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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. Who recognizes the narrator first, when he returns to Cambridge?
(a) Newton.
(b) Isobel.
(c) Gulliver.
(d) Winston Churchill.

2. What does the narrator tell Ari when Ari comes to visit him after he is attacked?
(a) That he did solve the Riemann Hypothesis.
(b) That football is boring.
(c) That he has broken off with Maggie.
(d) That he is from another planet.

3. What does the narrator say he found terrifying about making love with Maggie?
(a) The violence.
(b) The alienation.
(c) The dysfunction.
(d) The exoticism.

4. Why does Ari say that the idea of aliens can only be enjoyed as fiction?
(a) Because he does not think it is possible for there to be life elsewhere.
(b) Because the crisis of science being wrong would destroy human knowledge.
(c) Because the reality would push human beings out of the center of their own worldview.
(d) Because there would be panic if people thought it was possible.

5. What is Ari’s response to the thing the narrator tells him?
(a) He says that he will have other experiences.
(b) He says that he believes him.
(c) He says that he is fucked, then.
(d) He says that he wants to go there with him.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does the narrator say opened in him as he left Andrew Martin’s house?

2. Where does the narrator say that love stems from?

3. What is represented by the formula on the student’s t-shirt?

4. What happens when the narrator reaches out to touch Isobel’s neck and kill her?

5. Where does the epigram come from at the end of the book?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. How does the narrator characterize human sex?

3. What do the narrator’s hosts say when he tells them that he needs more time?

4. How does the narrator finally break the hosts’ hold on him?

5. What is the general tendency in the advice the narrator writes out for his son (and for the reader)?

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

7. What happens when the narrator sets Gulliver up to fight Theo “The Fucking Business” Clarke (181)?

8. What explanation does the narrator offer the hosts, for his inability to perform the task he was sent to perform?

9. How does Maggie characterize what it means to be human?

10. What is Ari’s reaction when the narrator tells him the truth of his origins?

(see the answer keys)

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