Text-dependent questions
directions: for the following questions, choose the best answer or respond in complete sentences.
1.
part a: which of the following best states a theme of the story?
sometimes you don't fully appreciate something until it is too late.
always embrace change, or you will live with bitterness.
hold strong to your traditions and stand up for them.
d. war only brings pain and loss.
part b: which paragraph from the text best supports the answer to part a?
paragraph 1
paragraph 14
paragraph 20
paragraph 31
b.)
3
.
in paragraphs 9-12, how does the description of the setting contribute to the mood of the
story? what does this tell you about the town's attitude toward the announcement?
4.
explain the figurative language in the following quotation from paragraph 23. what is the
purpose of this comparison? "for that day monsieur hamel had prepared some entirely
new examples, on which was written in a fine, round hand: 'france, alsace, france, alsace.'
they were like little flags, waving all about the class, hanging from the rods of our desks."

[1] nothing that comes from the desert expresses its extremes better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas. tormented, thin forests of it stalk drearily in the high mesas, particularly in that triangular slip that fans out eastward from the meeting of the sierras and coastwise hills. the yucca bristles with bayonet-pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with age like an old [5] man's tangled gray beard, tipped with panicles of foul, greenish blooms. after its death, which is slow, the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly power to rot, makes even the moonlight fearful. but it isn't always this way. before the yucca has come to flower, while yet its bloom is a luxurious, creamy, cone-shaped bud of the size of a small cabbage, full of sugary sap. the indians twist it deftly out of its fence of daggers and roast the prize for their [10] own delectation why does the author use the words "bayonet-pointed" (line 4) and "fence of daggers" (line 9) to describe the leaves of the yucca tree? . to create an image of the sharp edges of the plant to emphasize how beautiful the plant's leaves are to explain when and where the plant grows to show how afraid the author is of the plant