Sharing Our Best AP English Lit Multiple Choice Questions

Does our Meme Exhibit Any Literary Term?

In an attempt to understand how to navigate AP Multiple Choice questions, we spent a night composing some. Here are our three best to date. We would appreciate any positive feedback in our comments below.

HB’s Multiple Choice question is good because she was able to find a word in the text that had multiple, valid meanings and could easily be misinterpreted by many test-takers. This makes her question one that the AP writers would look for because they are looking for test-takers who can closely read and analyze the material thoroughly. The choices that Hattie gave are similar as well, which requires the test-taker to dig deeper and critically think about the right answer.

In the phrase, “Then we went loafing around the town.The stores and houses was most all old, shackly, dried up frame concerns that hadn’t ever been painted; they was set up three or four foot above ground on stilts, so as to be out of reach of the water when the river was overflowed” spoken by Huck Finn in Chapter 21, the word “loafing” means that they:

1. Skipped around town
2. Wandered with speed around town
3. Trudged sadly around town
4. Walked idly around town

This question determines how good or bad the reader’s ability to understand a word in the context of a sentence is, and how to decide the best choice between similar definitions.

The answer to this question is D. To “loaf” around is to idle time away, and since they were walking around town, they were walking idly through the town. All the other answers could be looked at as distractors because “loafing” is not a normal word, and the definition could be obscure to a reader who has never encountered it before.

We have posted two other questions from the class here: ap-mult-choice-attempts  Do other classes try this practice? What other ways can students prepare for upcoming AP Multiple Choice questions?