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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Ishmael say made Germans captive under Hitler?
(a) Hitler’s charisma
(b) Hitler’s international support
(c) Hitler’s story about the Aryan people
(d) Hitler’s violence

2. What does Ishmael say is mythical about the story the narrator tells in Chapter 3?
(a) The facts themselves
(b) The arrangement of the facts
(c) The implied redemption
(d) The chronology

3. When does Ishmael say he was truly born?
(a) When he realized that he had a name
(b) When he realized that his name was not his
(c) When he realized that he was a gorilla
(d) When he learned to read

4. How does the narrator characterize the 1960s?
(a) As the great cultural leap forward
(b) As a the time when culture was completely lost
(c) As the time of the children’s revolt
(d) As a period of hopeless despair

5. What is the story the narrator tells in Chapter 3?
(a) The evolution of man
(b) God’s creation of the universe
(c) God’s expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden
(d) The war between good and evil

6. When does Ishmael say that human history began?
(a) 30 thousand years ago
(b) 3 million years ago
(c) 3 thousand years ago
(d) 300 thousand years ago

7. What does the narrator say made the difference between men before and the men that live now?
(a) Language
(b) Agriculture
(c) Writing
(d) Stories

8. How does the narrator characterize the end of the 1960s?
(a) As a fight that was defeated
(b) As a dwindling to irrelevance
(c) As a cooptation by corporations
(d) As a movement that died in a crackdown

9. In Chapter 3, how does Ishmael tell the narrator to think, when he tries to get him to see the myth of his culture?
(a) Imaginatively
(b) Counter intuitively
(c) Mythological
(d) Like a child

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

11. What does the narrator say he does with the newspaper the first time he reads Ishmael’s ad?
(a) Throws it on the floor
(b) Leaves the paper on a bench
(c) Throws it in the trash
(d) Burns it

12. What does Ishmael say is the consequence of thinking that the world was made for us?
(a) That we have to take care of it
(b) That we owe someone an enormous debt of gratitude
(c) That we have to find its proper owners
(d) That we can do what we want with it

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

14. In Chapter 4, how does the narrator say men used to live before they became men?
(a) Like the least noble creatures
(b) He says that they were always men
(c) Like every other creature
(d) Like the chosen creatures

15. Where, in the narrator’s account, does the destruction of the earth get reversed?
(a) In the future, with the children
(b) As soon as the political parties can come to agreement
(c) It never does
(d) As soon as someone discovers how to make money from healing the natural world

Short Answer Questions

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

2. In Chapter 5, how does the narrator characterize the world without man?

3. What does Ishmael tell the narrator to do, when the narrator cannot say what man’s destiny is in Chapter 5?

4. What distinction does Ishmael point out between Leaver and Taker cultures?

5. Where does Ishmael say he was born?

(see the answer keys)

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