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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 3 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. In line 15, what is the speaker calling "unstoried, artless, unenhanced"?
(a) The American people.
(b) The wars fought to secure land.
(c) The American land.
(d) The history of the United States.

2. What technique is used in line 10, "We were withholding from our land of living"?
(a) Personification.
(b) Metonymy.
(c) Alliteration.
(d) Paradox.

3. What is alluded to in the phrase "the land vaguely realizing westward" (line 14)?
(a) The Westward expansion of the United States.
(b) The American Civil War.
(c) The Louisiana Purchase.
(d) The forced resettlement of Native peoples.

4. The repetition of the word "deed" in line 13 is an example of which technique?
(a) Anadiplosis.
(b) Epistrophe.
(c) Antanaclasis.
(d) Epizeuxis.

5. What does line 12 make clear is the "Gift" in the title "The Gift Outright"?
(a) Surrender and salvation.
(b) The land Americans live on.
(c) Americans themselves.
(d) Freedom from England.

6. What techniques are used in the lines "Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,/ Possessed by what we now no more possessed" (lines 6-7)?
(a) Oxymoron and epistrophe.
(b) Epistrophe and chiasmus.
(c) Chiasmus and antithesis.
(d) Antithesis and oxymoron.

7. What technique is used in the line "Such as she was, such as she would become" (line 16)?
(a) Anaphora.
(b) Chiasmus.
(c) Symbolism.
(d) Anadiplosis.

8. What is the implied antecedent of "our" and "we" in lines 1 and 2?
(a) Revolutionaries.
(b) Farmers.
(c) Americans.
(d) Colonists.

9. What technique is used in the phrase "unstoried, artless, unenhanced" (line 15)?
(a) Asyndeton.
(b) Assonance.
(c) Apostrophe.
(d) Euphemism.

10. What technique is used in the lines "She was our land more than a hundred years/ Before we were her people" (lines 2-3)?
(a) Symbolism.
(b) Alliteration.
(c) Metonymy.
(d) Personification.

11. To what event does the phrase "more than a hundred years/ Before we were her people" obliquely refer?
(a) The American Revolution.
(b) Columbus's voyage.
(c) The Pilgrims' first landing.
(d) The American Civil War.

12. Which technique is used in the first line, "The land was ours before we were the land’s"?
(a) Anaphora.
(b) Chiasmus.
(c) Euphemism.
(d) Allegory.

13. Who is the author of "The Gift Outright"?
(a) Robert Lowell.
(b) Robert Frost.
(c) Donald Hall.
(d) Galway Kinnell.

14. What techniques are used in the lines "She was ours/ In Massachusetts, in Virginia" (lines 3-4)?
(a) Antithesis and synecdoche.
(b) Synecdoche and asyndeton.
(c) Apostrophe and antithesis.
(d) Asyndeton and apostrophe.

15. Which term most accurately describes the meter of "The Gift Outright"?
(a) Blank verse.
(b) Free verse.
(c) Ballad meter.
(d) Heroic verse.

Short Answer Questions

1. Which is the primary definition of "still" being used in the expression "still colonials" in line 5?

2. What is the antecedent of "it" in the phrase "it was ourselves" (line 9)?

3. According to the poem's second sentence, how did "we" find "salvation"?

(see the answer keys)

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