CLEP® practice test

Free CLEP Analyzing & Interpreting Literature Practice Test

This is a set of 25 original practice questions that follow the official CLEP Analyzing and Interpreting Literature content outline and its weights by literary period, each with a short explanation.

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  • 4 topics from the official outline
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25 questions

Question 1 of 25In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Prospero ends a magical show by saying: "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep." He suggests that
Question 2 of 25Read the opening of Shakespeare's Sonnet 116: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments. Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds / Or bends with the remover to remove." The speaker claims that true love
Question 3 of 25Read this passage, written for this quiz: "The new highway was finished in May. By June the diner had taken down its sign, and by August the motel had stopped pretending. Only the gas station kept its lights on, burning all night for cars that now passed two miles to the east, as if it had not heard the news." The final clause "as if it had not heard the news" mainly
Question 4 of 25In Richard Brinsley Sheridan's comedy The Rivals (1775), Mrs. Malaprop says of a young officer: "He is the very pine-apple of politeness!" The joke depends on
Question 5 of 25Anne Bradstreet's "The Author to Her Book" begins: "Thou ill-form'd offspring of my feeble brain, / Who after birth didst by my side remain, / Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise then true / Who thee abroad, expos'd to publick view," The speaker addresses her book as if it were
Question 6 of 25In the first chapter of Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853), the narrator describes London: "Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city." Later in the chapter, the fog is thickest at the Court of Chancery. The fog is best read as a symbol of
Question 7 of 25In Susan Glaspell's play Trifles (1916), the men search a farmhouse for a motive for a murder, while the women notice small details in the kitchen. When Mrs. Peters reports that the jailed farm wife is worried about her frozen preserves, Hale says: "Well, women are used to worrying over trifles." The line is ironic because
Question 8 of 25Read Walt Whitman's "A Noiseless Patient Spider": "A noiseless patient spider, / I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated, / Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, / It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament out of itself, / Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. / And you O my soul where you stand, / Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, / Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, / Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, / Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul." The spider is compared to
Question 9 of 25F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) ends: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." The sentence suggests that
Question 10 of 25Langston Hughes's "Mother to Son" (1922) begins: "Well, son, I'll tell you: / Life for me ain't been no crystal stair. / It's had tacks in it, / And splinters, / And boards torn up, / And places with no carpet on the floor— / Bare." The staircase is
Question 11 of 25John Milton, who had gone blind, begins a sonnet: "When I consider how my light is spent / Ere half my days in this dark world and wide, / And that one talent which is death to hide / Lodged with me useless," The word "talent" works on two levels because it means both
Question 12 of 25In its first chapter, "The Prison-Door," Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) says: "The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison." The irony of this sentence is that
Question 13 of 25These are the opening lines of Dante's Inferno in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's translation: "Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost." The dark forest most likely stands for
Question 14 of 25James Joyce's story "The Dead" (1914) ends: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." The repeated soft sounds and the reversal of "falling faintly" into "faintly falling" mainly create
Question 15 of 25In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Mark Antony speaks at Caesar's funeral after Brutus has justified the murder: "Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest, / For Brutus is an honourable man, / So are they all, all honourable men, / Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral. / He was my friend, faithful and just to me; / But Brutus says he was ambitious, / And Brutus is an honourable man." The repeated word "honourable" is mainly
Question 16 of 25Emily Dickinson begins a poem: "Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne'er succeed. / To comprehend a nectar / Requires sorest need." These lines claim that
Question 17 of 25In Thomas Hardy's "The Man He Killed" (1902), a former soldier tells of shooting an enemy who, he guesses, had enlisted for the same reason he did: he was out of work. The poem ends: "Yes; quaint and curious war is! / You shoot a fellow down / You'd treat if met where any bar is, / Or help to half-a-crown." The stanza suggests that
Question 18 of 25William Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper" in Songs of Innocence (1789) begins: "When my mother died I was very young, / And my father sold me while yet my tongue / Could scarcely cry ‘Weep! weep! weep! weep!’ / So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep." The child's cry is a pun because it is both
Question 19 of 25Francis Bacon writes in his essay "Of Studies": "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested;" Bacon means that
Question 20 of 25Read this short scene, written for this quiz: DORA (folding a letter, then folding it again): Your brother says the weather in Phoenix is lovely. SAM: Does he say anything else? DORA (pressing the letter flat with her palm): He says the weather is lovely. SAM: Then I suppose it must be. Dora's actions and repetition most strongly suggest that
Question 21 of 25Read Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice" (1920): "Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice. / From what I've tasted of desire / I hold with those who favor fire. / But if it had to perish twice, / I think I know enough of hate / To say that for destruction ice / Is also great / And would suffice." The final words "would suffice" are an example of
Question 22 of 25In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), Douglass introduces the story of his fight with a cruel slave-breaker by writing: "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man." The sentence relies on
Question 23 of 25Jane Austen's Emma (1815) begins: "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her." The word "seemed" mainly
Question 24 of 25Read this passage from an essay written for this quiz: "We call them labor-saving devices, and each one does save labor, once. The dishwasher saves an hour, and the hour is quietly spent answering email on the phone that saved us a trip to the post office." The tone of the passage is best described as
Question 25 of 25John Keats's "To Autumn" (1820) begins: "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; / Conspiring with him how to load and bless / With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;" Autumn is presented through

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