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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. When Janisse tells her father repeatedly that she does not like her piano lessons, what does she say she would rather be doing?
(a) She would rather be peeling potatoes.
(b) She would rather be helping her mother sew.
(c) She would rather be outside.
(d) She would rather be learning how to fix cars.

2. How long did it take the family to travel to the nearest Apostolic Church, which was in the town of Brunswick?
(a) Thirty minutes.
(b) Ninety minutes.
(c) Two hours.
(d) One hour.

3. What is one place that Janisse's parents do NOT list as a place where one of their children was found?
(a) Under a grapevine.
(b) On a bed of moss in the treehouse.
(c) Inside a big cabbage in the garden.
(d) Beside a huckleberry bush.

4. How did Janisse and her siblings get access to books which they knew would garner their father's disapproval?
(a) They bought them from garage sales and sneaked them home in their backpacks.
(b) They borrowed them from friends and read them only in the junkyard when their father was not around.
(c) They sneaked them home from the library within their clothes and sandwiched them between acceptable volumes.
(d) They waited for the Bookmobile to make a stop in town and spent hours inside the van reading forbidden titles.

5. What job did Janisse's great-grandfather Pun have that she sees as having wreaked havoc on the longleaf pine forests?
(a) Lumberjack.
(b) Cattle herder.
(c) Farmer.
(d) Surveyor.

Short Answer Questions

1. What nickname did Frank call his wife, Lee Ada?

2. Why did the town of Brunswick have a distinctive smell?

3. How many acres did Janisse's family's land take up, including the family home and her father Frank's junkyard?

4. In what way was the Ray family different than everyone else in the Apostolic Church's congregation?

5. Janisse uses a quote from which novel to begin Chapter 3, Shame?

Short Essay Questions

1. What elements did Frank consider crucial to the business of buying?

2. What is the author's purpose in relating the fact that her parents told their children false stories about their births?

3. Why did Janisse look forward so much to the days when Frank shopped at Winn-Dixie?

4. On page 79, Janisse includes the text of a letter her father Frank wrote to her. In the letter, Frank wrote that he was thankful for his mental illness and that it had taught him seven lessons. What were three of those lessons he said mental illness had taught him?

5. 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?

6. Whose idea was it to spread old shoes around underneath the grapevine and what was the intended purpose of that act?

7. 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?

8. Why do people call certain parts of the wood of the longleaf pine "fat-lightered"?

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

10. Why were the conditions so favorable for Frank's junkyard business to make money?

(see the answer keys)

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