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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What distinguishes Makina’s travel from one city to another?
(a) She has to take so many varieties of transportation to get there.
(b) She does not leave an urban environment.
(c) She only knows she has arrived because people tell her so.
(d) She arrives surprisingly quickly.

2. What is Makina’s brother told he will be doing, by taking this job?
(a) Saving a family.
(b) Earning his keep.
(c) Assuring his immortality.
(d) Saving his country.

3. What does Makina’s brother say when Makina asks about the land?
(a) He asks if she has gone to see it, as if to say: you know it is worthless.
(b) He tells her a long and complicated lie about how he lost it.
(c) He says that when he got there, the construction was just starting.
(d) He tells her that he never got there, because he was robbed on the way.

4. Which direction does Makina have to go, to get to the first suggested place?
(a) South.
(b) North.
(c) West.
(d) East.

5. What does Makina write?
(a) A lecture.
(b) A jeremiad.
(c) A tirade.
(d) A plea.

6. What does the man at the land her brother had gone to tell Makina was there from the beginning?
(a) A town.
(b) A forest.
(c) A river.
(d) Nothing.

7. What does Makina say she wants to do when the man tells her that the family who lived there moved?
(a) Kill someone.
(b) Go to Europe.
(c) Hang herself from a lamp post.
(d) Go home.

8. What is the first thing Makina thinks when she sees her brother?
(a) That her brother should come home with her.
(b) That this person looks a lot like her brother.
(c) That her brother looks tired.
(d) That her brother looks so grown up in uniform.

9. What does Makina find when she arrives at the land her brother had gone to see?
(a) A vacant lot.
(b) Sheer emptiness.
(c) A city intersection.
(d) A busy marketplace.

10. Who does Makina think when her acquaintance recognizes her?
(a) That she is very hungry.
(b) That she must be filthy.
(c) That she must still inspire fear.
(d) That she must look terrible.

11. What part of language is Makina’s brother teaching the fellow soldier who talks to him and Makina?
(a) The past tense.
(b) The optative mood.
(c) The conditional tense.
(d) The future tense.

12. How does Makina characterize the places she arrives at, and keeps going to?
(a) Plastic crowds.
(b) Empty pits.
(c) Teeming cities.
(d) Bleak tundras.

13. What does the family do when Makina’s brother returns?
(a) Adopt him into the family formally.
(b) Accuse him of identity theft.
(c) Leave town and reinvent themselves.
(d) Make arrangements to send him to school.

14. Why did Makina go into the ATM booth?
(a) To get money.
(b) To change her clothes.
(c) For shelter from the cold.
(d) To hide from some cops.

15. Who offered Makina’s brother a job?
(a) An Anglo woman.
(b) An old woman in a restaurant.
(c) Mr. P.
(d) An excavator.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Makina’s brother say made him confident about taking this job?

2. What does Makina say people are doing when they combine languages?

3. How does Makina characterize new ways of saying things?

4. What does Makina’s brother’s second note say?

5. Where is Makina, in her dream, when she is evicted from the ATM booth?

(see the answer keys)

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