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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 injury does the narrator suffer after falling from the roof with Gulliver?

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

3. Where do the narrator and Maggie go from his office?

4. What does Kierkegaard say a man must pass through, to arrive at the perfection of everything human?

5. What does Ari compare prime numbers to?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does the narrator find out about the presence of the replacement?

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

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

4. How does the narrator get Gulliver’s buy-in for his authority and power?

5. What effect does the evening out at Hamlet have on Isobel?

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

7. What happens when the narrator tells Isobel about having sex with Maggie?

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

9. How can the narrator tell that someone was in his house?

10. How does the narrator dispose of the replacement’s body?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What is missing from this book? What should have been covered or presented that was not? What is the effect of this absence? Describe an element that ought to have been covered, and explain why it would have made the book stronger.

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)

This section contains 1,010 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample