View a FREE sample

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

Short Answer Questions

1. How many died on Flight 655?

2. What is reported as the literal translation of the Persian word for an eyebrow?

3. How does the novel render the term “badbadak”?

4. To which of the following does Cyrus compare himself?

5. Per the novel, how does the Big Book refer to resentment?

Short Essay Questions

1. Why, per Cyrus, is it particularly American to discount dreams?

2. How is Ferdowsi commissioned to write the Shahnameh?

3. What does the front desk clerk at Cyrus’s hotel ask him when he checks out?

4. Per Orkideh, what marks out grace?

5. What does the docent who sees Cyrus collapse in the museum discuss with Cyrus?

6. How does Cyrus explain his collapse in the museum to the docents?

7. Why had Arash listened to Allegri’s Miserere?

8. Why does Sang Linh posit Orkideh did not tell Cyrus she was his mother?

9. How does Ali note his wife had looked at him?

10. To what does Cyrus ascribe his inability to focus on the now?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Consider the work Cyrus does with medical students. How well does it accord with the rest of his life, as presented in the novel? What in the text indicates as much, and how does it do so?

Essay Topic 2

Section divisions, their titles, and chapter numbering / division schema are all components of paratext. That is, they are not part of the text but are associated with it closely and affect its meaning. What significance, if any, accrues to the chapter-numbering scheme at work in Martyr!? If there is significance, how does that significance manifest? If there is not, what in the novel supports the paratextual divisions that are in place?

Essay Topic 3

To what other writer’s work in your experience does Akbar’s seem most similar? What makes the writers similar? What differentiates them? Overall, which do you regard as doing better at the craft of writing, and why?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 572 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample