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

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

3. According to the poem's second sentence, how did "we" find "salvation"?
(a) By finding the courage to fight England.
(b) By fully surrendering ourselves to the land.
(c) By realizing our own weakness.
(d) By dedicating ourselves to the Christian God.

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

5. 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) Chiasmus and antithesis.
(b) Epistrophe and chiasmus.
(c) Oxymoron and epistrophe.
(d) Antithesis and oxymoron.

Short Answer Questions

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

2. Who is the author of "The Gift Outright"?

3. What is the implied antecedent of "our" and "we" in lines 1 and 2?

4. What technique is used in the lines "She was our land more than a hundred years/ Before we were her people" (lines 2-3)?

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

Short Essay Questions

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

2. Explain the poem's title.

3. 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)?

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

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

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

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

(see the answer keys)

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