To answer Questions 13-18, please read the following passage from Chapter 8 of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Choose the best responses to the prompts next to the passage. There is one and only one correct answer to each prompt.

Chapter 8, pages 63-65

“Okonkwo did not taste any food for two days after the death of Ikemefuna. He drank palm wine from morning till night, and his eyes were red and fierce like the eyes of a rat when it was caught by the tail and dashed against the floor. He called his son, Nwoye, to sit with him in his obi. But the boy was afraid of him and slipped out of the hut as soon as he noticed him dozing.

He did not sleep at night. He tried not to think about Ikemefuna, but the more he tried the more he thought about him. Once he got up from bed and walked about his compound. But he was so weak that his legs could hardly carry him. He felt like a drunken giant walking with the limbs of a mosquito. Now and then a cold shiver descended on his head and spread down his body.

On the third day he asked his second wife, Ekwefi, to roast plantains for him. She prepared it the way he liked--with slices of oil-bean and fish.

‘You have not eaten for two days,’ said his daughter Ezinma when she brought the food to him. ‘So you must finish this.’ She sat down and stretched her legs in front of her. Okonkwo ate the food absent-mindedly. 'She should have been a boy,' he thought as he looked at his ten-year-old daughter. He passed her a piece of fish...

...Ezinma took the dish in one hand and the empty water bowl in the other and went back to her mother's hut. ‘She should have been a boy,’ Okonkwo said to himself again. His mind went back to Ikemefuna and he shivered. If only he could find some work to do he would be able to forget. But it was the season of rest between the harvest and the next planting season. The only work that men did at this time was covering the walls of their compound with new palm fronds. And Okonkwo had already done that. He had finished it on the very day the locusts came, when he had worked on one side of the wall and Ikemefuna and Nwoye on the other.

‘When did you become a shivering old woman,’ Okonkwo asked himself, ‘you, who are known in all the nine villages for your valour in war? How can a man who has killed five men in battle fall to pieces because he has added a boy to their number? Okonkwo, you have become a woman indeed.’ "

To answer Questions 19-24, please read the following passage from Chapter 8 of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Choose the best responses to the prompts next to the passage. There is one and only one correct answer to each prompt.

Chapter 9, Page 79

“By the time Onwumbiko died Ekwefi had become a very bitter woman. Her husband's first wife had already had three sons, all strong and healthy. When she had borne her third son in succession, Okonkwo had slaughtered a goat for her, as was the custom. Ekwefi had nothing but good wishes for her. But she had grown so bitter about her own chi that she could not rejoice with others over their good fortune. And so, on the day that Nwoye's mother celebrated the birth of her three sons with feasting and music, Ekwefi was the only person in the happy company who went about with a cloud on her brow. Her husband's wife took this for malevolence, as husbands' wives were wont to. How could she know that Ekwefi's bitterness did not flow outwards to others but inwards into her own soul, that she did not blame others for their good fortune but her own evil chi who denied her any?”

To answer Questions 25-29, please read the following essay excerpt about Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Choose the best responses to the prompts next to the excerpt. There is one and only one correct answer to each prompt.

In Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe tells two different stories at the same time. One is of Okonkwo, the villager whose rise to power is halted because of all of his misfortunes. The other is of Okonkwo’s village, Umuofia, and its struggle to hold on to its cultural traditions while facing colonialism from the West. The title, Things Fall Apart, describes perfectly what happens to both Okonkwo and his village. The cultural traditions of Umuofia and Okonkwo himself both fall apart, and both become influenced by the West. In Things Fall Apart, Achebe uses Okonkwo and the village’s fall to show how African culture, as well as other cultures around the world, suffered as a result of Westernization. In the book, Achebe focuses mainly on the character of Okonkwo. Okonkwo’s story follows the general pattern of a Greek tragedy. He experiences many successes in the beginning, but everything eventually comes crashing down on him. His early life is the typical success story. He starts poor, but works hard to earn everyone’s respect. From the beginning he is disgusted with his father. He is a lazy old man who borrows money and never pays it back. Okonkwo realizes that he does not want to be like his father, and it is this hatred that drives him to work hard. After his father’s death, Okonkwo pays off his debts, and starts his long journey to the top of the clan. In a short time, Okonkwo’s hard work pays off and he becomes one of the village’s most respected members. He earns three out of the four village titles; he is recognized as the greatest warrior in Umuofia; he takes three wives and has many children. He is almost to the top of the clan when his journey to greatness starts to crumble. Because of a scuffle with one of the nearby villages, Okonkwo is given a boy to take care of. The boy, Ikemefuna, shows many similarities to Okonkwo and they become very close. He sees Okonkwo as a father figure, and even calls him “father.”Okonkwo even puts him before his true son, Nwoye. But one day the village elders decide that he has gotten too close and that he needs to be killed. Okonkwo eventually deals the final blow that kills Ikemefuna, to show that he is not weak. The grief that follows starts Okonkwo on his downfall.

"Free Essays Must Be Free!TM." Essay Papers Things Fall Apart. Web. 19 Mar. 2017.

To answer Questions 32-34, 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