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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Section 1: "There Will Come Soft Rains".

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Why does the dog want to get into the kitchen so badly?
(a) Its food dish is in the kitchen.
(b) The rest of the house is filling with smoke.
(c) The house has begun making pancakes.
(d) It thinks the family is in the kitchen.

2. What is the house compared to as it burns to the ground?
(a) A cigar.
(b) A skeleton.
(c) A bonfire.
(d) A bomb.

3. What is the probable purpose of emphasizing the roundness of the smoke plume and the great quantity of smoke?
(a) It points out how little chance the house really had.
(b) It reminds the reader of a nuclear explosion.
(c) There is an implied comparison to a woman's skirts.
(d) It reinforces the "technology versus nature" motif.

4. When the fire travels outside and up the sides of the house, it is described as what?
(a) Mischievous.
(b) Treacherous.
(c) Clever.
(d) Overwhelming.

5. What is the image of the west wall meant to allude to?
(a) A recent riot in Los Angeles.
(b) An asteroid strike.
(c) Similar silhouettes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
(d) The Biblical flood.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is strange about how the nursery reacts to the fire?

2. What happens to the dog when it cannot get into the kitchen?

3. Who is Baal?

4. What effect is the constant repetition and rhyming of the voice-clock probably meant to have?

5. Which is the best descriptor of the mood of the scene in the study, where the poem is read and music plays as a cigar slowly burns down to ash?

(see the answer key)

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