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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. In the conversation Smith overhears at a Subway shop, Smith learns that the two women conversing are more appalled by what factor, than that the child is too young for technology?

2. In “The American Exception,” Smith says that Americans attacked death as a series of what?

3. Which actor is in the director’s chair talking to Jesus in the meme someone sent Smith at the start of the pandemic?

4. What does Smith say has “rarely been random” in America in her essay “The American Exception”?

5. What does Smith say she believed to be the “cage of her circumstance” (3) when she was younger?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Smith say about love in “Something to Do”?

2. What does Smith say the country had begun to learn or discuss in regards to privilege prior to the virus?

3. What does Smith say about what disaster demands at the start of “The American Exception”?

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

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

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

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

8. What does Smith compare the way in which she packs her free time to at the start of “Peonies’?

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

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Write an essay analyzing the theme of crime and punishment in “A Provocation in the Park.” What are Smtih’s thoughts on the subject and how are her thoughts bolstered or challenged by events in the essay?

Essay Topic 2

Write an essay analyzing Cy’s character in “A Hovering Young Man.” What does he represent and how does the pandemic affect Cy? What is Smith’s tone in regards to the effect the pandemic has on people like Cy?

Essay Topic 3

Write an essay exploring the pandemic’s significance on each story in Intimations. Include how the pandemic affects the overall mood of the collection.

(see the answer keys)

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