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COMPASS-Test – Computer-adaptive Placement, Assessment, and Support System: English, Math, Writing

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Showing 10–12 of 20 questions

Question 10 (Reading)

O’Rourke

I always did like O’Rourke, the crabby old round-shouldered news editor at The Sentinel. Of course Constantin was the real boss, but he lived in a lofty place from which he could perceive nothing smaller than an international crisis. Sometimes we saw him passing in lonely grandeur to his inner sanctum, his mind hovering over the Persian Gulf. He never saw us, but O’Rourke was his first lieutenant and it was he that we knew. The old man nodded and pushed his spectacles up on his bald forehead as I came in.

“Well Jenkins, you seem to be doing very well,” he said kindly. “The factory fire was excellent. So was the bus crash. What did you want to see me about?” “To ask a favor.”

His brow furrowed warily.

“What is it?”

“Do you think, Sir, that you could possibly send me on some mission for the paper? I would do my best to get you some good copy.” “What sort of mission had you in mind, Jenkins?”

“Well, Sir, anything that had adventure and danger in it. The more difficult, the better!”

“You seem very anxious to lose your life, Jenkins.”

“To justify my life, Sir!”

“Dear me, this is rather exalted. I’m afraid the day for this sort of thing is past. The expense of the special assignment business hardly justifies the result, and in any case only an experienced man with a name that could command public confidence would get such an order.”

My shoulders sank. O’Rourke looked at me kindly for a moment. But suddenly, his head bobbed up and he looked excited.

“Wait a moment,” said he. “What about exposing a fraud? There’s a fellow going about making ridiculous claims about a lost continent. You could show him up as the liar that he is. How does that appeal to you?”

“Anything, anywhere,” I cried. O’Rourke thought furiously for some minutes.

“I bet you could get friendly with this fellow,” he said at last. “You seem to be good with people. Animal magnetism or something. Why not try your luck with Professor Corval?” I must have looked a little startled. “Corval,” I cried. “Corval, the famous anthropologist?

Wasn’t he the man who broke Benson’s arm over that piece he wrote for The Telegraph?”

The news editor smiled grimly. “Didn’t you say it was adventures you were after?”

In the first paragraph, Constantin’s mind is said to be “hovering over the Persian Gulf.” This means that

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  • ○

    Constantin is hallucinating
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    Constantin is probably preoccupied with weighty matters
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    Constantin is listening to the news on a headset
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    Constantin is mentally ill
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    Constantin has indigestion from a Persian meal
Question 11 (Writing)

The following sentences either have existing or require additional commas somewhere in their structures. Choose the option that best reflects proper comma usage in each sentence.

After the death of Blackbeard, the famous pirate, piracy disappeared from the coast of the American colonies.

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  • ○

    The famous pirate
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    After the death,
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    Coast, of
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    No error
Question 12 (Reading)

Review of "The Collected Prose." By Elizabeth Bishop. Edited by Robert Giroux. 278 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

The late Elizabeth Bishop always epitomized, in John Ashbery's phrase, "a writer's writer's writer." By 1976, when she became the first American – and the first woman – ever to receive the Neustadt International Prize, the world at large began to realize what many of her fellow poets had long suspected: that her poetic achievement might in time overshadow that of her more famous contemporaries. Bishop's admirers will want to consult her "Collected Prose" for the light it sheds on her poetry. They will discover, however, that it is more than just a handsome companion volume to last year's "Complete Poems, 1927-1979." Bishop's clean, limpid prose makes her stories and memoirs a delight to read.

Robert Giroux, Bishop's editor, divides her "Collected Prose" into "Memory: Persons & Places" and "Stories." Fair enough, though inevitably the distinctions between these two categories blur. Stories like "Gwendolyn" and the justly celebrated "In the Village" do double duty as autobiographical statements. By the same token "Efforts of Affection" – a memoir of Marianne Moore as mentor and friend – achieves the emotional resonance of a finely wrought short story.

So does "The U.S.A. School of Writing," Bishop's account of her first job after graduation from Vassar in the midst of the Great Depression. For the grand sum of $15 a week, she impersonated a "successful, money-making" author named "Fred

G. Margolies" for a shady correspondence school in New York City.

In general, the reviewer's reaction to "Collected Prose" is

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  • ○

    favorable.
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    mixed.
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    neutral.
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    unfavorable.
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    Margolies" for a shady correspondence school in New York City.
    In general, the reviewer's reaction to "Collected Prose" is