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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Tom thinks that progress leads...
(a) To forgetting.
(b) Back to where we started.
(c) To a brighter future.
(d) Nowhere.

2. What does Mary stare at all day at the mental hospital?
(a) A travel picture book of the Fens.
(b) A picture of Dick Crick.
(c) The playground children across the road.
(d) The ceiling of her room.

3. What does the headmaster calls the students of the Holocaust Club?
(a) Fear-mongering morons.
(b) Crick-loving losers.
(c) Exemplary visionaries.
(d) Prophets of doom.

4. What is NOT a negative personality trait associated with phlegm, although it plays a pivotal role in some of the novel's most important turning points?
(a) Anger.
(b) Fatalism.
(c) Dullness.
(d) Stupor.

5. In chapter 32, what is the event that Dick cannot understand?
(a) Finding the bottle he used to kill Freddie.
(b) His mother's death.
(c) Freddie Parr's death.
(d) Mary's attempt to teach him about love.

6. What is the way out everybody in Price's nightmare uses except for Price?
(a) Covering their ears.
(b) The classroom window.
(c) Suicide pills.
(d) Turning themselves into more black dogs.

7. What temperament does phlegm tend towards, as reflected in the mood of the landscape the novel is set in and in the mood of many of its major characters?
(a) Melancholic.
(b) Sanguine.
(c) Inquisitive.
(d) Choleric.

8. What does Dick hide in the mouth of a stuffed pike?
(a) The key to his mother's chest in the attic.
(b) The shards of the murder weapon.
(c) A note Mary gives him.
(d) A picture of his mother and Tom as an infant.

9. Tom dislikes the pike because...
(a) The pike reminds him of Dick.
(b) Pikes are killers and scares him.
(c) The pike smells awful.
(d) Pikes were swarming around Freddie Parr's body.

10. In Tom's mind, the headmaster thinks of the school as what, figuratively speaking?
(a) A kennel for wild dogs.
(b) A swamp full of lost sheep.
(c) A duck pond with a fence.
(d) An atomic bomb shelter.

11. While Martha locks herself in with Mary, she asks Tom to do what outside?
(a) Chop firewood.
(b) Pluck a duck.
(c) Stand guard.
(d) Pray to the Virgin Mary.

12. Why does Tom Crick apologize to Price outside the pub?
(a) Tom promised Price a lift but now is too drunk to drive.
(b) Tom doesn't really know either.
(c) Tom shouts at the barman and has them both kicked out of the pub.
(d) Tom thinks he wasted the students' time in his history class.

13. What is the title Ernest Atkinson gives Dick in the letter?
(a) Most Beloved Grandson.
(b) An expletive.
(c) Saviour of the World.
(d) Earl of Gildsey.

14. What's the "old, old feeling" that Tom Crick tells Price everybody has always felt?
(a) That everything might amount to nothing.
(b) That nobody really understand anyone.
(c) That life must have meaning.
(d) That maybe there is no God.

15. At the end of chapter 44, Tom Crick decides that what people really want to know isn't truth. What they really want is...
(a) To know that they're right.
(b) An excuse to hate.
(c) To laugh at someone.
(d) Drama.

Short Answer Questions

1. How did Mary's father Harold Metcalf treat Tom's father Harry?

2. What is NOT one of the synonyms for phlegm used in chapter 52?

3. What does the letter reveal to Tom and Dick about Dick?

4. What does Mary fail to explain to Dick properly, with terrible consequences?

5. What sparks Tom Crick's interest in the mating habits of eels?

(see the answer keys)

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