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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. What college had Peggy attended?

2. Which of the following is among the Seven Joys?

3. In which city did the man live to whom Percival had sold his fragment?

4. What composer’s work features in the last concert in the series Tommy and his wife attend?

5. At which of the following had Percival worked?

Short Essay Questions

1. What, per Nell, was at the root of Peggy’s fear about John?

2. What traits does Tommy possess that are helpful professionally but unhelpful personally?

3. To what does Percival ascribe the decline of appetites with age?

4. What is the usual topic of Peggy’s complaints to Nell?

5. What are the initial partitions of the DiDomenico painting into fragments?

6. What is Bobby Daniels’ current occupation?

7. How does Tommy react to the arrival of Fein at the beginning of “The Bootlegger”?

8. How does the DiDomenico fragment come to be?

9. Why does the narrator agree to go to Carnegie Hall with Tommy?

10. Why does Jeremy recommend against wearing a Mets cap when surveilling others?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

To what other writer’s work in your experience does Towles’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?

Essay Topic 2

The narrator of “The Line” asks the following question (13): “For to serve the ones we love and receive their approval in return, need life be any more complicated than that?” Does the remainder of the short story offer an answer to that question? If so, what is the answer and how is it presented? If not, what effect does raising the question and refusing to answer it have for the reader?

Essay Topic 3

Conversely, given demonstrated efforts toward censorship in a number of countries, what would likely prompt bans of Table for Two? By which groups? Why?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 540 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample