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

Chapter 18, pages 158-159

“ ‘It is not our custom to fight for our gods,’ said one of them [Okeke]. ‘Let us not presume to do so now. If a man kills the sacred python in the secrecy of his hut, the matter lies between him and the god. We did not see it. If we put ourselves between the god and his victim we may receive blows intended for the offender. When a man blasphemes, what do we do? Do we go and stop his mouth? No. We put our fingers into our ears to stop us hearing. That is a wise action.’

‘Let us not reason like cowards,’ said Okonkwo. ‘If a man comes into my hut and defecates on the floor, what do I do? Do I shut my eyes? No! I take a stick and break his head. That is what a man does. These people are daily pouring filth over us, and Okeke says we should pretend not to see.’ Okonkwo made a sound full of disgust. This was a womanly clan, he thought. Such a thing could never happen in his fatherland, Umuofia.

‘Okonkwo has spoken the truth,’ said another man. ‘We should do something. But let us ostracize these men. We would then not be held accountable for their abominations.’

Everybody in the assembly spoke, and in the end it was decided to ostracize the Christians. Okonkwo ground his teeth in disgust.”

To answer Questions 19-24, please read the following passage from Chapter 20 of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Choose the best responses to the prompts located next to each passage. There is one and only one correct answer to each prompt.

Chapter 20, page 176

" ‘Perhaps I have been away too long,’  Okonkwo said, almost to himself. ‘But I cannot understand these things you tell me. What is it that has happened to our people? Why have they lost the power to fight?’

‘Have you not heard how the white man wiped out Abame?’ asked Obierika.

‘I have heard,’ said Okonkwo. ‘But I have also heard that Abame people were weak and foolish. Why did they not fight back? Had they no guns and machetes? We would be cowards to compare ourselves with the men of Abame. Their fathers had never dared to stand before our ancestors. We must fight these men and drive them from the land.’

‘It is already too late,’ said Obierika sadly. ‘Our own men and our sons have joined the ranks of the stranger. They have joined his religion and they help to uphold his government. If we should try to drive out the white men in Umuofia we should find it easy. There are only two of them. But what of our own people who are following their way and have been given power? They would go to Umuru and bring the soldiers, and we would be like Abame.’ He paused for a long time and then said: ‘I told you on my last visit to Mbanta how they hanged Aneto.’

‘What has happened to that piece of land in dispute?’ asked Okonkwo.

‘The white man's court has decided that it should belong to Nnama's family, who had given much money to the white man's messengers and interpreter.’

‘Does the white man understand our custom about land?’

‘How can he when he does not even speak our tongue? But he says that our customs are bad, and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our customs are bad. How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us? The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.’ "

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

Interviewer: “A character in Things Fall Apart remarks that the white man ‘has put a knife on the things that held us together, and we have fallen apart.’ Are those things still severed, or have the wounds begun to heal?”

Achebe: “What I was referring to there, or what the speaker in the novel was thinking about, was the upsetting of a society, the disturbing of a social order. The society of Umuofia, the village in Things Fall Apart, was totally disrupted by the coming of the European government, missionary Christianity, and so on. That was not a temporary disturbance; it was a once and for all alteration of their society. To give you the example of Nigeria, where the novel is set, the Ibo people had organized themselves in small units, in small towns and villages, each self-governed. With the coming of the British, Ibo land as a whole was incorporated into a totally different polity, to be called Nigeria, with a whole lot of other people with whom the Ibo people had not had direct contact before. The result of that was not something from which you could recover, really. You had to learn a totally new reality, and accommodate yourself to the demands of this new reality, which is the state called Nigeria. Various nationalities, each of which had its own independent life, were forced by the British to live with people of different customs and habits and priorities and religions. And then at independence, fifty years later, they were suddenly on their own again. They began all over again to learn the rules of independence. The problems that Nigeria is having today could be seen as resulting from this effort that was initiated by colonial rule to create a new nation. There's nothing to indicate whether it will fail or succeed. It all depends.

One might hear someone say, How long will it take these people to get their act together? It's going to take a very, very long time, because it's really been a whole series of interruptions and disturbances, one step forward and two or three back. It has not been easy. One always wishes it had been easier. We've compounded things by our own mistakes, but it doesn't really help to pretend that we've had an easy task.”

Bacon, Katie. "An African Voice." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 2 Aug. 2000. Web. 15 Apr. 2017.

To answer Questions 32-34, please read the following passage from “Lunch at Woolworth’s." Choose the best responses to the prompts located next to the passage. There is one and only one correct answer to each prompt.

                                Lunch at Woolworth’s
                                by Gloria Harris


As news of the first sit-in spread, students organized shifts so that they could join in without missing classes.

It came as no surprise when the waitress refused to serve Joseph McNeil, David Richmond, Ezell Blair, Jr., and Franklin McCain. The four African American men sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, and requested service. In many places in the South, blacks could shop at most stores, but they couldn’t eat at the lunch counters in those stores. These college students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College knew the law, but they had decided to take action against the injustice. The four young men refused to leave their seats until they had been served at the counter, or until the store closed. Woolworth’s closed with the students still waiting.

While this “sit-in” was not the first, it was the most significant, as it sparked a mass student movement. More students showed up the next day, when the “Greensboro Four,” as these men became known, returned to Woolworth’s to try again. As the days turned into weeks, the number of protesters swelled. The students were peaceful but determined. They requested service at the counter, and when they did not get it, they remained seated quietly until fellow protesters relieved them or the store closed. Many of the students brought homework or books to read.

Although the protestors remained nonviolent, white onlookers did not. When television cameras showed well-dressed, polite young men and women being pulled off stools, spat on, kicked, burned with cigarettes, and called ugly names, the outpouring of support from students, both black and white, in northern and southern colleges was overwhelming. News of the sit-in in Greensboro spread like wildfire. In less than two weeks, college students all over the South started their own sit-ins. Within 18 months, nearly 70,000 students had participated in similar protests. In addition, people began to form picket lines at sister stores in the North to protest those businesses’ segregated policies in the South.

The sit-in movement also won support from older established civil rights organizations such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). CORE sent a representative to Greensboro to provide training for the students, 
which included role playing based on simple rules of conduct:

Do show yourself friendly at all times.

Do sit straight and face the counter.

Don’t strike back if attacked.

Don’t laugh.

Don’t hold conversations.

CORE field workers provided training throughout the sit-in movement, while the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund provided lawyers and bail money as hundreds of students were arrested for trespassing, disturbing the peace, unlawful assembly, and disobeying police orders to move from their seats. Some students refused to pay fines and served jail sentences instead.

The SCLC provided support for the sit-in movement under the direction of Ella Baker. Baker organized the first Sit-In Leadership Conference on April 15, 1960, at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. She invited students from 40 southern colleges and 19 northern campuses to come listen to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., share his message of nonviolence.

Inspired by King’s words and encouraged by Baker, who supported a grassroots movement that was organized and led by students, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was born. The group adopted a policy of achieving racial equality through nonviolent protest. It participated in a number of sit-ins and also would breathe new life into the Freedom Rides a year later.

As stores closed temporarily to avoid dealing with the sit-ins, and as businesses suffered because customers stayed away, these peaceful, student-led protests met with success. By the fall of 1960, lunch counters in almost 100 southern cities were desegregated. Other sit-ins desegregated movie theaters, amusement parks, and hotels. “Wade-ins” desegregated beaches; “read-ins” desegregated libraries.

Although the sit-ins did not guarantee all rights for African Americans, they did show a younger generation of civil rights protesters what could be accomplished when people took a stand and worked together.