CLEP Composition and Literature Certification Exam Questions with AI Explanations

QUESTION: 36

The Prairie States

A NEWER garden of creation, no primal solitude,
Dense, joyous, modern, populous millions, cities and farms,
With iron interlaced, composite, tied, many in one,
By all the world contributed – freedom’s and law’s and thrift’s society,
The crown and teeming paradise, so far, of time’s accumulations,
To justify the past.

“iron interlaced” in line 3 refers to

the steel industry
slaves
railroads
telephone system
the Internet

Answer(s): C

Explanation:

The author Walt Whitman refers to the important role played by the railroad lines made of iron that helped to develop and tie together the Midwestern states.

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QUESTION: 37

They are rich and prosperous.
They are full of industry and agriculture.
They are faint copies of a lost paradise.
They are sustained by the institution of slavery.
They represent America’s diversity, union, and strength.

Answer(s): E

Explanation:

Whitman praises the prairie states as a “NEWER garden of creation.” He speaks of the diverse origins of the people who live in these states, their interconnectedness, and their embodiment of America’s strength.

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QUESTION: 38

Which poem describes the narrator’s “sorrow for the lost Lenore”?

To One in Paradise
The Raven
A Clear Midnight
I Thought I was not Alone
The Conqueror Worm

Answer(s): B

Explanation:

Poe’s The Raven describes the narrator’s sadness following the death of his beloved Lenore.

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QUESTION: 39

Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser are best categorized as

Romantics
Transcendentalists
Naturalists
Realists
Modernists

Answer(s): C

Explanation:

These authors are commonly characterized as “Naturalists.” Naturalist fiction attempted to portray a scientifically accurate, detached picture of life, including everything and selecting nothing for particular emphasis. Unlike Realism, Naturalism emphasizes the determining role of heredity and environment in characters’ lives.

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QUESTION: 40

The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army’s feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills.

The passage above opens

James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers
John Dos Passos’s 1919
Earnest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls
Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage
William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

Answer(s): D

Explanation:

The passage is from the opening of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. The protagonist, Henry Fleming, is a soldier in the Union Army.

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QUESTION: 36

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QUESTION: 37

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QUESTION: 38

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QUESTION: 39

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QUESTION: 40

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