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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 Tamina ask Bibi to get at Tamina's stepmother's house?
(a) Some of Tamina's clothes.
(b) Pictures of Tamina's son.
(c) Pictures of Tamina's daughter.
(d) A parcel.

2. What finally happens to Tamina?
(a) She drowns.
(b) She is hung by the children who keep losing to her team.
(c) She dies in her sleep naturally.
(d) She becomes the oldest of the elderly woman there.

3. What does litost mean?
(a) The least weight of all.
(b) A toast to life.
(c) A state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery.
(d) A toast to misery.

4. Why is Tamina thought to be a good listener?
(a) She does not interrupt others with stories about herself.
(b) She nods constantly.
(c) She looks people straight in the eye.
(d) She always seems to understand what someone is saying.

5. How do the children on Tamina's team reward her?
(a) By raping her.
(b) They do not reward her.
(c) By letting her have her own room.
(d) By rowing her back to the mainland.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is Kristyna to the student?

2. How does the student feel as he returns home?

3. What do Tamina and her husband leave at her Stepmother's house?

4. Where is the boat with the boy who rows?

5. What is Tamina not doing?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Tamina do shortly after her husband dies and what might this foreshadow?

2. Why do you think Kundera blurs historical moments?

3. What is the meaning of the word litost?

4. Who does Kristyna meet and what attracts her to this person?

5. Explain who Tamina is and the significance of how Kundera describes her.

6. What does Tamina ask Bibi to get for her in Prague and why does Tamina make the request?

7. How are the Czechs and litost related in Kundera's opinion?

8. Who is Kristyna?

9. What happens to permanently silence Tamina?

10. What character's life is again addressed in part 6 and how is her life dismissed in a sense?

(see the answer keys)

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