Practice Exam 1 ❮ 1811
2345Our first stories come to us through the air. We hear voices.
Children in oral societies grow up within a web of stories; but so do all children.
We listen before we can read. Some of our listening is more like listening in, to the
calamitous or seductive voices of the adult world, on the radio or the television or in our
daily lives. Often it’s an overhearing of things we aren’t supposed to hear, eavesdropping
on scandalous gossip or family secrets. From all these scraps of voices, from the
whispers and shouts that surround us, even from ominous silences, the unfilled gaps in
meaning, we patch together for ourselves an order of events, a plot or plots; these, then,
are the things that happen, these are the people they happen to, this is the forbidden
knowledge.
We have all been little pitchers with big ears, shooed out of the kitchen when the
unspoken is being spoken, and we have probably all been tale-bearers, blurters at the
dinner table, unwitting violators of adult rules of censorship. Perhaps this is what writers
are: those who never kicked the habit. We remained tale-bearers. We learned to keep
our eyes open, but not to keep our mouths shut.
If we’re lucky, we may also be given stories meant for our ears, stories intended for
us. These may be children’s Bible stories, tidied up and simplified and with the vicious
bits left out. They may be fairy tales, similarly sugared, although if we are very lucky
it will be left in. In any case, these tales will have deliberate, molded shapes, unlike
stories we have patched together for ourselves. They will contain mountains, deserts,
talking donkeys, dragons; and, unlike the kitchen stories, they will have definite
endings. We are likely to accept these stories being on the same level of reality as the
kitchen stories. It’s only when we are older that we are taught to regard one kind of
story as real and the other kind as mere invention. This is about the same time we’re
taught to believe that dentists are useful, and writers are not.
Traditionally, both the kitchen gossips and the readers-out-loud have been mothers
or grandmothers, native languages have been mother tongues, and the kinds of stories
that are told to children have been called nursery tales or old wives’ tales. It struck me
as no great coincidence when I learned recently that, when a great number of prominent
writers were asked to write about the family member who had the greatest influence
on their literary careers, almost all of them, male as well as female, had picked their
mothers. Perhaps this reflects the extent to which North American children have been
deprived of the grandfathers, those other great repositories of story; perhaps it will come
to change if men come to share in early child care, and we will have old husbands’ tales.
But as things are, language, including the language of our earliest-learned stories, is a
verbal matrix, not a verbal patrix...Questions 11–20 are based on the following passage from Margaret Atwood’s “Origins of Stories.”
- One reason Atwood gives for the presence of
stories in children’s lives is
A. scandalous gossip
B. family secrets
C. supernatural inf luences
D. listening
E. radio and television
12. The close association between the reader and
the author is immediately established by
A. a first person, plural point of view
B. placing the reader into a family situation
C. using accessible diction and syntax
D. being emotional
E. appealing to the child in the reader