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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What technique is used in the sentence "On my fingers your slick scent mixed with the coconut musk of the suntan lotion we’d repeatedly smeared over each other's bodies" (234) ?
(a) Personification.
(b) Metonymy.
(c) Allusion.
(d) Imagery.

2. In the story's opening, what details are related to the characters' youth?
(a) The condition of the Rambler and the rosary.
(b) Light and darkness.
(c) Grass, leaves, and snow.
(d) Gin's bed and their parents' cars.

3. What happens after the night on the beach, when the narrator senses Gin growing distant while they are kissing?
(a) He tells her she is crazy.
(b) He pretends to feel the same way she does.
(c) He tries to tell her jokes to cheer her up.
(d) He kisses her harder.

4. Why does the narrator say that Lake Michigan "became" the Pacific Ocean (235)?
(a) He is experiencing a feeling of being lost in space and time.
(b) The sound of the waves is exaggerated by his excitement.
(c) He is referencing the film From Here to Eternity.
(d) Gin has always imagined losing her virginity on a California beach.

5. Which of the following techniques is used in the sentence "How adept we were at fumbling, how perfectly mistimed our timing, how utterly we confused energy with ecstasy" (233)?
(a) Asyndeton.
(b) Synecdoche.
(c) Antithesis.
(d) Polysyndeton.

Short Answer Questions

1. In the story's opening, what details are related to the story's epigraph?

2. How has the narrator and Gin's relationship changed by the end of the summer?

3. What is the narrator's tone when he recalls, "I was trying to calm your terror with reassuring phrases such as 'Holy shit! I don’t fucking believe this!'” (236)?

4. While he is on the beach, what does the narrator imagine the couples in the high-rises around them are wearing?

5. What does Gin believe is true about the dead woman on the beach?

Short Essay Questions

1. What scenario does Gin keep thinking about after the night on Oak Street Beach?

2. On the night in the lover's lane toward the end of the story, what does the narrator realize about his relationship with Gin?

3. In what sense does the narrator mean that, after the night on Oak Street Beach, the dead woman was always "with" him and Gin?

4. Where are some of the places listed in the poem's opening paragraph, and how do they convey the couple's youth?

5. What is the rhetorical purpose of the narrator's comments about the "bloodless way in which a young man discards his own virginity" (235)?

6. What does the narrator say might have happened if the dead woman had washed up beside them while he and Gin were trying to have sex on the beach, and why is Gin so offended?

7. What is the inclusion of details about the House of Dong intended to convey?

8. What is the rhetorical purpose of including the narrator's loss of the condom right before the drowned woman's body is discovered?

9. What is foreshadowed by the page 233 description of their "lover's lane"?

10. What do the first paragraph's details about the father's car convey about the family's social class?

(see the answer keys)

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