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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 "Get Me Some Medicine," what is the colloquial name used for the kind of beers that are in the bag when David hits Meekew?

2. In "Food for the Common Cold," what is revealed about how Frick's daughter died?

3. In "The Blessing Tobacco," what is David's mother too preoccupied with to notice that David is feeling sick?

4. In "The Blessing Tobacco," how does David's grandmother react when the first puff of the cigarette makes him cough?

5. To what does David compare the sound of the ice cracking in the swamp?

Short Essay Questions

1. In "The Blessing Tobacco," what is the rhetorical function of the passage where David considers whom he should "smoke like" (108)?

2. In "The Blessing Tobacco," how does David end up smoking cigarettes at his grandmother's house?

3. In "Burn," what does Fellis asks David to do when he goes back to town to get marijuana, beer, and chips, and why does Fellis ask David to do this?

4. In "The Blessing Tobacco," where does David get a drink on his way home from his grandmother's, and what is the significance of this?

5. In "Get Me Some Medicine," how do David and Fellis end up binge-watching an old television series?

6. In "Get Me Some Medicine," why does Fellis get so angry at David for saying that Meekew could beat Fellis in a fistfight?

7. In "Burn," how dis Fellis end up stuck in the snow?

8. In "In a Field of Stray Caterpillars," how does Alice end up at Beth's house?

9. In "In a Jar," what is implied to have happened to Paige at the end of the story?

10. In "Food for the Common Cold," what is the difference between the way the adult narrator David and the child David in the story see the mood in the household during the week that Frick is gone?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

David and Fellis's plan to steal from the tribal museum shows how disconnected they have come to feel from their own tribal community and implies that they feel entitled to a larger share of cultural and financial resources than the tribe has offered them. How does this relate to David's yearning for fry bread in "Night of the Living Rez"? How does it relate to David's remark about being cut off from traditional medicine in "Burn"? Where else in these stories do you see evidence that the tribal community is not taking collective responsibility for children like David? Write an essay in which you advance and defend an argument about what these stories say about the breakdown of community responsibility on David's reservation. Support your assertions with evidence drawn from throughout the collection, citing any quoted evidence in MLA format.

Essay Topic 2

Choose two stories in which the depictions of the natural environment create starkly differing atmospheres. Write an essay explicating how language and detail choices create these two differing atmospheres. Then, analyze the function of these differing atmospheres. How do they support the differing action of these two stories? How do they amplify what characters are experiencing? What thematic ideas are these two atmospheres supporting? If they support similar thematic motifs, how does Talty manage to make contrasting atmospheres support similar ideas? If they support differing thematic ideas, what aspects of their contrasting impact on the reader are used to convey these differing themes? Support your assertions with both quoted and paraphrased evidence drawn from both stories, citing quoted evidence in MLA format.

Essay Topic 3

"Half-Life" is not the only story in this collection where water plays a symbolic role. Choose another story where water seems to play such a role. Is water being used to convey the same kinds of ideas, or does the water seem to play a different role in this second story? Write an essay that compares and contrasts the symbolic use of water in these two stories. Support your assertions with evidence drawn from both stories, citing any quoted evidence in MLA format.

(see the answer keys)

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