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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.

 

 

The Tales:

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.

 


 

 

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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.

  1. 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 . . .
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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, alliteration, etc.).
  6. 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.
  7. 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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