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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 is the topic of conversation Smith overhears between two woman at a Subway shop in “Suffering Like Mel Gibson”?
(a) Feminism.
(b) The economy.
(c) Higher Education.
(d) Technology and children.

2. What is the title of the second essay in Zadie’s Smith’s collection, Intimations?
(a) The American Exception.
(b) Screengrabs.
(c) Peonies.
(d) Intimations.

3. In “The American Exception,” Smith says that Americans attacked death as a series of what?
(a) Discrete problems.
(b) Mysteries.
(c) Bad decisions.
(d) Unfortunate events.

4. As Smith stares into the garden of peonies near two other women her age, Smiths comments of what “gaudy symbol,” the flowers represent, “in the middle of a barren concrete metropolis” (3)?
(a) Holiness.
(b) Sadness.
(c) Fertility.
(d) Opportunity.

5. In “The American Exception,” Smith says that nobody in 1945 wanted to go back to 1939 unless it was to do what?
(a) Change the course of history.
(b) Vote for a different leader.
(c) Be younger.
(d) Resurrect the dead.

Short Answer Questions

1. What flowers does Smith wish she was looking at instead of peonies?

2. What purported purpose of art does Smith say is usually overstated in her essay “Something to Do”?

3. What is one of the social issues Smith said that pandemic forced many to have to face in her essay “Something to Do”?

4. In “Something to Do,” Smith says that without love life can seem what?

5. What does Smith say writers often write about at some point in their careers at the start of “Something to Do”?

Short Essay Questions

1. Whose speech does “The American Exception” begin with and what it is in regards to?

2. Describe the article Smith references in “Suffering Like Mel Gibson” about a 17-year-old during lockdown.

3. Why does Smith say it was hard for Americans to fathom a plague?

4. How do “defenders of art typically justify its existence” (21) according to Smith?

5. What is Smith doing at the very start of “Peonies’?

6. In what way does Smith agree with Trump’s sentiment that prior to the pandemic “we had no death” (12)?

7. Describe the moment Smith realized her own privilege in a Subway shop.

8. In “The American Exception” Smith says that Americans attack death as what?

9. What does Smith say that artists learned in regards to privacy and time at the start of “Suffering Like Mel Gibson”?

10. What does Smith say was missing from the American concept of death in “The American Exception”?

(see the answer keys)

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