The Frame Story:
This book is a frame story. What is a frame story? It is a story that
exists only so that you can tell several short stories that don't go together.
The frame story for Arabian Nights is this:
The Sultan does not trust women. He hates them. However,
he must get married. So he marries a woman every so often and then kills
them the next morning.
Scheherazade decides she can stop this madness and places
herself into a position to get married. That night, she begins to tell
the Sultan a story. At the most exciting part, she says she is sleepy.
The Sultan wants to hear the rest of the story, so he lets her live.
She does this every night for 1001 nights. Finally she runs out of stories.
The Sultan has long decide he loves her and decides she will not die.
They live happily ever after.
All the stories used where adapted from Candlelight
Tales and used with permission. I encourage you to go there and
read more tales from Arabian Nights if you are interested.
EOC Style Questions:
The purpose of this unit is to give you experience with
EOC style test questions. Here are some of the types of questions that
we focused on for this unit and the type of questions you'll see on our
unit test. Our unit test will look exactly like
the stories we did in class plus you'll need to know what a frame story
is and what the frame story of Arabian Nights.
- What is the purpose of this passage?
- When you see this, what you need to think is "Why was this written?"
The answer is usually something like to entertain, to teach a lesson,
to demonstrate how to do . . ., to persuade the reader to . . .
- What does _____ mean as used in the
passage? - This is a vocabulary type question, but it
is not asking if you know the meaning of the word, but rather can you
figure it out from the way it is used in the story.
- What is the best lesson that can be
learned from this passage? - It might say "best
lesson," or "best title," or best whatever. The key here
is the word "best." This means that there may/will be more
than one correct answer, but only one is the best answer. The EOC uses
this type question to test whether or not you read the passage, if not,
it is highly likely you'll fall for one of the wrong answers.
- What happened in the passage?
- This is pure plot level. What happened. You can go back through
and find the answer. This should be the easiest type of question.
- This is an example of ______.
- This is a literary term question. The answer choices will be different
literary tersm like we practice in class (metaphor, irony, simile, allusion,
- What will happen next?
- There is often a question that asks for you to think about what will
happen next. In these cases you should look for an obvious occurence.
If the hero repeatedly did something in the reading passage and did
not learn his lesson, he will probably continue to do so. Take Sinbad
for instance. He repeated goes out and gets ship wrecked. Chances are
that he will continue to do so.
- What type of writing is this?
- The answer will be something like:
- prose - this is if it is written in paragraph
form. Most stories and articels are written in prose
- poetry - it will look like poetry, words
will not go to the margins
- drama - this is a play, there will be
speaking parts and all
- fable - this is a story usually with
animals and it always teaches a moral at the end (will usually say,
the moral of the story is...)
The best tip is to READ THE STORY!!!!! This is
guarranteed to increase your percentage in getting the correct answers.
The EOC is designed to trick those who just guess or look through the
text to find the answers without reading.
This is a picture from our test story.
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