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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What is it that moves the narrator during Daniel Russell’s dying moments?
(a) Daniel Russell’s stoicism.
(b) Russell’s wife’s concern.
(c) Russell’s wife’s panic.
(d) Daniel Russell’s fear.

2. How does Isobel Martin characterize Andrew Martin’s relationship with Daniel Russell?
(a) Distrust and suspicion.
(b) Indifference.
(c) Mutual regard.
(d) Deep hostility.

3. What does the narrator say is the most significant of the human languages he will have to master?
(a) The language of sighs.
(b) The language of frowns.
(c) The language of silent moments.
(d) The language of eyebrows.

4. What are the narrator’s feelings about rain?
(a) It soothes him.
(b) It makes him nostalgic.
(c) He hates it.
(d) It silences him.

5. What does the narrator say is the “emergency exit for humans” (42)?
(a) Laughter.
(b) Departure.
(c) Violence.
(d) Love.

6. What happens to the narrator after Daniel Russell slaps him on the back?
(a) He feels pain in his shoulder.
(b) He briefly blacks out.
(c) His face becomes his own.
(d) He is exhausted for the energy of killing Russell.

7. How does the narrator characterize the effect music has on him?
(a) It gives him the pleasure of counting.
(b) It gives him a strange, satisfying agitation.
(c) It gives him a satisfying blindness.
(d) It gives him nostalgia for home.

8. What does the narrator find distinguished about Grigori Perelman?
(a) His mathematical genius.
(b) He passed up a million dollar prize for solving a mathematical problem.
(c) His humanitarian career.
(d) His mathematical certainty.

9. What does the narrator conclude human beings enjoy about music?
(a) Its contradictions.
(b) Its patterns.
(c) Its clear laws.
(d) Its orderliness.

10. What does the narrator say makes events important to people?
(a) Their spiritual importance.
(b) Their distance from them.
(c) Their proximity to them.
(d) Their mathematical importance.

11. What does the narrator say he has for the first time after killing Daniel Russell?
(a) A personal sentiment.
(b) Remorse.
(c) A nightmare.
(d) A tear in his eye.

12. What do the hosts say the narrator should not interfere with?
(a) The inevitability of death for Isobel and Gulliver.
(b) The unavoidable nature of pain and suffering.
(c) The purity of reason.
(d) The mathematical certainty of his mission.

13. What delusion does the narrator think humans have?
(a) That they control their lives.
(b) That they are alone.
(c) That they are divine.
(d) That they are advanced.

14. Why does the narrator say he does not like wearing clothes?
(a) He prefers glorious nakedness.
(b) They chafe.
(c) They are embarrassing.
(d) They are not geometrical enough.

15. What question does the narrator asks Isobel, which Isobel says has been a constant for her whole marriage to Andrew Martin?
(a) How will you live without me?
(b) Who’s going to stop me?
(c) Why do you think I care?
(d) What’s in it for you?

Short Answer Questions

1. What music does the narrator play, when he feels lonely in the house?

2. What assumption in his audience does the narrator seek to overturn?

3. How does the narrator characterize the pattern Riemann discovered for the first hundred thousand or so prime numbers?

4. Who is the poet who gives the narrator hope for humanity?

5. What is it that impresses the narrator about Grigori Perelman?

(see the answer keys)

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