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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Section 1: "The Gift Outright," Lines 1-16.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What technique is used in the line "Such as she was, such as she would become" (line 16)?
(a) Anaphora.
(b) Symbolism.
(c) Chiasmus.
(d) Anadiplosis.

2. Who is the author of "The Gift Outright"?
(a) Robert Frost.
(b) Donald Hall.
(c) Galway Kinnell.
(d) Robert Lowell.

3. What does line 12 make clear is the "Gift" in the title "The Gift Outright"?
(a) Surrender and salvation.
(b) Americans themselves.
(c) Freedom from England.
(d) The land Americans live on.

4. What techniques are used in the lines "Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,/ Possessed by what we now no more possessed" (lines 6-7)?
(a) Chiasmus and antithesis.
(b) Epistrophe and chiasmus.
(c) Oxymoron and epistrophe.
(d) Antithesis and oxymoron.

5. What is alluded to in the phrase "the land vaguely realizing westward" (line 14)?
(a) The American Civil War.
(b) The Westward expansion of the United States.
(c) The forced resettlement of Native peoples.
(d) The Louisiana Purchase.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is the antecedent of "it" in the phrase "it was ourselves" (line 9)?

2. Which technique is used in the first line, "The land was ours before we were the land’s"?

3. What technique is used in the phrase "unstoried, artless, unenhanced" (line 15)?

4. To what event does the phrase "more than a hundred years/ Before we were her people" obliquely refer?

5. According to the poem's second sentence, how did "we" find "salvation"?

(see the answer key)

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