To answer Questions 13-18, please read the following passage from Chapter 4 of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Choose the best responses to the prompts located next to the passage. There is one and only one correct answer to each prompt.

Chapter 4, page 26

" ‘Looking at a king's mouth,’ said an old man, ‘one would think he never sucked at his mother's breast.’ " He was talking about Okonkwo, who had risen so suddenly from great poverty and misfortune to be one of the lords of the clan. The old man bore no ill will towards Okonkwo. Indeed he respected him for his industry and success. But he was struck, as most people were, by Okonkwo's brusqueness in dealing with less successful men. Only a week ago a man had contradicted him at a kindred meeting which they held to discuss the next ancestral feast. Without looking at the man Okonkwo had said: " ‘This meeting is for men.’ The man who had contradicted him had no titles. That was why he had called him a woman. Okonkwo knew how to kill a man's spirit.

To answer Questions 19-23, please read the following passage from Chapter 5 of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Choose the best responses to the prompts located next to the passage. There is one and only one correct answer to each prompt.

Chapter 5, Pages 44-45

“The drums were still beating, persistent and unchanging. Their sound was no longer a separate thing from the living village. It was like the pulsation of its heart. It throbbed in the air, in the sunshine, and even in the trees, and filled the village with excitement.

Ekwefi ladled her husband's share of the pottage into a bowl and covered it. Ezinma took it to him in his obi.

Okonkwo was sitting on a goatskin already eating his first wife's meal. Obiageli, who had brought it from her mother's hut, sat on the floor waiting for him to finish. Ezinma placed her mother's dish before him and sat with Obiageli.

‘Sit like a woman!’ Okonkwo shouted at her. Ezinma brought her two legs together and stretched them in front of her.

‘Father, will you go to see the wrestling?’ Ezinma asked after a suitable interval.

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Will you go?’

‘Yes.’ And after a pause she said: ‘Can I bring your chair for you?’

‘No, that is a boy's job.’ Okonkwo was specially fond of Ezinma. She looked very much like her mother, who was once the village beauty. But his fondness only showed on very rare occasions.

‘Obiageli broke her pot today,’ Ezinma said.

‘Yes, she has told me about it,’ Okonkwo said between mouthfuls.

‘Father,’ said Obiageli, ‘people should not talk when they are eating or pepper may go down the wrong way.’

‘That is very true. Do you hear that, Ezinma? You are older than Obiageli but she has more sense.’

He uncovered his second wife's dish and began to eat from it. Obiageli took the first dish and returned to her mother's hut. And then Nkechi came in, bringing the third dish. Nkechi was the daughter of Okonkwo's third wife.

In the distance the drums continued to beat.”

To answer Questions 24-27, please read the following essay excerpt about Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Choose the best responses to the prompts located next to the essay. There is one and only one correct answer to each prompt.

“Towards the end of the nineteenth century most European states migrated to Africa and other parts of the world where they established colonies. Nigeria was amongst other African nations that received visitors who were on a colonising mission; introducing their religion and culture that is later imposed on Igbo. The culture of the people of Umuofia (Igbo culture) is immensely threatened by this change. Achebe’s primary purpose of writing the novel is because he wants to educate his readers about the value of his culture as an African. Things Fall Apart provides readers with an insight of Igbo society right before the white missionaries’ invasion on their land. The invasion of the colonising force threatens to change almost every aspect of Igbo society; from religion, traditional gender roles and relations, family structure to trade. Consequently, Achebe blames the white missionaries’ colonial rule and/or invasion for the post-colonial oppressed Igbo culture; this oppression can be seen in terms of the oppressed social coherence between the individual and their society.”

Kenalemang, Lame Maatla. "7. Things Fall Apart." Representing the Race Things Fall Apart: An Analysis of Pre and Post-Colonial Igbo Society. Karlstads University. Web.

To answer Questions 30-32, please read "Something Could Happen to You" from Almost a Woman, a memoir, by Esmeralda Santiago. Choose the best responses to the prompts located next to the excerpt. There is one and only one correct answer to each prompt.

Something Could Happen to You

The day we arrived, a hot, humid afternoon had splintered into thunderstorms as the last rays of the sun dipped into the rest of the United States. I was thirteen and superstitious enough to believe thunder and lightning held significance beyond the meteorological. I stored the sights and sounds of that dreary night into memory as if their meaning would someday be revealed in a flash of insight to transform my life forever. When the insight came, nothing changed, for it wasn’t the weather in Brooklyn that was important, but the fact that I was there to notice it.

One hand tightly grasped by Mami, the other by six-year-old Edna, we squeezed and pushed our way through the crowd of travelers. Five-year-old Raymond clung to Mami’s other hand, his unbalanced gait drawing sympathetic smiles from people who moved aside to let us walk ahead of them.

At the end of the tunnel waited Tata, Mami’s mother, in black lace and high heels, a pronged rhinestone pin on her left shoulder. When she hugged me, the pin pricked my cheek, pierced subtle flower-shaped indentations that I rubbed rhythmically as our taxi hurtled through drenched streets banked by high, angular buildings.

New York was darker than I expected, and, in spite of the cleansing rain, dirtier. Used to the sensual curves of rural Puerto Rico, my eyes had to adjust to the regular, aggressive two-dimensionality of Brooklyn. Raindrops pounded the hard streets, captured the dim silver glow of street lamps, bounced against sidewalks in glistening sparks, then disappeared, like tiny ephemeral jewels, into the darkness. Mami and Tata teased that I was disillusioned because the streets were not paved with gold. But I had no such vision of New York. I was disappointed by the darkness and fixed my hopes on the promise of light deep within the sparkling raindrops.

Two days later, I leaned against the wall of our apartment building on McKibbin Street wondering where New York ended and the rest of the world began. It was hard to tell. There was no horizon in Brooklyn. Everywhere I looked, my eyes met a vertical maze of gray and brown straight-edged buildings with sharp corners and deep shadows. Every few blocks there was a cement playground surrounded by chain-link fence. And in between, weedy lots mounded with garbage and rusting cars.

A girl came out of the building next door, a jump rope in her hand. She appraised me shyly; I pretended to ignore her. She stepped on the rope, stretched the ends overhead as if to measure their length, and then began to skip, slowly, grunting each time she came down on the sidewalk. Swish splat grunt swish, she turned her back to me; swish splat grunt swish, she faced me again and smiled. I smiled back, and she hopped over.

“¿Tú eres hispana?” she asked, as she whirled the rope in lazy arcs.

“No, I’m Puerto Rican.”

“Same thing. Puerto Rican, Hispanic. That’s what we are here.” She skipped a tight circle, stopped abruptly, and shoved the rope in my direction. “Want a turn?”

“Sure.” I hopped on one leg, then the other. “So, if you’re Puerto Rican, they call you Hispanic?”

“Yeah. Anybody who speaks Spanish.”

I jumped a circle, as she had done, but faster. “You mean, if you speak Spanish, you’re Hispanic?”

“Well, yeah. No … I mean your parents have to be Puerto Rican or Cuban or something.”

I whirled the rope to the right, then the left, like a boxer. “Okay, your parents are Cuban, let’s say, and you’re born here, but you don’t speak Spanish. Are you Hispanic?”

She bit her lower lip. “I guess so,” she finally said. “It has to do with being from a Spanish country. I mean, you or your parents, like, even if you don’t speak Spanish, you’re Hispanic, you know?” She looked at me uncertainly. I nodded and returned her rope.

But I didn’t know. I’d always been Puerto Rican, and it hadn’t occurred to me that in Brooklyn I’d be someone else.

Later, I asked. “Are we Hispanics, Mami?”

“Yes, because we speak Spanish.”

“But a girl said you don’t have to speak the language to be Hispanic.”

She scrunched her eyes. “What girl? Where did you meet a girl?”

“Outside. She lives in the next building.”

“Who said you could go out to the sidewalk? This isn’t Puerto Rico. Algo te puede suceder [1]."

“Something could happen to you” was a variety of dangers outside the locked doors of our apartment ... I listened to Mami's lecture with downcast eyes and the necessary, respectful expression of humility. But inside, I quaked. Two days in New York, and I'd already become someone else. It wasn't hard to imagine that greater dangers lay ahead.

[1] algo te puede suceder: something could happen to you