Stories on the test
About a quarter of the reading passages on the GED Language Arts test are literary, and almost all of those are stories: a piece of a short story or a novel. Each passage is 450 to 900 words long and has six to eight questions.
The questions ask the same few things again and again:
- What happens, and why. The order of events, and what caused what.
- What the characters are like. What they want, what they feel, and how you can tell, even when the story does not say it outright. Working something out from what the story does say is called making an inference.
- What a word or a comparison means in the sentence where it sits.
- How the story is told. Who is telling it, and what that voice sounds like: serious, joking, bitter, tender. That attitude is called tone.
- What the story is about underneath. An idea about life that the whole story shows is called its theme.
The only way to get good at these is to read stories and answer questions about them, and then to talk about them and write about them. That is what these pages are for.
How each story page works
- Before you read. Who wrote it, when, where it takes place, and the hard words, listed by paragraph.
- The story, with every paragraph numbered, so the questions can point to places in it.
- Questions like the test’s. Most have you choose one answer. Others ask you to choose two, to choose from a drop-down, or to put events in order, as the test does. Press Check after each one. If your answer is wrong, the page tells you why it was tempting, and you can try again.
- For talking it over. Questions with no single right answer, for class or for thinking about on your own.
- Write about it. A choice of things to write, and a box that saves your writing under your code, so you can come back to it and send it to Myles.
Every page prints cleanly, story and questions together, with the answers on the last page.
Why these stories
A story published in the United States in 1930 or earlier is now free for anyone to print. So each older story here is printed in full, and it is yours to keep. Stories written after 1930 still belong to their authors and publishers. Two of the pages pair an older story with a newer one that the Library of America has put online for free. The newer one stays on their site, and the page links to it.
One story, Rubén Darío’s, was written in Spanish. The Spanish is free to print, so it is here beside an English translation made for these pages.
They are all about people working, moving, arriving, and trying to be heard. Most of them take place in New York City.
The stories
Each story has its own page. Start with the first one. The first two are the length of a passage on the test; the others are longer, and the last two put two stories side by side. After the first, take them in any order.
- 1“The Story of an Hour”
Start hereTest lengthA woman with a weak heart is told her husband has been killed in a train accident. The story follows her through the next hour, alone in her room.
- 2“Hearts and Hands”
Test lengthOn a train out of Denver, a young woman sees an old friend walk down the aisle, handcuffed to another man. One of them is a marshal; the other is going to prison. Read it twice.
- 3“The Cop and the Anthem”
A homeless man in Madison Square tries all night to get himself arrested, so he can spend the winter in the jail on Blackwell’s Island, now Roosevelt Island.
- 4“The Bourgeois King”
English and SpanishA rich king who collects beautiful things is brought a hungry poet, and puts him to work in the garden, turning the handle of a music box, one tune for one piece of bread.
- 5“My Life with the Wave”
With “The Bourgeois King”A man goes to the sea, and a wave follows him home to Mexico City. For a while she fills his life with light. Then winter comes. Read in class, from the book.
- 6“America and I” and “The First Seven Years”
Two at a timeTwo stories about work, and what it is for. A young immigrant woman on the Lower East Side goes from job to job looking for work that uses what is in her; a shoemaker’s helper works five years for almost nothing, for a reason he has never said.
- 7“In the Land of the Free” and “The Loudest Voice”
Two at a timeTwo stories about a child, a family, and becoming American. A Chinese mother in San Francisco has her son taken at the dock for lack of a paper; a Jewish girl in New York is picked for the school Christmas play because of her voice.
More to read, free
No questions on these yet. They are here because they are worth your time.
- The Library of America’s Story of the Week. A free story every week, with more than seven hundred in the archive, all readable online without an account. Three set in New York: James Baldwin’s “The Rockpile” (a family in Harlem), Bernard Malamud’s “Idiots First” (a dying father, one night, trying to get his son on a train), and Zora Neale Hurston’s “Story in Harlem Slang”. All the stories, by author.
- O. Henry, The Four Million. The book “The Cop and the Anthem” comes from: twenty-five stories of ordinary New Yorkers, free at Project Gutenberg. “The Gift of the Magi” is in it.
- Anzia Yezierska, Hungry Hearts. Her first book of stories of the Lower East Side, 1920, free at Project Gutenberg.
Borrow or buy
A library card is free. Anyone who lives, works or goes to school in New York State can get a New York Public Library card, and borrow e-books and audiobooks on a phone. How to get one.
Books of short stories to look for, at the library or in a bookstore:
- Flash Fiction America (Norton). Seventy-three very short stories by American writers. Many are the length of a test passage.
- Sudden Fiction Latino (Norton). Very short stories by writers from the United States and Latin America.
- Nicholasa Mohr, El Bronx Remembered. Stories of Puerto Rican families in the Bronx after the Second World War.
- Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak! Stories of Haiti, and of Haitian families in New York.
- Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street. A girl growing up in Chicago, told in very short chapters, most of them a page or two.
- Langston Hughes, The Best of Simple. Short conversations in a Harlem bar with Jesse B. Semple, a working man with an opinion about everything.