View a FREE sample

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

Short Answer Questions

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

2. How does Daniel Russell greet the narrator?

3. What book does the narrator see on Gulliver’s bed?

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

5. What does the narrator say makes events important to people?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. What happens when the narrator calls Andrew Martin’s mother?

3. How does the narrator define beauty for humans?

4. How does the narrator characterize his relationship with his hosts, now that he is getting accustomed to Andrew Martin’s life?

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

6. How does the narrator characterize his relationship with human music?

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

8. What happens to the narrator for the first time in his life when Isobel gives him a sandwich?

9. How is the narrator ultimately captured by the police?

10. What is the narrator’s first experience of food and drink like?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Identify the source of the humor Matt Haig employs in The Humans. What strategies does he use to get the reader laughing, and how does he vary his technique so that he defines a range of comic possibilities? What is his comic territory?

Essay Topic 2

Identify the most important plot points in The Humans. What is at stake in each of these moments? What possibilities do these moments present, and how are those possibilities channeled into specific actions or events? How does the plot chart its course among other alternative or possible plots?

Essay Topic 3

Matt Haig seems to delight in describing people as aliens, even in allowing his narrator to all but confess that he is an alien. What is the effect of this language in the novel, and what does this technique show us about regular people and daily life?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 1,007 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample