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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 language is spoken in Texas in the novel?

2. How long is Rowan disallowed public transit due to his outbursts when talking with his mother?

3. The comment that “Problem-solving was not the scythedom’s strength” (97) offers an example of which of the following?

4. At what age does Scythe Curie propose to reset her physical self?

5. What color does Greyson dye his hair as part of taking on the Slayd persona?

Short Essay Questions

1. Scythe Brahms observes that “five highly developed senses could often have the semblance of a sixth” (6). To what sixth sense does Brahms refer? What purpose might its denial serve for the genre?

2. What possibilities for maintaining Earth’s human population count does the Thunderhead foresee, and why are they problems?

3. How does Purity verify Slayd’s identity, and why does she do so?

4. The novel notes Rowan’s work “while others prepared for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday” (53), as well as marking other holidays throughout the year (Christmas is mentioned, among others). What does the denotation of what holidays are celebrated suggest about the culture of the narrative milieu?

5. Rowan notes that “imagination had atrophied.…become vestigial and pointless, like the appendix—which had been removed from the human genome more than a hundred years ago” (15). What does the simile foreshadow will happen within the narrative milieu? How does it do so?

6. In his expulsion hearing, Greyson works “to seamlessly begin to paint a convincing fiction” (93-94). What is the primary rhetorical appeal he makes in his presentation, and how is it enacted?

7. What is the irony in Greyson’s unsavory cousin having “iron chains surgically implanted in his wrists” (102)?

8. Xenocrates engages in a “trialogue” in a cathedral confessional with a representative of the Thunderhead and an Interlocutor, the latter of which serves as a go-between (20-23). There is a symbolic component to the meeting; what is it, and how does it manifest?

9. Anastasia notes that the site of the Mortality Memorial is “a city underserved by the scythedom” because it “was too macabre for them” and “in very poor taste” (45). Why would scythes, whose work is in killing people, find celebrations of death macabre and in poor taste, per the novel?

10. Why does Anastasia feel the need to call upon Greyson after his denigration to unsavory status, per her report?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Consider the statement that “if we were judged by the things we most regret, no human being would be worthy to sweep the floor” (340). Does the text as a whole support that assertion or not? What in the text affirms / denies the assertion, and how does it do so?

Essay Topic 2

The Thunderhead notes, “To deny humanity the lesson of consequences would be a mistake” (489). Is the Thunderhead’s assessment accurate? What in the text and in experience suggests whether it is or not? How does it do so?

Essay Topic 3

Greyson, in his persona as Slayd, poses the following questions (195): “Was it wrong for the Thunderhead to rehabilitate people from the inside out? Should evil people be allowed the freedom to be evil, without safety nets?” What answers does the novel give to those questions? What in the text indicates the answer? How does it do so?

(see the answer keys)

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