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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

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

2. What does the narrator say gives him the closest approximation of space?
(a) Debussy’s Clair de Lune.
(b) Tchaikovsky’s concertos.
(c) Palestrina’s psalms.
(d) Mozart’s Requiem.

3. What does the narrator say is the quintessential experience that defines being on Earth?
(a) Love.
(b) Fear.
(c) Anxiety.
(d) Disbelief.

4. What deos the narrator say is the chief purpose of magazines?
(a) To generate envy in poorer humans.
(b) To provide political updates.
(c) To supplement ethnographic research about how other people live.
(d) To create a sense of inferiority in the reader.

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

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Isobel Martin say Andrew Martin is motivated by?

2. What is the narrator’s mission on Earth?

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

4. How does Daniel Russell greet the narrator?

5. What is it that makes the narrator sick the day after killing Daniel Russell?

Short Essay Questions

1. What makes the narrator’s narrative so funny?

2. How does the narrator characterize life in the world he comes from?

3. What does the narrator tell Newton?

4. What does the narrator tell Daniel Russell before he kills him?

5. What happens in the narrator’s interrogation by police?

6. Who does the narrator meet in the cafeteria in the jail?

7. How does Haig characterize the marriage between Andrew and Isobel Martin?

8. What is the importance of prime numbers for the narrator?

9. What is happening in the first scene the narrator describes in his narrative?

10. Who are the main characters the narrator introduces at the beginning of the novel?

(see the answer keys)

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