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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. How do the narrator’s hosts characterize human beings?
(a) The simplest of problems.
(b) The most tedious of freedoms.
(c) The least forgivable of criminals.
(d) The shallowest of mysteries.

2. What does a person need to stay true, or in order for their love to be true, according to the narrator?
(a) The idea of love.
(b) The lover’s own heart.
(c) The beloved’s whims.
(d) Life’s delusions.

3. What starts to astonish the narrator after he becomes human?
(a) The inevitability of his suffering and death.
(b) The impossibility of escape from Earth.
(c) The ubiquity of threats to human life.
(d) The improbability of human life.

4. How does the narrator try to blunt the replacement’s power?
(a) By turning the TV on.
(b) By cutting his left hand off.
(c) By taking him outside.
(d) By sitting him on the purple couch.

5. What will the consequence be, if the narrator surrenders his gifts?
(a) He will start to decompose in Earth’s atmosphere.
(b) He will never be able to return home.
(c) He will have to start again as a human child.
(d) He will never become fully human.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does the narrator say he always needed, instead of emotions?

2. How does the narrator characterize the pleasure he feels while making love with Maggie?

3. Who does Maggie say the narrator looks like?

4. How does the narrator characterize his feelings before making love with Isobel?

5. How does Ari characterize the duration of human history?

Short Essay Questions

1. What happens to prevent the narrator killing Gulliver?

2. What is the secret Ari has been keeping for Andrew Martin?

3. How does the narrator characterize human sex?

4. What gesture does Isobel Martin make at Daniel Russell’s funeral, and how does it affect the narrator?

5. What does Gulliver tell the narrator he wants, now that all the facts have come out?

6. Why does the narrator put his hand on the AGA where the replacement’s hand had been burned?

7. What effect does the host's “warning” have on the narrator (159)?

8. What brings the narrator back to Isobel and Gulliver?

9. What does the narrator learn from reading Isobel’s novel Wider than the Sky?

10. How does the narrator defuse the humor and anxiety in his classroom, when he returns to teaching for the first time after being arrested for being naked?

(see the answer keys)

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