Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra

Author:Alejandro Zambra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-06-22T14:15:22+00:00

V. READING COMPREHENSION

Next you will read three texts, each of them followed by questions or problems based on their content. Each question has five possible answers. Mark the one that you think is most appropriate.

TEXT #1

After so many study guides, so many practice and proficiency and achievement tests, it would have been impossible for us not to learn something, but we forgot everything almost right away and, I’m afraid, for good. The thing that we did learn, and to perfection—the thing we would remember for the rest of our lives—was how to cheat on tests. Here I could easily ad-lib an homage to the cheat sheet, all the test material reproduced in tiny but legible script on a minuscule bus ticket. But all that superb workmanship would have been worthless if we hadn’t also had the necessary skill and audacity when the crucial moment came: the instant the teacher lowered his guard and the ten or twenty golden seconds began.

At our school in particular, which in theory was the strictest in Chile, it turned out that cheating was fairly easy, since many of the tests were multiple choice. We still had years to go before we’d take the Academic Aptitude Test and apply to university, but our teachers wanted to familiarize us right away with multiple-choice exercises, and although they designed up to four different versions of every test, we always found a way to pass information around. We didn’t have to write anything or form opinions or develop any ideas of our own; all we had to do was play the game and guess the trick. Of course we studied, sometimes a lot, but it was never enough. I guess the idea was to lower our morale. Even if we did nothing but study, we knew there would always be two or three impossible questions. We didn’t complain. We got the message: Cheating was just part of the deal.

I think that, thanks to our cheating, we were able to let go of some of our individualism and become a community. It’s sad to put it this way, but cheating gave us a sense of solidarity. Every once in a while we suffered from guilt, from the feeling that we were frauds—especially when we looked ahead to the future—but in the end our indolence and defiance prevailed.

__________

We didn’t have to take religion—the grade didn’t affect our averages—but getting out of it was a long bureaucratic process, and Mr. Segovia’s classes were really fun. He’d go on and on in an endless soliloquy about any subject but religion; his favorite, in fact, was sex, and which teachers at our school he wanted to have it with. Every class we’d do a quick round of confessions: Each of us had to disclose a sin, and after listening to all forty-five—which ranged from I kept the change to I want to grab my neighbor’s tits to I jacked off during recess, always a classic—the teacher would tell us that none of our sins were unforgivable.

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