Section Four Language Arts - Reading: GED-SECTION-4

Whats Wrong with Biff and Happy?

[Biff is talking with his brother, Happy. They are together with their parents in the home where they grew up.]

BIFF: [with rising agitation] Hap, Ive had twenty or thirty different kinds of jobs since I left home before the war, and it always turns out the same. I just realized it lately. In Nebraska, when I herded cattle, and the Dakotas, and Arizona, and

now in Texas. Its why I came home now, I guess, because I realized it.

This farm I work on, its spring there now, see? And theyve got about fifteen new colts. Theres nothing more inspiring or beautiful than the sight of a mare and a new colt. And its cool there now, see? Texas is cool now, and its spring. And

whenever spring comes to where I am, I suddenly get the feeling, my God, Im not gettin anywhere! What the hell am I doing, playing around with horses, twenty-eight dollars a week! Im thirty-four years old, I oughta be makinmy future.

Thats when I come running home. And now, I get here, and I dont know what to do with myself. [After a pause] Ive always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all Ive done is to waste my life.

HAPPY: Youre a poet, you know that, Biff?

Youre a youre an idealist!

BIFF: No, Im mixed up very bad. Maybe I oughta get married. Maybe I oughta get stuck into something. Maybe thats my trouble. Im like a boy. Im not married,

Im not in business, I justIm like a boy. Are you content, Hap? Youre a success, arent you? Are you content?

HAPPY: Hell, no!

BIFF: Why? Youre making money, arent you? HAPPY: [moving about with energy, expressiveness] All I can do now is wait for the merchandise manager to die.

And suppose I get to be merchandise manager? Hes a good friend of mine, and he just built a terrific estate on Long Island. And he lived there about two months and sold it, and now hes building another one. He cant enjoy it once its finished.

And I know thats just what I would do. I dont know what the hell Im workin for.

Sometimes I sit in my apartment all alone. And I think of the rent Im paying. And its crazy. But then, its what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, Im lonely.

Arthur Miller, from Death of a Salesman (1949)

Which of the following sentences best describes whats wrong with Biff?

A. He needs to stop being selfish and find someone to love.

B. He needs to grow up and stop acting like a baby.

C. He needs to pick one career and work hard until he achieves success.

D. He needs to stop moving around so much and just stay in one place.

E. He needs to accept who he is and stop searching elsewhere for happiness.

What Inspires Thomas?

[Thomas Builds-the-Fire is a Spokane Indian living on the Spokane Indian Reservation.]

So Thomas went home and tried to write their first song. He sat alone in his house with his bass guitar and waited for the song. He waited and waited. Its nearly impossible to write a song with a bass guitar, but Thomas didn't know that. He’d

never written a song before. "Please," Thomas prayed. But the song would not come, so Thomas closed his eyes, tried to find a story with a soundtrack. He turned on the television and watched The Sound of Music on channel four. Julie

Andrews put him to sleep for the sixty-seventh time, and neither story nor song came in his dreams.

After he woke up, he paced around the room, stood on his porch, and listened to those faint voices that echoed all over the reservation. Everybody heard those voices, but nobody liked to talk about them. They were loudest at night, when

Thomas tried to sleep, and he always thought they sounded like horses. For hours,

Thomas waited for the song.

Then, hungry and tired, he opened his refrigerator for something to eat and discovered that he didnt have any food. So he closed the fridge and opened it again, but it was still empty. In a ceremony that he had practiced since his youth, he

opened, closed, and opened the fridge again, expecting an immaculate conception of a jar of pickles. Thomas was hungry on a reservation where there are ninety-seven different ways to say fry bread.

[. . . .]

As his growling stomach provided the rhythm, Thomas sat again with his bass guitar, wrote the first song, and called it "Reservation Blues."

Sherman Alexie, from Reservation Blues (1995)

The narrator tells us that "Thomas was hungry on a reservation where there are ninety-seven ways to say fry bread."What is the purpose of this sentence?

A. to show us how important fry bread is to the language

B. to show us how hungry Thomas was

C. to make us want to try fry bread

D. to show us the irony of the situation

E. to show us how Thomas was inspired

What Is the Authors Father Like?

It was an impressive place: old, solidly built, in the Tudor style, with leaded windows, a slate roof, and rooms of royal proportions. Buying it had been a big step for my parents, a sign of growing wealth. This was the best neighborhood in town,

and although it was not a pleasant place to live (especially for children), its prestige outweighed its deadliness. Given the fact that he wound up spending the rest of his life in that house, it is ironic that my father at first resisted moving there.

He complained about the price (a constant theme), and when at last he relented, it was with grudging bad humor. Even so, he paid in cash. All in one go. No mortgage, no monthly payments. It was 1959, and business was going well for him.

Always a man of habit, he would leave for work early in the morning, work hard all day, and then, when he came home (on those days he did not work late), take a short nap before dinner. Sometime during our first week in the new house,

before we had properly moved in, he made a curious kind of mistake. Instead of driving home to the new house after work, he went directly to the old one, as he had done for years, parked his car in the driveway, walked into the house

through the back door, climbed the stairs, entered the bedroom, lay down on the bed, and went to sleep. He slept for about an hour.

Needless to say, when the new mistress of the house returned to find a strange man sleeping in her bed, she was a little surprised. But unlike Goldilocks, my father did not jump up and run away. The confusion was eventually settled, and

everyone had a good laugh. Even today, it still makes me laugh. And yet, for all that, I cannot help regarding it as a pathetic story. It is one thing for a man to drive to his old house by mistake, but it is quite another, I think, for him not to notice

that anything has changed inside it.

Paul Auster, from The Invention of Solitude (1982)

Why does the author think the story of his fathers mistake is pathetic?

A. It shows how stubborn his father was.

B. It shows how little he knew his father.

C. It shows how blind his father was to his needs.

D. It shows how little attention his father paid to things around him.

E. It shows how attached he was to the old house.