someone thinks you should have said but did not.
(d) Words that were not spoken but should have been.

Short Answer Questions

1. How may fights have the speaker's parent had in all of their marriage?

2. What were the speaker and his father recently doing, despite his father's doctor telling him not to?

3. Why does the speaker think he has become a yes man?

4. In the final conversation in the story, what is Jonathan's response to his father's {I love you}?

5. What symbol represents the "backup"?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does the speaker realize about himself after his father discusses how his brother was already a yes man?

2. What are the final words that remain unspoken, as shown by the use of the should-have brackets, between father and son in the final conversation of the story?

3. Describe the snowflake and when it might be used.

4. What does the severed web symbolize? What does the speaker call this?

5. Describe the conversation the speaker relays between mother and father to show use of the corroboration mark.

6. Describe the phone call between the speaker and his brother after he ended up in intensive care.

7. What is one example the speaker gives of the use of a reversible colon?

8. What does the speaker's father confess to him about his marriage after his 19th heart attack?

9. Why did the speaker's father's doctor advise against pulling weeds? What other things did he advice against?

10. What are the should-have brackets?

(see the answer keys)

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