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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 7 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

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

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

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

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

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

Short Answer Questions

1. What technique is used in the line "Such as she was, such as she would become" (line 16)?

2. 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)?

3. Which technique is used in the first line, "The land was ours before we were the land’s"?

4. To what event does the phrase "more than a hundred years/ Before we were her people" obliquely refer?

5. In line 15, what is the speaker calling "unstoried, artless, unenhanced"?

Short Essay Questions

1. Describe the form of "The Gift Outright."

2. To whom is it implied the pronouns "our" and "we" refer in this poem?

3. Explain the poem's title.

4. What does the speaker mean by "the land vaguely realizing westward" (line 14)?

5. What is implied by the diction the speaker uses to describe the lands yet to be conquered by American settlers: "unstoried, artless, unenhanced" (line 15)?

6. Explain the synecdoche in line 4, "In Massachusetts, in Virginia."

7. What does the speaker claim makes the colonists "weak," and what is the solution to this weakness (line 8)?

(see the answer keys)

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