There Will Come Soft Rains

​There Will Come Soft Rains

​Reading: Make Inferences and Read on to Find

Additional Support

​An inference is an insight, based on stated details, about information that is not stated.

Making inferences helps you make connections between facts or events. After making an inference, read on to find additional support. If other details disprove your inference, change it.

Open Ended

In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunnyside up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two cool glasses of milk.

What inference can you make?

Open Ended

The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.

What inference can you make?

Open Ended

The dog, once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud.

What inference can you make?

Literary Analysis: Setting

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All stories have a setting—the time and the place of the story’s events. To establish a setting, writers use descriptions, or word-pictures, to appeal to the senses. Settings shape stories by helping to determine plot as well as characters’ concerns and values.

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A story may have an overall setting as well as specific settings. There may be more than one setting as the action moves from place to place, and from one time to another. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, for example, the overall setting is Verona, Italy, in the sixteenth century, but

the specific time and place changes from scene to scene.

You should pay attention to details about the setting, just as you pay attention to other information in the story. What details give you information about the time and place of a story, and what is the effect of those details?

Multiple Choice

What is the setting of “There Will Come Soft Rains”?

• on a Pacific island in 2026

• in a small town in California in 1950

• in a city in California in the near future

• on a Pacific island a few years after World War II

Multiple Choice

How is the setting of “There Will Come Soft Rains” revealed to the reader?

• The date and location are burned into the side of the house.

• The house states the time, date, and location at the beginning of the story.

• The reader must figure it out based on a variety of clues throughout the

  story.

• There is a newspaper on the kitchen table that shows the date and location

  of the story.

Multiple Choice

Where are the human beings in “There Will Come Soft Rains”?

• They are all at work or at school.

• They have all moved to a different city.

• They have all been destroyed by a nuclear war.

• They are all being held prisoner in the basement of the automated house.

Multiple Choice

Which of the following details helps you figure out what has happened to the owners of the house in “There Will Come Soft Rains”?

• Mrs. McClellan likes to listen to poetry in the evenings.

• The stove prepares a breakfast that goes uneaten.

• There are silhouettes of four people burned into the side of the house.

• The house carefully keeps itself clean and protects itself from harm.

Multiple Choice

At the beginning of the story, the stove prepares eight pieces of toast, eight eggs, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two glasses of milk. What can you figure out about the McClellan family based on this information?

• The family is having guests over for breakfast.

• Two of the family members are allergic to milk.

• The stove usually burns the toast and undercooks the eggs.

• There are four family members, and two of them are children.

Multiple Choice

What is the purpose of the robot mice in “There Will Come Soft Rains”?

• to entertain the family’s cat

• to clean the floors of the house

• to feed and groom the family’s dog

• to serve the food prepared by the stove

Multiple Choice

What happens to the family’s dog in “There Will Come Soft Rains”?

• It dies of radiation sickness and starvation.

• It wandered away before the beginning of the story.

• The house takes care of it, but it becomes ill from loneliness and bad food.

• It is taken in by another family because the McClellans can no longer take care of it.

Multiple Choice

What was the last thing the McClellan children did before the story begins?

• They played a game of catch.

• They listened to poetry before bedtime.

• They watched the animal scenes in the nursery.

• They ate eggs, toast, and bacon prepared by the stove.

Multiple Choice

What is the poem by Sara Teasdale about?

• the beauty of a soft rain shower in the springtime

• how she wishes she owned a high-tech automated house

• that nature would not care if humans disappeared entirely

• that spring always comes to an end when the heat of summer arrives

Multiple Choice

How does the automated house “die” in “There Will Come Soft Rains”?

• It is blown up in a nuclear blast.

• The electronic mice tear it down.

• It catches on fire and is unable to put the fire out.

• Its owners leave it and it eventually stops functioning.

Multiple Choice

In “There Will Come Soft Rains,” machines, not humans, perform all house chores. Which of the following adjectives best describes the feeling that is created by this setting?

• cheerful

• frightening

• reassuring

• impersonal