Are You Literate?

To live without literature is to hardly live at all, and without a sound knowledge of literature one can hardly understand language and its many manifestations. In short, to be literate is not merely being able to write your name, nor is it about being able to read scholarly, difficult articles. It is much more than that.

Are you literate, or are you merely pretending to be literate? Has your education wasted your time and money, or has it given you a solid foundation? Take this quiz and find out if you are one of the literati, a scribe who uses words like handtools, or someone in dire need of learning!

1. What is your age?
Under 18 Years Old
18 to 24 Years Old
25 to 30 Years Old
31 to 40 Years Old
41 to 50 Years Old
51 to 60 Years Old
Over 60 Years Old
2. What is your gender?
Male
Female
3. In the Iliad and Odyssey, Helen is from which city?
Athens
Sparta
Mycenae
Troy
4. Livy the historian was the author of which work?
Ab Urbe Condita
A History of My Times
The Twelve Caesars
Julius Caesar
5. An early Roman book about cosmetics was written by:
Virgil
Lucretius
Ovid
Maecenas
6. Geoffrey Chaucer likely met this poet.
Dante Alighieri
Petrarch
Julian of Norwich
Christopher Marlowe
7. "World, world, O world! But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee, Life would not yield to age" This phrase comes from which play by William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet
Hamlet
King Lear
Macbeth
8. The English novelist who most resembles the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky is:
Charles Dickens
Thomas Hardy
Joseph Conrad
Conrad and Dickens
9. The style of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy may best be described using one of the following terms:
Serious Realism
Polished Naturalism
Trashy Romance
Spiritually Historical
10. Out of the two poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, you think the better poet is:
Ted Hughes
Sylvia Plath
Both are outstanding poets
Neither are very good
11. Postcolonial theory is:
Bad scholarship
Interesting but limited
Excellent
Cutting edge
12. Comma splicing is
An annoying habit of bad writers
A ridiculous term for proper punctuation
A fiction invented by the MLA
An experimental form of punctuation used by European writers
13. The "Deutsches Requiem" is a short story by
Leni Riefenstahl
E.T.A. Hoffman
Jorge Luis Borges
Alphonse Daudet
14. In "The Trial" by Franz Kafka, the picture in the Cathedral depicts which of the following:
Two trees
A fountain
A crucifix
None of the above
15. Argot is another term for:
The ship that Jason navigated to the Black Sea.
Rotten rye that produces lysergic acid.
The kind of jargon loved and employed in the novels of Victor Hugo and Louis-Ferdinand Celine.
A specialized terminology, or jargon.
16. Out of the following, the best Portuguese poet and writer is:
Fernando Pessoa
Bernardo Soares
Ricardo Reis
All are equally good
17. Which of the following has not won the Nobel Prize?
Gao Xinjiang
Oe Kenzaburo
Jorge Luis Borges
Orhan Pamuk
18. The first novel was written by:
A man--Miguel de Cervantes
A man--Petronius Arbiter
A woman--Murasaki Shikibu
A woman--Aphra Behn
19. Oprah Winfrey has...
contributed considerably to the literary consciousness of Americans.
instituted a rigorous program of thought control disguised as book reading.
has no effect on literary culture whatsoever.
truly shown the way for people trying to educate themselves.
20. In the philsophy of Martin Heidegger, the concept of "projection" is known in German as:
Entwurf
das Wovor
Dasein
Zeit
21. The concept of a Theatre of Cruelty was first formulated by
Susan Sontag
Antonin Artaud
Samuel Beckett
Eugene Ionesco
22. Han Shan refers to
The name of a poet
The name of a place
The name of a book
All three
None of the above
23. A noun is
A person
A place
A thing
A person, a place, or a thing
24. The Bible was written by
The Catholic Church
Whites oppressing other minorities
North Africans, Jews, Greeks, and Others
Nobody knows
25. The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa was fond of adapting this person's plays:
Maxim Gorky
Chikamatsu Monzaemon
William Shakespeare
Yukio Mishima

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