Dear students: allow yourself no more than 60 minutes for the multiple choice exam. Then, if you have the stamina, try either two of the following questions in an 80 minute span, or all three in a 120 minute span. Use ink for your essays, because that's required for the actual exam.
J.D.
Question 1
(Suggested time—40 minutes. This question counts as one-third of the total essay section score.)
The following two poems present animal-eye views of the world. Read each poem carefully. Then write an essay in
which you analyze the techniques used in the poems to characterize the speakers and convey differing views of the
world.
HAWK ROOSTING
I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
5 The convenience of the high trees!
The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.
My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
10 It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly—
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
15 There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads—
The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
20 No arguments assert my right:
The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.
—Ted Hughes
From Lupercal, by Ted Hughes.
Faber & Faber Ltd., 1960.
GOLDEN RETRIEVALS
Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention
seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so.
Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh
joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then
5 I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue
of any thrillingly dead thing. And you?
Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk,
thinking of what you never can bring back,
or else you’re off in some fog concerning
10 —tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work:
to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving,
my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark,
a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here,
entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.
—Mark Doty
Copyright © 1998 by Mark Doty.
Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Question 2
(Suggested time — 40 minutes. This question counts as one-third of the total essay section score.)
Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey (1818) opens with the following passage. Read the passage carefully.
Then, in a well-organized essay, analyze the literary techniques Austen uses to characterize Catherine Morland.
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland
in her infancy would have supposed her born to be
an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her
father and mother, her own person and disposition,
5 were all equally against her. Her father was a
clergyman, without being neglected or poor, and
a very respectable man, though his name was
Richard, and he had never been handsome. He
had a considerable independence besides two good
10 livings,1 and he was not in the least addicted to
locking up his daughters. Her mother was a woman
of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what
is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had
three sons before Catherine was born; and, instead
15 of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as
anybody might expect, she still lived on—lived to
have six children more—to see them growing up
around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself.
A family of ten children will be always called a fine
20 family, where there are heads, and arms, and legs
enough for the number; but the Morlands had little
other right to the word, for they were in general very
plain, and Catherine, for many years of her life,
as plain as any. She had a thin awkward figure,
25 a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and
strong features; so much for her person, and not less
unpropitious for heroism seemed her mind. She was
fond of all boys’ play and greatly preferred cricket,
not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments
30 of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird,
or watering a rose-bush. Indeed she had no taste for
a garden, and if she gathered flowers at all, it was
chiefly for the pleasure of mischief, at least so it was
conjectured from her always preferring those which
35 she was forbidden to take. Such were her propensities;
her abilities were quite as extraordinary. She never
could learn or understand anything before she was
taught, and sometimes not even then, for she was
often inattentive, and occasionally stupid. Her mother
40 was three months in teaching her only to repeat the
“Beggar’s Petition,” and, after all, her next sister Sally
could say it better than she did. Not that Catherine
was always stupid; by no means; she learnt the fable
of “The Hare and many Friends,” as quickly as any
45 girl in England. Her mother wished her to learn
music; and Catherine was sure she should like it,
for she was very fond of tinkling the keys of the old
forlorn spinnet,2 so at eight years old she began. She
learnt a year and could not bear it; and Mrs. Morland,
50 who did not insist on her daughters being accomplished
in spite of incapacity or distaste, allowed her
to leave off. The day which dismissed the musicmaster
was one of the happiest of Catherine’s life.
Her taste for drawing was not superior; though
55 whenever she could obtain the outside of a letter
from her mother, or seize upon any other odd piece
of paper, she did what she could in that way by
drawing houses and trees, hens and chickens, all
very much like one another. Writing and accounts
60 she was taught by her father; French by her mother.
Her proficiency in either was not remarkable, and she
shirked her lessons in both whenever she could. What
a strange unaccountable character! for with all these
symptoms of profligacy at ten years old, she had
65 neither a bad heart nor a bad temper, was seldom
stubborn, scarcely ever quarrelsome, and very kind
to the little ones, with few interruptions of tyranny.
She was, moreover, noisy and wild, hated confinement
and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in
70 the world as rolling down the green slope at the back
of the house.
1 Incomes or endowments
2 Piano
Question 3
(Suggested time—40 minutes. This question counts as one-third of the total essay section score.)
In some works of literature, childhood and adolescence are portrayed as times graced by innocence and a sense
of wonder; in other works, they are depicted as times of tribulation and terror. Focusing on a single novel or play,
explain how its representation of childhood or adolescence shapes the meaning of the work as a whole.
You may select a work from the list below or choose another appropriate novel or play of similar literary merit.
Avoid mere plot summary.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Black Boy
Bless Me, Ultima
The Bluest Eye
The Catcher in the Rye
Cat’s Eye
The Chosen
Great Expectations
A High Wind in Jamaica
The House on Mango Street
Jane Eyre
Kafka on the Shore
Little Women
Lord of the Flies
“Master Harold” . . . and the boys
The Member of the Wedding
My Ántonia
Native Speaker
Old School
Pocho
A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The Red Badge of Courage
A River Runs Through It
Romeo and Juliet
Sula
To Kill a Mockingbird
To the Lighthouse
Tom Jones
The Turn of the Screw
Wide Sargasso Sea
Woman Warrior
Wuthering Heights
