T he r eader ’

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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CHAPTER 20: Reading Contemporary Fiction and 
Nonfiction 
TEST A
 
 
Answer the multiple-choice questions based on the passage. 
I got out of the car and stretched. It was so quiet I could almost hear the mist starting to 
burn away as the sun began to creep above the cypress trees. The yard had all the messy 
semblance of a child’s coloring book. There was a strange sense of monastic solitude about the 
place, and yet the yard was a gallery of sociability. Bird feeders hung from branches. There was a 
carefully tended vegetable garden, horseshoe stakes permanently implanted in dirt pitch holes, a 
barbecue pit, a rusted 
PURE OIL
sign nailed to a tree, a hammock strung between mimosa trees, 
and the all-too-familiar Sand Bar tank tops and stonewashed jeans hanging from a clothesline. 
I walked up the stone path to the front of the house and knocked. Nothing. I called Carla’s 
name. No answer. The door was unlocked. That didn’t mean anything. People don’t generally 
lock doors in small towns. I opened the door. 
I went in. 
Death was hanging in the air.
[Pedrazas, Allan. 
Angel’s Cove
. New York: Worldwide Publishers, 1999, pp. 34-5.] 
1. The passage takes place
A. at night. 
B. at noon. 
C. in early morning. 
2. In comparing the yard to a coloring book, it means the yard
A. was colorful. 
B. was littered with many different things. 
C. was barren. 
3. We can infer that when the narrator went into the house, he suspected someone 
A. was dead. 
B. had been shot. 

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94 Chapter 20, Reading Contemporary Fiction and Nonfiction 
C. had committed suicide.
4. The passage implies small towns 
A. have littered lawns. 
B. are sociable. 
C. have little crime. 
5. The phrase monastic solitude, as underlined in the passage, indicates that the place was 
A. isolated. 
B. as quiet as a monastery. 
C. religious. 

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Chapter 20, Reading Contemporary Fiction and Nonfiction 95 
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