501 Critical Reading Questions

Critical Reading Questions

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and then says 
I can see now—
(lines 38–39) suggesting that she
can understand now how Mrs. Wright must have felt.
284.
d.
Mrs. Hale describes Mr. Wright as a 
hard man
who was 
like a raw
wind that gets to the bone
(lines 51–52). Mrs. Wright’s loneliness
would be deepened by living with a man who was quiet and cold.
285.
b.
The punctuation here—the dashes between each word—sug-
gest that Mrs. Wright changed from the sweet, fluttery woman
she was to a bitter, unhappy person over the years. The
emphasis on her loneliness and the dead husband and bird add
to this impression.
286.
d.
The women decide to take the quilt to Mrs. Wright to keep her
busy; it would give her something to do, something familiar and
comforting
287.
c.
Because her house was so lonely, Mrs. Wright would have wanted
the company of a pet—and a pet that shared some qualities with
her (or with her younger self) would have been particularly
appealing. She would have liked the bird’s singing to ease the
quiet in the house, and she also 
used to sing real pretty herself
(line
10) and would have felt a real connection with the bird.
288.
b.
The clues in the passage—the violently broken bird cage, the
dead bird lovingly wrapped in silk and put in a pretty box, the
description of John Wright as a hard and cold man—suggest that
he killed the bird and that Mrs. Wright in turn killed him for
destroying her companion.
289.
d.
The fact that Mrs. Hale 
slips box under quilt pieces
suggests that she
will not share her discovery with the men.
290.
c.
Frankenstein asks his listener to 
[l]earn from me [ . . . ] how danger-
ous is the acquirement of knowledge
(lines 6–8). He is telling his tale
as a warning and does not want to lead his listener into the same
kind of 
destruction and infallible misery
(line 6).
291.
a.
The context reveals that Frankenstein was prepared for 
a multi-
tude of reverses
or setbacks that would hinder his operations.
292.
e.
Frankenstein describes himself as pursuing his 
undertaking with
unremitting ardour
and that his 
cheek had grown pale with study, and
[his] person had become emaciated with confinement
(lines 45–47). He
also says that a 
resistless, and almost frantic, impulse urged me for-
ward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit
(lines 56–58). These are the marks of a man obsessed.
293.
b.
Moreau states in lines 22–24 that 
this extraordinary branch of knowl-
edge has never been sought as an end, [ . . . ] until I took it up!
, and in
lines 28–30, he states that he was 
the first man to take up this ques-
tion armed with antiseptic surgery, and with a really scientific knowledge
501