Finding Salinger Context Clues

It had been raining again today, so Sonia had decided to ______________ her original plan to walk home after school.

• continue

• forego

• pause

• commence

It was pretty _______________ , she thought. Everyone else got to have a phone to entertain themselves, and she just had to sit there, bored, wasting her time.

• unfair

• solid

• hard

• justified

Then she shifted her attention to the spots and smudges on the window, ____________ them to see if they looked like anything.

• inspecting

• challenging

• presorted

• folded

It was a grey tabby cat with black stripes, and Tom had _________________ on naming it after some writer he liked.

• insisted

• started

• insistence

• contemplating

Salinger was already a few years old when they brought him home, and at first Sonia had been ________________ not to get a kitten, but later she decided it was probably better this way.

• disappointed

• reminded

• excited

As she unlocked the front door, Sonia ___________ that today she would allow herself to just lie around for an afternoon and do nothing but watch cartoons.

• decided

• confirmed

• criticized

• told

When her parents got divorced, her mom had insisted on moving out to a nice house in the ______________ so that Sonia and her brother wouldn’t have to grow up amid the chaos and noise of Seattle.

• suburbs

• countryside

• attic

• mountains

She felt like making the house really warm so that she could sit in front of the television wearing just a T-shirt and jeans to watch cartoons, and then she could ____________ it was summer again, rather than the seemingly never-ending dreariness that went on for months and months every winter.

• pretend

• conclude

• ascertain

• distinguish

No one in her family was particularly ____________ toward gardening or home improvement, so they had left the backyard the way it was when they moved in.

• inclined

• compelled

• happy

• moved

And over on the other side of the pond, also staring ____________ at the tadpoles, was Salinger the cat!

• intently

• honestly

• gravely

• lackadaisically