Flashcards: Language in Literature Passages

Adapted from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)

He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart grew sympathetic with the birds' thwarted desires. They seemed, like himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted anew.

"Poor little dears!" said Jude, aloud. "You shall have some dinner—you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a good meal!"

They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much resembled his own.

His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of offense used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude's cowering frame, the clacker swinging in his hand.

"So it's 'Eat my dear birdies,' is it, young man? 'Eat, dear birdies,' indeed! I'll tickle your breeches, and see if you say, 'Eat, dear birdies' again in a hurry! And you've been idling at the schoolmaster's too, instead of coming here, ha'n't ye, hey? That's how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks off my corn!"

Which of the following statements about Troutham is supported by the passage?

He pays his employees well.

He is severe. 

He is a small man. 

He is undemanding.

He is well spoken. 

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The ISEE Middle Level examination includes a section of Reading Comprehensions questions that test the young student’s abilities to apply his or her analytic skills to prose passages from various genres. The purpose of this section is to provide potential admissions boards with a metric for judging the overall linguistic and logical reasoning skills of the young applicant. Although such abilities do not represent the whole of one’s intelligence or academic prowess, they do represent an important part of the overall application to competitive schools. Generally speaking, such skills of analysis and comprehension are not limited in applicability only to literature and compositional studies. Indeed, this fact is acknowledged by the variety of passages topics used by the ISEE exam writers, who include not only literary passages among those presented in the examination, but also passages about the sciences, current affairs, and history. By offering a differentiated group of passage types, the exam attempts to test the general skills of students instead of focusing on one particular type of passage to the detriment of others.

The overall thrust of the exam’s questioning looks to ascertain the test-taker’s ability to understand the content of a given passage as a synoptic whole and then to analyze how that whole is held together as a composition made up of discrete parts. Some of the questions ask the young student to identify main themes, the conclusions of arguments, and the outcomes that are implied by a passage’s main arguments. Likewise, the section asks questions about the overall viewpoint of the author as expressed in the whole of the passage. All such inquiries help to test the young student’s ability to grasp the passage as a formal whole.

In addition to such comprehensive and synoptic questioning, the Middle Level ISEE’s Reading Comprehension section also looks to ascertain the young student’s overall logical reasoning abilities as evidenced by his or her skills at noting the general structure of argumentation in passages. This sort of questioning is more analytical in character, making various inquiries of the student regarding the reasoning used by the author of a given passage. They ask the student to identify elements of the passage’s sequence and structure, noting the way that it has been constructed as a series of interrelated logical stages. Such examination helps to show the young student’s ability to identify logical patterns and attests to his or her general skills in reasoning—skills that are critical to every kind of academic undertaking.

Finally, the examination tests less “tangible” abilities such as skills at recognizing and interpreting non-literal language. Such questions ask the student to note figurative uses of language as well as the stylistic variants utilized by authors. These questions provide an important final examination point, testing the student’s ability to understand the logic of meaning transference as well as the ways that language can be used to express multiple levels of communication at once.

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