1. Marriage has always proved irresistible to my family. We try and fail and try again, somehow maintaining our belief in an institution that has made fools of us all. I’ve married twice; so has my sister. Our mother had three husbands. None of us intended this to happen. We meant to stick our landing on the first try, but we stumbled. My parents divorced when I was five. My mother and my stepfather Mike had their final parting when I was twenty-four. She married Darrell when I was twenty-seven, and they stayed together until he died, in 2018, when I was fifty-four. My problems were never ones of scarcity. I suffered from abundance, too much and too many. There are worse problems to have.

In this paragraph, the main concept is that

1. The second time that my sister, Heather, married, in 2005, she wanted a real wedding. She and her new husband, Bill, threw a terrific party in a barn that had been fancied up and turned into an event space. My husband, Karl, and I had eloped a few months before, and those beautiful words of love and commitment were still fresh. We drank the champagne, danced in a line, blew soap bubbles into the night sky above the bride and groom. Only my former stepfather, Mike, was sullen. His third marriage was nearing its end, and he was in love with my mother again. But my mother was happy with Darrell, so Mike danced with me for most of the night.

The author is mostly stating

1. Darrell noticed none of this. Eight weeks earlier, he had fallen down the brick stairs that led to the back door of the house where he lived with my mother and fractured several vertebrae. He was wearing a brace beneath his suit, beneath his clerical gown. He was a retired Presbyterian minister, and he officiated at my sister’s wedding, despite the pain it caused him to walk and stand and breathe. He hung on through the dinner and then got a ride home.

The word “officiated” here means

1. I called my father first, since I pegged him as the one most likely to say no, but he surprised me. Sure, he said, fine. He didn’t care.

The word “pegged” indicates

1. Then I asked Mike, who would have found a way to get me the North Star had I wanted it. Although he hesitated, he said yes as well. He didn’t like the idea, but as far as I was concerned he didn’t have to like it. It would take two minutes.

To get her the North Star indicated

Mike would do anything for her

Mike would spend time looking up at the stars with her when she was a little girl

Mike was extremely selfish

None of the above

1. The three fathers died in the order in which my mother had married them, and in the inverse order of their health. My father went first, even though he had made a religion of the elliptical trainer, the treadmill, the NordicTrack.

The idea behind the word “religion” has to do with

1. He spent four slow years dying of a neurological disease called progressive supranuclear palsy, which, in the end, confined him to a wheelchair. His wife took care of him at home, a herculean task that allowed him to die in the comfort of their bed.

The word “herculean” has the idea behind it of

1. Darrell made death hard. He hadn’t been well for decades. After his broken back, there was a series of splintering falls, a terrible car accident, a shunt for hydrocephalus, and two kinds of cancer. But he kept on living. Sitting by Darrell’s bed in the assisted-living center where he spent his final, excruciating years, I remembered the photograph.

Excruciating means

mentally agonizing

very embarrassing

awkward and tedious

All of the above

1. Without us, my father rented out the house on Rossmoyne and returned to his father’s house on Council Street and his bed on the porch. My sister and I flew from Nashville to visit for a week every summer. After the yearly purchase of two plane tickets for us, he used what was left of his savings to take us to Disneyland or Knott’s Berry Farm, but the place we all liked best was Forest Lawn. Forest Lawn was free. We would bring a lunch and walk the paths through the exemplary grass to see where the movie stars were buried, then we would go and stand in the crisp, cold air of the flower shop, which looked like a summer retreat for hobbits.

The word “exemplary” has the idea behind it of

A model

An example

Something to imitate

All of the above

1. From the other side of the country, our father tried to shape us.

This line has the idea behind it that the author’s father wanted to

1. My father wanted me to be athletic. He wanted me to be on teams, join clubs, start clubs. He wanted me to run for office in any organization that held elections. He wanted me to audition, volunteer, be a part of something, submit. When I claimed to have no interest in a high-school sorority he was pushing, he told me to become a member of that organization, rise through the ranks, and then change the system from within. He wanted me to infiltrate.

The idea behind the word infiltration has to do with

1. I’m older now than my father was then. There are so many ways to think about these conversations in the aftermath of time. Maybe he was trying to save me from suffering. He remembered his father walking through Los Angeles all day looking for work with a sandwich in his pocket and a wife and seven children back on Council Street. He remembered working in a liquor store after the Navy, sleeping on the porch. Wouldn’t he want to spare me that? Maybe all he could do was operate within the confines of the world he knew: Catholicism, the Navy, the police department.

The word confines has the idea behind it of

1. I got an M.F.A. from Iowa, a handful of fellowships, a smattering of prizes

Based on this story, an MFA is

1. I grew up in the weather of his insanity, and yet the gifts he gave me are legion.

In this story, the word “legion” means

1. Or he did care, but in the same way that he cared about Heather’s job as a development officer for a liberal-arts college. He had a son who was the editor of a newspaper, a son who was a doctor, a daughter who was a Realtor. He seemed to be equally impressed with all of us. When he read one of my books or came to a reading, he would give me a hug afterward and say, “Aren’t you a wonder,” which was also what he said when I picked up Italian food for dinner or helped clean out the garage. I heard him say it to his children and to his grandchildren and to my mother. “Aren’t you a wonder.” It was a statement, not a question, and, as many times as he said it, it never sounded like a stock phrase.

One can infer from “a stock phrase” to mean

1. Darrell was forever falling. His son-in-law would come to pick him up off the floor. The fire department would come. He broke ribs; there were compression fractures in his spine. He wouldn’t eat and dwindled to a pile of bones that made us question how life was sustained.

In this paragraph, the word “sustained” means

1. The bicyclist who won the race was given a trophy and a standing ovation.

What word is the relative pronoun?

1. It was John, himself, who was to blame.

Which word is the relative pronoun?

1. She blames herself for the accident.

Which word is the noun that correlates with the relative pronoun?