Once Upon a Time

Multiple Choice and Long Answer questions create ideal opportunities for whole-text review, unit exam, or summative assessments.

Multiple Choice

1. Why does the narrator refer to the fencing as “pure concentration-camp style”?

A) The wall was built by Germans.

B) It represents a larger racist ideology.

C) It is designed to keep people in.

D) People inside are actively murdered.

2. What kind of figurative language does the narrator use in “The misbeats of my heart tailed off like the last muffled flourishes on one of the wooden xylophones”?

A) Metaphor

B) Personification

C) Alliteration

D) Simile

3. Who is the “wise old witch”?

A) A random neighbor

B) The wife’s mother

C) The husband’s mother

D) A local preacher

4. Who finds the boy in the wire and attempts to save him?

A) The nervous mother

B) The itinerant gardener

C) The loving father

D) The doting grandmother

5. Which of the following quotes best supports the theme of South Africa’s Mining Industry, Exploitation, and Personal Wealth?

A) “He loved her very much and buses were being burned, cars stoned, and schoolchildren shot by the police.” (Paragraph 9)

B) “Insurance companies paid no compensation for single malt, a loss made keener by the property owner’s knowledge that the thieves wouldn’t even have been able to appreciate what it was they were drinking.” (Paragraph 11)

C) “The alarm was often answered—it seemed—by other burglar alarms, in other houses, that had been triggered by pet cats or nibbling mice.” (Paragraph 11)

D) “Next day a gang of workmen came and stretched the razor-bladed coils all round the walls of the house where the husband and wife and little boy and pet dog and cat were living happily ever after.” (Paragraph 16)

6. What is implied about the wife’s character by the scene in which she tries to feed the beggars?

A) She is working for change.

B) She is naive to potential dangers.

C) She is different from her neighbors.

D) She used to be poor.

7. What is the narrator’s tone when describing the robbers as “hungry enough to devour everything in the refrigerator or paus[ing] audaciously to drink the whiskey in the cabinets or patio bars”?

A) Indifferent

B) Enraged

C) Fearful

D) Condescending

8. In Paragraph 13, what is the primary effect of the narrator’s uses of two non-English words, baas and tsotsis?

A) It highlights the racial difference between the family and the workers.

B) It adds confusion for the reader in moments of chaos.

C) It increases the overall sense of setting.

D) It proves that the author is in fact from South Africa.

Long Answer

Compose a response of 2-3 sentences, incorporating textual details to support your response.

1. Explain how the Neighborhood Watch signs lettered “YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED” are an example of foreshadowing.

2. Why does the boy not seem scared of the barbed wire and other security?