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 ambulances respond to the drugstore crime?

2. What part of the movie does Steve feel like he has walked into in the prologue?

3. In the credits in Chapter 1, Sandra Petrocelli is credited as what?

4. According to Osvaldo, how old is Bobo?

5. In the screenplay description of the inmates "yelling from cell to cell," what distinguishes their yells?

Short Essay Questions

1. When the newscaster in Steve's "notes" section of the screenplay asks a passerby if he is shocked by the crime, what is the man's response?

2. Why does Johnny, the ringleader of the eventual crime, want to rob a pharmacy instead of a bank?

3. What does Mr. Nesbitt look like in the pictures the prosecution passes around to the jury?

4. What does Steve think his father's crying means?

5. What is Steve doing when the police come to arrest him and take him away from home?

6. When Steve decides to write a movie, what does he say it will be a story of?

7. In the first journal entry, why does Steve say he does not recognize himself?

8. What does Wendell Bolden look and act like?

9. How can Steve's lawyer be described?

10. In his journal notes for Tuesday, July 7, why does Steve say he needs to keep thinking of the movie?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

This novel features a family where there are two parents, yet somehow Steve still managed to get into trouble. Analyze the roles Steve's parents play in his life, including before, during, and after prison. What characterizes his relationship with his parents? What responsibility do they have for him getting in trouble (if any) and what are the ways in which they tried to help him out of trouble?

Essay Topic 2

Steve and King are very different people on trial for the same crime. Write an essay comparing and contrasting these two characters. Be sure to include both examples and details of what they look like, who they are, how they behave, etc., as well as an analysis of the strategies Walter Dean Myers employed to achieve these two different characters.

Essay Topic 3

What does this novel communicate to the reader about personal responsibility and guilt? Write an analysis describing and investigating what Myers thinks about these two issues. Be sure to offer working definitions of each, personal responsibility as well as guilt, and determine, through specific and explicit textual analysis, the ways in which these two issues are similar to each other and/or differ from each other.

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 910 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample