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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

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

2. What does the narrator say is the color of home?

3. How does the narrator justify killing Daniel Russell?

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

5. What is the narrator’s tone when describing humans?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is the narrator’s rhetorical stance in The Humans?

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

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

4. How does Andrew Martin characterize his discovery in the introduction the narrator reads?

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

6. Who are the narrator’s chief suspects for people who might know about Andrew Martin’s discovery?

7. How does the narrator ultimately get himself out of prison?

8. What does the narrator learn about mathematicians that undermines his core beliefs about human beings?

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

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What part of life on Earth corresponds most closely to life on the narrator’s home planet? Is Vonnadoria portrayed as a utopia or dystopia?

Essay Topic 2

When is The Humans most itself? What is its characteristic passage, or moment? What makes that moment or passage the most representative of the book as a whole? Are there any places where the book seems to depart from its typical self, as if to become a different book?

Essay Topic 3

How would The Humans be different if it were narrated by a female mathematician? How might the humor change? How might the moral vision change?

(see the answer keys)

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