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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does the narrator say the ad in Chapter 1 was looking for?
(a) Someone who wanted to teach
(b) Someone who wanted to make an investment
(c) Someone who wanted to work with gorillas
(d) Someone who wanted to change the world

2. What does Ishmael say is the pinnacle of the story the narrator tells in Chapter 3?
(a) Literature
(b) Man himself
(c) A just society
(d) God’s laws

3. What does the narrator say, in Chapter 5, man did once he made the development that distinguished him from his ancestors?
(a) Set about discovering himself
(b) Set about mastering the world
(c) Set about telling stories about the exile from the Garden
(d) Set about learning from the animals

4. Whose voice does Ishmael say the narrator is lulled by?
(a) God the Father
(b) Mother Culture
(c) Father Time
(d) Mother Nature

5. What does Ishmael say he wants, in Chapter 4, when the narrator finally realizes the truth of what Ishmael has been talking about?
(a) Terror
(b) Gratitude
(c) Humility
(d) Astonishment

6. Why does the narrator have a hard time identifying the creation myth of his culture?
(a) Because creation myths are not myths to people who tell them
(b) Because he has been blinded by a limiting ideology
(c) Because he never took the religious classes where he would have learned it
(d) Because the creation myth is a mystical secret

7. How does Ishmael define a story?
(a) A manifestation of the self seeking its center through experience
(b) A fiction that makes factual life possible
(c) A scenario interrelating man, the world and the gods
(d) A set of events aligned by a human experience of them

8. How does Ishmael respond when the narrator says that he does not believe that he is part of a story?
(a) He says that it is easier to believe in more incredible things
(b) He says that belief is unimportant
(c) He says that belief is the beginning of resistance
(d) He says that belief is less important than action

9. What pressure does the narrator say he feels to act out his culture’s stories?
(a) He says that if he doesn’t work, he won’t eat
(b) He says that his neighbors exclude him if he expressed doubt about the value of the culture
(c) He says that his parents have threatened to disown him if he does not follow in their footsteps
(d) He says that he has to go to admit his belief in court

10. Why does the narrator say he reacts so violently to the ad in Chapter 1?
(a) Because he had once taught lessons in saving the world himself
(b) Because he had once wanted to save the world
(c) Because he had never had any response when he ran similar ads himself
(d) Because he had always hoped to see an ad like this, but feels he had missed his chance

11. From whose perspective does Ishmael tell a rival creation story in Chapter 4?
(a) A jellyfish
(b) An indigenous person in Asia
(c) Someone from another planet
(d) A gorilla

12. What does Ishmael elicit from the narrator in Chapter 4 regarding his creation myth?
(a) That his creation myth excludes the perspective of women
(b) That his creation myth is centered on mankind
(c) That his creation myth is damaging the earth
(d) That his creation myth is founded on falsehoods

13. What event does Ishmael say correlates to the birth of the Takers’ story?
(a) The birth of agriculture
(b) The beginning of writing
(c) The development of trade routes
(d) The discovery of metallurgy

14. What has the narrator’s coldness become, now that he mentions it to Ishmael a second time, at the end of Chapter 5?
(a) A character
(b) A motif
(c) A symbol
(d) A trope

15. How does Ishmael say the narrator learned the story of ‘how things came to be this way’?
(a) All at once in church
(b) In his earliest experience with his family
(c) Systematically, in school
(d) A little at a time

Short Answer Questions

1. What does the narrator say his relationship with Nazi Germany is?

2. In Chapter 5, what perspective does Ishmael say the narrator should look at the world from?

3. What does the narrator say grew where his idealism had died?

4. In the narrator’s account of his culture, in Chapter 5, what was the problem early man had to solve?

5. Where does Ishmael say people were looking, when they came to the conclusion that man had undermined the universe’s plan, that he would rule nature?

(see the answer keys)

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