Passage I: Public Contradiction and Private Fate

Book the First, Chapter 1, 'The Period'

Questions 1–8. Read the following carefully before you choose your answers.

IT WAS the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of
wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was
the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of
Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had
5 everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to
Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so
far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted
on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of
comparison only. There were a king with a large jaw, and a queen with a
10 plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw,
and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it
was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and
fishes, that things in general were settled for ever. It was the year of Our
Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were
15 conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had
recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a
prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by
announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and
Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of
20 years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last
past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere
messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown
and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange
to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any
25 communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane
brood. France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her
sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down
hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her
Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane
30 achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue
torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled
down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed
within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely
enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing
35 trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman,
Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable
framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely
enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands
adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude
40 carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in
by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his
tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they
work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about
with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that
45 they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous. In England, there was
scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national
boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took place
in the capital itself every night; families were publicly cautioned not to
go out of town without removing their furniture to upholsterers’ warehouses
50 for security; the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the light,
and, being recognised and challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stopped
in his character of “the Captain,” gallantly shot him through the head and
rode away; the mail was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three
dead, and then got shot dead himself by the other four, “in consequence of
55 the failure of his ammunition”: after which the mail was robbed in peace;
that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand and
deliver on Turnham Green by one highwayman, who despoiled the illustrious
creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London gaols fought
battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the law fired blunderbusses
60 in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball; thieves snipped off
diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at Court drawing-rooms;

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

 musketeers went into St. Giles’s, to search for contraband goods, and the
mob fired on the musketeers, and the musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody
thought any of these occurrences much out of the common way. In the midst of
65 them, the hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant
requisition; now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now,
hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now,
burning people in the hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now, burning
pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an
70 atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a
farmer’s boy of sixpence. All these things, and a thousand like them, came
to pass in and close upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred and
seventy-five. Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer worked
unheeded, those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain and
75 the fair faces, trod with stir enough, and carried their divine rights with
a high hand. Thus did the year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five
conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small creatures—the creatures of
this chronicle among the rest—along the roads that lay before them. 2 The
Mail IT WAS the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November,
80 before the first of the persons with whom this history has business. The
Dover road lay, as to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up
Shooter’s Hill. He walked uphill in the mire by the side of the mail, as the
rest of the passengers did; not because they had the least relish for
walking exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill, and the
85 harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the horses had
three times already come to a stop, besides once drawing the coach across
the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it back to Blackheath.

1. The opening catalogue of oppositions chiefly establishes the period as

(A) a purely comic setting in which political extremes cancel one another harmlessly.

(B) a nostalgic age whose errors are softened by the narrator's retrospective distance.

(C) an era whose public meanings are unstable because every judgment produces its counterjudgment.

(D) a moral allegory in which English institutions are consistently superior to French ones.

(E) a chronology whose importance lies mainly in factual precision rather than interpretive pressure.

2. The phrase about 'noisiest authorities' most strongly suggests that the narrator

(A) accepts official opinion because it provides needed historical order.

(B) resents political speech only when it interrupts domestic feeling.

(C) treats authority as laughable because it has no practical effect.

(D) prefers private memory to any account that names public events.

(E) distrusts confident public simplifications even while adopting a grand public voice.

3. The personifications of the Woodman and the Farmer function primarily to

(A) turn historical causation into an accidental sequence of unrelated images.

(B) make revolutionary violence appear latent, patient, and already materializing before anyone acknowledges it.

(C) excuse the aristocracy by making fate rather than policy responsible.

(D) interrupt the chapter's realism with a temporary supernatural episode.

(E) shift sympathy away from future victims and toward abstract natural law.

4. The movement from monarchs to 'small creatures' most nearly implies that

(A) the novel will abandon politics once its private plot begins.

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

 (B) ordinary people are morally simpler than kings and queens.

(C) royal power is ultimately more comic than destructive.

(D) large historical forces become narratively meaningful only as they press upon individual lives.

(E) the narrator regards common lives as too numerous to distinguish.

5. The tone of the passage as a whole is best described as

(A) prophetic, ironic, and morally foreboding.

(B) sentimental, apologetic, and gently elegiac.

(C) detached, archival, and politically neutral.

(D) celebratory, patriotic, and confidently reformist.

(E) playful, pastoral, and deliberately inconsequential.

6. The narrator's phrase 'clearer than crystal' is most caustic because it

(A) celebrates the administrative competence of both monarchies.

(B) marks the one moment in the passage free from irony.

(C) suggests that political prophecy is unavailable to fiction.

(D) uses the language of transparency to expose the blindness of ruling certainty.

(E) privileges optical imagery over moral judgment without connecting them.

7. The alliterative 'loaves and fishes' allusion most sharply characterizes the ruling class as

(A) treating public stewardship as a private miracle of consumption.

(B) preserving religious charity against secular revolution.

(C) misreading scripture because they lack formal education.

(D) feeding the poor through inherited obligation.

(E) rejecting material pleasure in favor of spiritual discipline.

8. The passage's historical sweep is made rhetorically unstable by its tendency to

(A) exclude all concrete examples in favor of abstraction.

(B) announce a single thesis and then avoid qualifying it.

(C) treat monarchy as tragic but the common people as purely comic.

(D) withhold temporal markers until the final sentence.

(E) yoke cosmic inevitability to comic specificity.

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

Passage II: The Mystery of Other Minds
Book the First, Chapter 3, 'The Night Shadows'

Questions 9–16. Read the following carefully before you choose your answers.

A WONDERFUL fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted

to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn
consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those
darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every
5 one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the
hundreds of thousands of breasts there is, in some of its imaginings, a
secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death
itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear
book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I
10 look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary
lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other
things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring,
for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the
water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on
15 its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my
neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the
inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in
that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end. In any
of the burial- places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper
20 more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost
personality, to me, or than I am to them? As to this, his natural and not to
be alienated inheritance, the messenger on horseback had exactly the same
possessions as the King, the first Minister of State, or the richest
merchant in London. So with the three passengers shut up in the narrow
25 compass of one lumbering old mail coach; they were mysteries to one another,
as complete as if each had been in his own coach and six, or his own coach
and sixty, with the breadth of a county between him and the next. The
messenger rode back at an easy trot, stopping pretty often at ale-houses by
the way to drink, but evincing a tendency to keep his own counsel, and to
30 keep his hat cocked over his eyes. He had eyes that assorted very well with
that decoration, being of a surface black, with no depth in the colour or
form, and much too near together—as if they were afraid of being found out
in something, singly, if they kept too far apart. They had a sinister
expression, under an old cocked-hat like a three-cornered spittoon, and over
35 a great muffler for the chin and throat, which descended nearly to the
wearer’s knees. When he stopped for drink, he moved this muffler with his
left hand, only while he poured his liquor in with his right; as soon as
that was done, he muffled again. “No, Jerry, no!” said the messenger,
harping on one theme as he rode. “It wouldn’t do for you, Jerry. Jerry, you
40 honest tradesman, it wouldn’t suit your line of business! Recalled—! Bust me
if I don’t think he’d been a drinking!” His message perplexed his mind to
that degree that he was fain, several times, to take off his hat to scratch
his head. Except on the crown, which was raggedly bald, he had stiff, black
hair, standing jaggedly all over it, and growing downhill almost to his
45 broad, blunt nose. It was so like smith’s work, so much more like the top of
a strongly spiked wall than a head of hair, that the best of players at
leap-frog might have declined him, as the most dangerous man in the world to
go over. While he trotted back with the message he was to deliver to the
night watchman in his box at the door of Tellson’s Bank, by Temple Bar, who
50 was to deliver it to greater authorities within, the shadows of the night
took such shapes to him as arose out of the message, and took such shapes to
the mare as arose out of her private topics of uneasiness. They seemed to be
numerous, for she shied at every shadow on the road. What time, the
mail-coach lumbered, jolted, rattled, and bumped upon its tedious way, with
55 its three fellowinscrutables inside. To whom, likewise, the shadows of the
night revealed themselves, in the forms their dozing eyes and wandering
thoughts suggested. Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail. As the
bank passenger—with an arm drawn through the leathern strap, which did what
lay in it to keep him from pounding against the next passenger, and driving
60 him into his corner, whenever the coach got a special jolt—nodded in his
place, with half-shut eyes, the little coach-windows, and the coach-lamp
dimly gleaming through them, and the bulky bundle of opposite passenger,
became the bank, and did a great stroke of business. The rattle of the
harness was the chink of money, and more drafts were honoured in five

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

 65 minutes than even Tellson’s, with all its foreign and home connection, ever
paid in thrice the time. Then the strong- rooms underground, at Tellson’s,
with such of their valuable stores and secrets as were known to the
passenger (and it was not a little that he knew about them), opened before
him, and he went in among them with the great keys and the feebly-burning
70 candle, and found them safe, and strong, and sound, and still, just as he
had last seen them. But, though the bank was almost always with him, and
though the coach (in a confused way, like the presence of pain under an
opiate) was always with him, there was another current of impression that
never ceased to run, all through the night. He was on his way to dig some
75 one out of a grave. Now, which of the multitude of faces that showed
themselves before him was the true face of the buried person, the shadows of
the night did not indicate; but they were all the faces of a man of
five-and-forty by years, and they differed principally in the passions they
expressed, and in the ghastliness of their worn and wasted state. Pride,
80 contempt, defiance, stubbornness, submission, lamentation, succeeded one
another; so did varieties of sunken cheek, cadaverous colour, emaciated
hands and figures.

9. The passage's central analogy between a city and human consciousness suggests that

(A) urban life makes people morally interchangeable.

(B) social proximity does not abolish the radical privacy of individual experience.

(C) personal secrecy is always a sign of guilt.

(D) death matters less in crowds than in families.

(E) modern cities are more mysterious than ancient ones only because they are larger.

10. The repetition of 'secret' chiefly produces

(A) a satirical complaint about urban gossip.

(B) a mechanical rhythm that lightens the seriousness of the meditation.

(C) a widening pressure, moving from houses to rooms to hearts while deepening the idea of unknowability.

(D) a legalistic insistence on facts already proved.

(E) a sentimental assurance that intimacy eventually solves isolation.

11. The reference to Death in the passage mainly functions to

(A) interrupt a philosophical passage with melodrama unrelated to the coach journey.

(B) translate everyday separateness into an existential condition rather than a mere social inconvenience.

(C) suggest that the narrator fears cities because they are unhealthy.

(D) reduce mystery to the practical difficulty of identifying bodies.

(E) imply that death is more comprehensible than ordinary human privacy.

12. The narrator's tone in this passage is best described as

(A) mock-heroic and openly contemptuous.

(B) frantic and accusatory.

(C) flippant and conversational.

(D) meditative and solemn, with an undercurrent of awe.

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

 (E) strictly documentary and impersonal.

13. Within the novel's larger concerns, this passage most clearly anticipates

(A) the final rejection of coincidence as a plot device.

(B) the narrator's preference for public history over private life.

(C) the difficulty of reading identities, motives, and buried histories from outward appearances.

(D) the disappearance of doubles after the opening chapters.

(E) the comic exposure of secrets as trivial misunderstandings.

14. The narrator's meditation is most philosophically unsettling because it makes mystery

(A) ordinary, ubiquitous, and therefore impossible to dismiss as exceptional.

(B) dependent on supernatural intervention.

(C) limited to criminals and political conspirators.

(D) a problem solved by the progress of the journey.

(E) less important than the physical danger of the road.

15. The movement from 'great city' to 'room' to 'heart' is best described as

(A) a digression that abandons the passage's central claim.

(B) a comic deflation from public grandeur to private trivia.

(C) a chronological sequence from adulthood back to childhood.

(D) a legal classification of increasingly serious offenses.

(E) a recursive narrowing that paradoxically enlarges the scale of unknowability.

16. The passage's diction of 'awfulness' and 'solemn consideration' most directly resists

(A) the novel's interest in historical violence.

(B) the idea that cities contain many separate dwellings.

(C) the use of first-person narration in philosophical passages.

(D) the possibility that death changes human relations.

(E) reducing secrecy to mere plot mechanics.

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

Passage III: Wine and Blood
Book the First, Chapter 5, 'The Wine-Shop'

Questions 17–24. Read the following carefully before you choose your answers.

The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street in
the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stained
many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes.
The hands of the man who sawed the wood left red marks on the billets; and
5 the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby was stained with the stain of
the old rag she wound about her head again. Those who had been greedy with
the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and
one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a
nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy
10 wine-lees—BLOOD. The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled
on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there.
And now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a momentary gleam had
driven from his sacred countenance, the darkness of it was heavy—cold, dirt,
sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in waiting on the saintly
15 presence—nobles of great power all of them; but, most especially, the last.
Samples of a people that had undergone a terrible grinding and re-grinding
in the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old people
young, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at every doorway, looked
from every window, fluttered in every vestige of a garment that the wind
20 shook. The mill which had worked them down was the mill that grinds young
people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them,
and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming
up afresh, was the sign, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was
pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles
25 and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and
paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of
firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless
chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its
refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker’s
30 shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at
the sausage-shop, in every dead- dog preparation that was offered for sale.
Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in the turned
cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomies in every farthing porringer of husky
chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil. Its abiding place
35 was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding street, full of offence and
stench, with other narrow winding streets diverging, all peopled by rags and
nightcaps, and all smelling of rags and nightcaps, and all visible things
with a brooding look upon them that looked ill. In the hunted air of the
people there was yet some wild- beast thought of the possibility of turning
40 at bay. Depressed and slinking though they were, eyes of fire were not
wanting among them; nor compressed lips, white with what they suppressed;
nor foreheads knitted into the likeness of the gallows-rope they mused about
enduring, or inflicting. The trade signs (and they were almost as many as
the shops) were, all, grim illustrations of Want. The butcher and the
45 porkman painted up only the leanest scrags of meat; the baker, the coarsest
of meagre loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinking in the wine-shops,
croaked over their scanty measures of thin wine and beer, and were
gloweringly confidential together. Nothing was represented in a flourishing
condition, save tools and weapons; but, the cutler’s knives and axes were
50 sharp and bright, the smith’s hammers were heavy, and the gunmaker’s stock
was murderous. The crippling stones of the pavement, with their many little
reservoirs of mud and water, had no footways, but broke off abruptly at the
doors. The kennel, to make amends, ran down the middle of the street—when it
ran at all: which was only after heavy rains, and then it ran, by many
55 eccentric fits, into the houses. Across the streets, at wide intervals, one
clumsy lamp was slung by a rope and pulley; at night, when the lamplighter
had let these down, and lighted, and hoisted them again, a feeble grove of
dim wicks swung in a sickly manner overhead, as if they were at sea. Indeed
they were at sea, and the ship and crew were in peril of tempest. For, the
60 time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of that region should have
watched the lamplighter, in their idleness and hunger, so long as to
conceive the idea of improving on his method, and hauling up men by those
ropes and pulleys, to flare upon the darkness of their condition. But, the
time was not come yet; and every wind that blew over France shook the rags

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

 65 of the scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of song and feather, took no
warning. The wine-shop was a corner shop, better than most others in its
appearance and degree, and the master of the wine-shop had stood outside it,
in a yellow waistcoat and green breeches, looking on at the struggle for the
lost wine. “It’s not my affair,” said he, with a final shrug of the
70 shoulders. “The people from the market did it. Let them bring another.”
There, his eyes happening to catch the tall joker writing up his joke, he
called to him across the way: “Say, then, my Gaspard, what do you do there?”
The fellow pointed to his joke with immense significance, as is often the
way with his tribe. It missed its mark, and completely failed, as is often
75 the way with his tribe too. “What now? Are you a subject for the mad
hospital?” said the wine-shop keeper, crossing the road, and obliterating
the jest with a handful of mud, picked up for the purpose, and smeared over
it. “Why do you write in the public streets? Is there—tell me thou—is there
no other place to write such words in?” In his expostulation he dropped his
80 cleaner hand (perhaps accidentally, perhaps not) upon the joker’s heart.

17. The spilled wine operates most powerfully as

(A) a realistic detail included to soften the poverty of Saint Antoine.

(B) a comic interruption in an otherwise solemn political chapter.

(C) a symbolic rehearsal of collective bloodshed that the crowd cannot yet fully name.

(D) a sign that the poor are morally responsible for their own deprivation.

(E) a romantic emblem of French conviviality.

18. The emphasis on stained hands, faces, feet, and mouths chiefly

(A) turns hunger into a visible mark that blurs the boundary between need and violence.

(B) individualizes each member of the crowd through careful portraiture.

(C) presents the crowd as secretly wealthy despite its poverty.

(D) makes the scene religiously ceremonial rather than political.

(E) suggests that the wine-shop is isolated from the history around it.

19. The tall joker's scrawled word most nearly functions as

(A) a legal accusation against the owner of the cask.

(B) a private joke that the narrator treats as harmless.

(C) a coded instruction from revolutionary leaders.

(D) an accidental prophecy whose playfulness is overwhelmed by historical consequence.

(E) a sentimental plea for charity.

20. The passage's treatment of the crowd is most accurately described as

(A) wholly admiring of revolutionary violence.

(B) sympathetic to suffering yet disturbed by the ferocity suffering can release.

(C) wholly contemptuous of poverty.

(D) neutral because the narrator avoids moral judgment.

(E) comic because the people are presented as theatrical buffoons.

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

21. The final prophetic turn in the passage mainly changes the spilled wine from

(A) public ceremony into private memory.

(B) political symbol into domestic comedy.

(C) local accident into historical pattern.

(D) visual detail into irrelevant background.

(E) literal hunger into aristocratic luxury.

22. The phrase 'tigerish smear' is especially charged because it

(A) portrays the crowd's hunger as refined and ceremonial.

(B) presents violence as biologically inevitable and politically irrelevant.

(C) softens the scene by making the crowd seem playful.

(D) confines the passage's meaning to one eccentric individual.

(E) converts deprivation into predatory imagery without erasing its social cause.

23. The red stain's spread across bodies and street most strongly produces

(A) a decorative color pattern detached from narrative consequence.

(B) a metonymic fusion of place, poverty, appetite, and impending violence.

(C) a sacramental image that redeems the entire crowd.

(D) a precise economic explanation of wine production.

(E) a sentimental tableau of neighborhood cooperation.

24. The passage's prophetic turn depends on the narrator's ability to

(A) deny the symbolic meaning of the written word.

(B) separate comic behavior from future violence.

(C) turn revolutionary history into an aristocratic romance.

(D) make a seemingly incidental street accident legible as historical prefiguration.

(E) replace visual imagery with legal analysis.

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

Passage IV: A Voice Underground
Book the First, Chapter 6, 'The Shoemaker'

Questions 25–32. Read the following carefully before you choose your answers.

The faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful. It was not the
faintness of physical weakness, though confinement and hard fare no doubt
had their part in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was, that it was the
faintness of solitude and disuse. It was like the last feeble echo of a
5 sound made long and long ago. So entirely had it lost the life and resonance
of the human voice, that it affected the senses like a once beautiful colour
faded away into a poor weak stain. So sunken and suppressed it was, that it
was like a voice underground. So expressive it was, of a hopeless and lost
creature, that a famished traveller, wearied out by lonely wandering in a
10 wilderness, would have remembered home and friends in such a tone before
lying down to die. Some minutes of silent work had passed, and the haggard
eyes had looked up again; not with any interest or curiosity, but with a
dull mechanical perception, beforehand, that the spot where the only visitor
they were aware of had stood, was not yet empty. “I want,” said Defarge, who
15 had not removed his gaze from the shoemaker, “to let in a little more light
here. You can bear a little more?” The shoemaker stopped his work; looked
with a vacant air of listening, at the floor on one side of him; then
similarly, at the floor on the other side of him; then upward at the
speaker. “What did you say?” “You can bear a little more light?” “I must
20 bear it, if you let it in.” (Laying the palest shadow of a stress upon the
second word.) The opened half-door was opened a little further, and secured
at that angle for the time. A broad ray of light fell into the garret, and
showed the workman with an unfinished shoe upon his lap, pausing in his
labour. His few common tools and various scraps of leather were at his feet
25 and on his bench. He had a white beard, raggedly cut, but not very long, a
hollow face, and exceedingly bright eyes. The hollowness and thinness of his
face would have caused them to look large, under his yet dark eyebrows and
his confused white hair, though they had been really otherwise; but, they
were naturally large, and looked unnaturally so. His yellow rags of shirt
30 lay open at the throat, and showed his body to be withered and worn. He, and
his old canvas frock, and his loose stockings, and all his poor tatters of
clothes, had, in a long seclusion from direct light and air, faded down to
such a dull uniformity of parchment-yellow, that it would have been hard to
say which was which. He had put up a hand between his eyes and the light,
35 and the very bones of it seemed transparent. So he sat, with a steadfastly
vacant gaze, pausing in his work. He never looked at the figure before him,
without first looking down on this side of himself, then on that, as if he
had lost the habit of associating place with sound; he never spoke, without
first wandering in this manner, and forgetting to speak. “Are you going to
40 finish that pair of shoes to-day?” asked Defarge, motioning to Mr. Lorry to
come forward. “What did you say?” “Do you mean to finish that pair of shoes
to-day?” “I can’t say that I mean to. I suppose so. I don’t know.” But, the
question reminded him of his work, and he bent over it again. Mr. Lorry came
silently forward, leaving the daughter by the door. When he had stood, for a
45 minute or two, by the side of Defarge, the shoemaker looked up. He showed no
surprise at seeing another figure, but the unsteady fingers of one of his
hands strayed to his lips as he looked at it (his lips and his nails were of
the same pale lead-colour), and then the hand dropped to his work, and he
once more bent over the shoe. The look and the action had occupied but an
50 instant. “You have a visitor, you see,” said Monsieur Defarge. “What did you
say?” “Here is a visitor.” The shoemaker looked up as before, but without
removing a hand from his work. “Come!” said Defarge. “Here is monsieur, who
knows a well-made shoe when he sees one. Show him that shoe you are working
at. Take it, monsieur.” Mr. Lorry took it in his hand. “Tell monsieur what
55 kind of shoe it is, and the maker’s name.” There was a longer pause than
usual, before the shoemaker replied: “I forget what it was you asked me.
What did you say?” “I said, couldn’t you describe the kind of shoe, for
monsieur’s information?” “It is a lady’s shoe. It is a young lady’s
walking-shoe. It is in the present mode. I never saw the mode. I have had a
60 pattern in my hand.” He glanced at the shoe with some little passing touch
of pride. “And the maker’s name?” said Defarge. Now that he had no work to
hold, he laid the knuckles of the right hand in the hollow of the left, and
then the knuckles of the left hand in the hollow of the right, and then
passed a hand across his bearded chin, and so on in regular changes, without

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

 65 a moment’s intermission. The task of recalling him from the vacancy into
which he always sank when he had spoken was like recalling some very weak
person from a swoon, or endeavouring, in the hope of some disclosure, to
stay the spirit of a fast-dying man. “Did you ask me for my name?”
“Assuredly I did.” “One Hundred and Five, North Tower.” “Is that all?” “One
70 Hundred and Five, North Tower.” With a weary sound that was not a sigh, nor
a groan, he bent to work again, until the silence was again broken. “You are
not a shoemaker by trade?” said Mr. Lorry, looking steadfastly at him. His
haggard eyes turned to Defarge as if he would have transferred the question
to him: but as no help came from that quarter, they turned back on the
75 questioner when they had sought the ground. “I am not a shoemaker by trade?
No, I was not a shoemaker by trade. I—I learnt it here. I taught myself. I
asked leave to—” He lapsed away, even for minutes, ringing those measured
changes on his hands the whole time. His eyes came slowly back, at last, to
the face from which they had wandered; when they rested on it, he started,
80 and resumed, in the manner of a sleeper that moment awake, reverting to a
subject of last night.

25. The passage's comparisons of the voice to echo, faded color, and underground sound chiefly convey

(A) the near-erasure of personhood by prolonged isolation.

(B) the speaker's deliberate theatrical attempt to manipulate listeners.

(C) the physical weakness of age as distinct from psychological injury.

(D) the narrator's uncertainty about whether the speaker is dangerous.

(E) the superiority of visual evidence over auditory evidence.

26. The phrase 'solitude and disuse' most directly identifies imprisonment as

(A) a punishment that clarifies moral judgment.

(B) a shelter from political corruption.

(C) a discipline that strengthens memory.

(D) a force that damages the faculties by depriving them of human exchange.

(E) a mystery whose effects cannot be described.

27. The passage's repeated 'So' at the start of clauses creates

(A) a cumulative diagnostic rhythm, as if each comparison fails and must be intensified.

(B) a comic impatience with excessive description.

(C) a legal sequence of charges against the prisoner.

(D) a hymn-like certainty that the man will be restored immediately.

(E) a conversational looseness that resists emotional pressure.

28. The imagined famished traveller primarily expands the voice's effect by

(A) replacing sympathy for the prisoner with sympathy for an unrelated figure.

(B) proving that the speaker has literally crossed a wilderness.

(C) suggesting that the listener's fear is irrational.

(D) introducing comic exaggeration into a solemn recognition scene.

(E) making its desolation recognizable through a scene of extremity outside the room.

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

29. The passage is most concerned with the tension between

(A) crime and punishment in a narrowly legal sense.

(B) survival and the loss of a self capable of ordinary human expression.

(C) domestic comfort and social ambition.

(D) French manners and English practicality.

(E) romantic secrecy and comic disclosure.

30. The synesthetic movement from sound to color chiefly suggests that the prisoner's damage

(A) is merely aesthetic rather than psychological.

(B) can be measured accurately by medical observation.

(C) exceeds any single sensory category and therefore strains representation.

(D) makes him more eloquent than those around him.

(E) has no effect on his recognizable identity.

31. The clause 'like a voice underground' most powerfully evokes

(A) a literal confession coming from beneath the floor.

(B) a living presence made sepulchral by social burial.

(C) a comic misunderstanding of where the speaker stands.

(D) a political slogan shouted by an unseen crowd.

(E) an aesthetic preference for low vocal pitch.

32. The passage's moral force depends on distinguishing

(A) French imprisonment from English imprisonment.

(B) memory from imagination in a technical psychological sense.

(C) fatherhood from legal identity.

(D) bodily survival from the preservation of human relational capacities.

(E) speech from writing as rival narrative modes.

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

Passage V: Appetite in the Courtroom
Book the Second, Chapter 2, 'A Sight'

Questions 33–40. Read the following carefully before you choose your answers.

The sort of interest with which this man was stared and breathed at was not
a sort that elevated humanity. Had he stood in peril of a less horrible
sentence—had there been a chance of any one of its savage details being
spared—by just so much would he have lost in his fascination. The form that
5 was to be doomed to be so shamefully mangled was the sight; the immortal
creature that was to be so butchered and torn asunder, yielded the
sensation. Whatever gloss the various spectators put upon the interest,
according to their several arts and powers of self-deceit, the interest was,
at the root of it, ogreish. Silence in the court! Charles Darnay had
10 yesterday pleaded not guilty to an indictment denouncing him (with infinite
jingle and jangle) for that he was a false traitor to our serene,
illustrious, excellent, and so forth, prince, our Lord the King, by reason
of his having, on divers occasions, and by divers means and ways, assisted
Lewis, the French King, in his wars against our said serene, illustrious,
15 excellent, and so forth; that was to say, by coming and going, between the
dominions of our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, and
those of the said French Lewis, and wickedly, falsely, traitorously, and
otherwise evil-adverbiously, revealing to the said French Lewis what forces
our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, had in preparation to
20 send to Canada and North America. This much, Jerry, with his head becoming
more and more spiky as the law terms bristled it, made out with huge
satisfaction, and so arrived circuitously at the understanding that the
aforesaid, and over and over again aforesaid, Charles Darnay, stood there
before him upon his trial; that the jury were swearing in; and that Mr.
25 Attorney-General was making ready to speak. The accused, who was (and who
knew he was) being mentally hanged, beheaded, and quartered, by everybody
there, neither flinched from the situation, nor assumed any theatrical air
in it. He was quiet and attentive; watched the opening proceedings with a
grave interest; and stood with his hands resting on the slab of wood before
30 him, so composedly, that they had not displaced a leaf of the herbs with
which it was strewn. The court was all bestrewn with herbs and sprinkled
with vinegar, as a precaution against gaol air and gaol fever. Over the
prisoner’s head there was a mirror, to throw the light down upon him. Crowds
of the wicked and the wretched had been reflected in it, and had passed from
35 its surface and this earth’s together. Haunted in a most ghastly manner that
abominable place would have been, if the glass could ever have rendered back
its reflections, as the ocean is one day to give up its dead. Some passing
thought of the infamy and disgrace for which it had been reserved may have
struck the prisoner’s mind. Be that as it may, a change in his position
40 making him conscious of a bar of light across his face, he looked up; and
when he saw the glass his face flushed, and his right hand pushed the herbs
away. It happened, that the action turned his face to that side of the court
which was on his left. About on a level with his eyes, there sat, in that
corner of the Judge’s bench, two persons upon whom his look immediately
45 rested; so immediately, and so much to the changing of his aspect, that all
the eyes that were turned upon him, turned to them. The spectators saw in
the two figures, a young lady of little more than twenty, and a gentleman
who was evidently her father; a man of a very remarkable appearance in
respect of the absolute whiteness of his hair, and a certain indescribable
50 intensity of face: not of an active kind, but pondering and self-communing.
When this expression was upon him, he looked as if he were old; but when it
was stirred and broken up—as it was now, in a moment, on his speaking to his
daughter—he became a handsome man, not past the prime of life. His daughter
had one of her hands drawn through his arm, as she sat by him, and the other
55 pressed upon it. She had drawn close to him, in her dread of the scene, and
in her pity for the prisoner. Her forehead had been strikingly expressive of
an engrossing terror and compassion that saw nothing but the peril of the
accused. This had been so very noticeable, so very powerfully and naturally
shown, that starers who had had no pity for him were touched by her; and the
60 whisper went about: “Who are they?” Jerry, the messenger, who had made his
own observations, in his own manner, and who had been sucking the rust off
his fingers in his absorption, stretched his neck to hear who they were. The
crowd about him had pressed and passed the inquiry on to the nearest
attendant, and from him it had been more slowly pressed and passed back; at

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

 65 last it got to Jerry: “Witnesses.” “For which side?” “Against.” “Against
what side?” “The prisoner’s.” The Judge, whose eyes had gone in the general
direction, recalled them, leaned back in his seat, and looked steadily at
the man whose life was in his hand, as Mr. Attorney- General rose to spin
the rope, grind the axe, and hammer the nails into the scaffold. 3 A
70 Disappointment MR. ATTORNEY-GENERAL had to inform the jury that the prisoner
before them, though young in years, was old in the treasonable practices
which claimed the forfeit of his life. That this correspondence with the
public enemy was not a correspondence of to-day, or of yesterday, or even of
last year, or of the year before. That, it was certain the prisoner had, for
75 longer than that, been in the habit of passing and repassing between France
and England, on secret business of which he could give no honest account.
That, if it were in the nature of traitorous ways to thrive (which happily
it never was), the real wickedness and guilt of his business might have
remained undiscovered. That Providence, however, had put it into the heart
80 of a person who was beyond fear and beyond reproach, to ferret out the
nature of the prisoner’s schemes, and, struck with horror, to disclose them
to his Majesty’s Chief Secretary of State and most honourable Privy Council.

33. The description of the spectators' interest as not elevating humanity chiefly implies that

(A) the crowd is too ignorant to understand the legal issues.

(B) Darnay's innocence is obvious to everyone present.

(C) public justice has become entangled with a voyeuristic appetite for suffering.

(D) the court's ceremony successfully restrains violent feeling.

(E) the narrator approves of harsh punishment only for treason.

34. The phrase 'immortal creature' is most significant because it

(A) sets spiritual dignity against the crowd's fixation on bodily destruction.

(B) identifies Darnay as supernaturally immune to punishment.

(C) shows that the narrator has abandoned irony.

(D) turns the trial into a theological debate between lawyers.

(E) implies that public execution redeems the condemned.

35. The parenthetical sequence about savage details primarily serves to

(A) lessen the horror by treating punishment as a technicality.

(B) explain the exact legal procedure in neutral terms.

(C) shift attention from Darnay to the judge's private motives.

(D) suggest that mercy would increase the crowd's fascination.

(E) make the spectators' excitement seem proportional to the imagined cruelty of the sentence.

36. The final judgment that the interest is 'at the root of it' something base most strongly reveals

(A) the narrator's inability to distinguish law from religion.

(B) the crowd's successful self-knowledge.

(C) the court's complete freedom from theatricality.

(D) Darnay's inward guilt despite the formal charge.

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

 (E) the narrator's habit of stripping away respectable surfaces to expose moral appetite.

37. This passage most clearly connects the English courtroom to the novel's larger pattern of

(A) England functioning as an uncomplicated refuge from French disorder.

(B) romantic feeling correcting every public injustice.

(C) civilized institutions masking forms of sanctioned violence.

(D) legal language making private identity transparent.

(E) comic spectators preventing political tragedy.

38. The grotesque precision of the imagined sentence primarily reveals

(A) the spectators' refinement of cruelty into a consumable spectacle.

(B) Darnay's willingness to confess when pressured.

(C) the narrator's admiration for English legal detail.

(D) the court's successful separation of emotion from law.

(E) the relative mercy of treason proceedings.

39. The phrase 'according to their several arts and powers of self-deceit' implies that the spectators

(A) understand the trial more accurately than the narrator.

(B) are individually innocent despite the collective mood.

(C) have been forced by law to attend unwillingly.

(D) possess different rationalizations for the same underlying appetite.

(E) reject the execution as morally intolerable.

40. The passage's diction of mangling and butchery most directly undermines

(A) the defendant's resemblance to Carton.

(B) the decorous abstraction of legal ceremony.

(C) the reader's awareness that the trial occurs in England.

(D) the novel's larger interest in public violence.

(E) the possibility of narrative irony.

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

Passage VI: Waste Forces
Book the Second, Chapter 5, 'The Jackal'

Questions 41–48. Read the following carefully before you choose your answers.

Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on
his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the
wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and
perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries
5 from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits
of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment,
and it was gone. Climbing into a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw
himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with
wasted tears. Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than
10 the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed
exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the
blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away. 6 Hundreds of
People THE QUIET lodgings of Doctor Manette were in a quiet street-corner
not far from Soho Square. On the afternoon of a certain fine Sunday when the
15 waves of four months had rolled over the trial for treason, and carried it,
as to the public interest and memory, far out to sea, Mr. Jarvis Lorry
walked along the sunny streets from Clerkenwell, where he lived, on his way
to dine with the Doctor. After several relapses into business- absorption,
Mr. Lorry had become the Doctor’s friend, and the quiet street-corner was
20 the sunny part of his life. On this certain fine Sunday, Mr. Lorry walked
towards Soho, early in the afternoon, for three reasons of habit. Firstly,
because, on fine Sundays, he often walked out, before dinner, with the
Doctor and Lucie; secondly, because, on unfavourable Sundays, he was
accustomed to be with them as the family friend, talking, reading, looking
25 out of window, and generally getting through the day; thirdly, because he
happened to have his own little shrewd doubts to solve, and knew how the
ways of the Doctor’s household pointed to that time as a likely time for
solving them. A quainter corner than the corner where the Doctor lived was
not to be found in London. There was no way through it, and the front
30 windows of the Doctor’s lodging commanded a pleasant little vista of street
that had a congenial air of retirement on it. There were few buildings then,
north of the Oxford Road, and forest-trees flourished, and wild flowers grew
and the hawthorn blossomed in the now vanished fields. As a consequence,
country airs circulated in Soho with vigorous freedom, instead of
35 languishing into the parish like stray paupers without a settlement; and
there was many a good south wall, not far off, on which the peaches ripened
in their season. The summer light struck into the corner brilliantly in the
earlier part of the day; but, when the streets grew hot, the corner was in
shadow, though not in shadow so remote but that you could see beyond it into
40 a glare of brightness. It was a cool spot, staid but cheerful, a wonderful
place for echoes, and a very harbour from the raging streets. There ought to
have been a tranquil bark in such an anchorage, and there was. The Doctor
occupied two floors of a large still house, where several callings purported
to be pursued by day, but whereof little was audible any day, and which was
45 shunned by all of them at night. In a building at the back, attainable by a
courtyard where a plane- tree rustled its green leaves, church-organs
claimed to be made, and silver to be chased, and likewise gold to be beaten
by some mysterious giant who had a golden arm starting out of the wall of
the front hall—as if he had beaten himself precious, and menaced a similar
50 conversion of all visitors. Very little of these trades, or of a lonely
lodger rumoured to live upstairs, or of a dim coach-trimming maker asserted
to have a counting-house below, was ever heard or seen. Occasionally, a
stray workman, putting his coat on, traversed the hall, or a stranger peered
about there, or a distant clink was heard across the courtyard, or a thump
55 from the golden giant. These, however, were only the exceptions required to
prove the rule that the sparrows in the plane-tree behind the house, and the
echoes in the corner before it, had their own way from Sunday morning unto
Saturday night. Doctor Manette received such patients here as his old
reputation, and its revival in the floating whispers of his story, brought
60 him. His scientific knowledge, and his vigilance and skill in conducting
ingenious experiments, brought him otherwise into moderate request, and he
earned as much as he wanted. These things were within Mr. Jarvis Lorry’s
knowledge, thoughts, and notice, when he rang the door-bell of the tranquil
house in the corner, on the fine Sunday afternoon. “Doctor Manette at home?”

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

 65 Expected home. “Miss Lucie at home?” Expected home. “Miss Pross at home?”
Possibly at home, but of a certainty impossible for handmaid to anticipate
intentions of Miss Pross, as to admission or denial of the fact. “As I am at
home myself,” said Mr. Lorry, “I’ll go upstairs.” Although the Doctor’s
daughter had known nothing of the country of her birth, she appeared to have
70 innately derived from it that ability to make much of little means, which is
one of its most useful and most agreeable characteristics. Simple as the
furniture was, it was set off by so many little adornments, of no value but
for their taste and fancy, that its effect was delightful. The disposition
of everything in the rooms, from the largest object to the least; the
75 arrangement of colours, the elegant variety and contrast obtained by thrift
in trifles, by delicate hands, clear eyes, and good sense, were at once so
pleasant in themselves, and so expressive of their originator, that, as Mr.
Lorry stood looking about him, the very chairs and tables seemed to ask him,
with something of that peculiar expression which he knew so well by this
80 time, whether he approved? There were three rooms on a floor, and, the doors
by which they communicated being put open that the air might pass freely
through them all, Mr.

41. The opening phrase 'Waste forces within him' most immediately frames Carton's condition as

(A) natural villainy finally revealing itself.

(B) youthful innocence temporarily obscured by fatigue.

(C) unused capacity that has turned inward into spiritual desolation.

(D) social ambition frustrated only by lack of money.

(E) comic laziness without tragic implication.

42. The mirage imagery chiefly emphasizes

(A) the certainty that Carton will soon become professionally successful.

(B) the narrator's belief that ambition is always delusive.

(C) the artificial beauty of London society.

(D) the literal heat of the city at dawn.

(E) the painful nearness and unreality of the honorable life Carton imagines.

43. The contrast between 'fair city' and 'wilderness' primarily dramatizes

(A) the moral superiority of rural life over urban life.

(B) the distance between Carton's latent ideals and his lived self-neglect.

(C) the political contrast between London and Paris.

(D) the narrator's distrust of all forms of beauty.

(E) the ease with which Carton converts intention into action.

44. The phrase 'loves and graces' contributes to the passage by

(A) mocking romance as a childish distraction from work.

(B) identifying specific women who will later deceive him.

(C) reducing the passage to conventional courtly flattery.

(D) elevating Carton's lost possibilities into an almost allegorical vision of moral renewal.

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

 (E) separating love from any ethical consequence.

45. The passage's final effect is best described as

(A) tragic self-knowledge without immediate transformation.

(B) comic repentance followed by practical reform.

(C) objective biography without emotional involvement.

(D) political prophecy detached from character.

(E) sentimental consolation that removes Carton's conflict.

46. The phrase 'waters of Hope' is rhetorically poignant because it

(A) signals that Carton has already reformed.

(B) turns hope into a political program.

(C) rejects the earlier image of the mirage.

(D) offers refreshment in the very imagery of a desert that cannot sustain it.

(E) makes Lucie responsible for Carton's failures.

47. The sentence 'A moment, and it was gone' derives its force mainly from

(A) abrupt syntactic contraction after luxuriant visionary expansion.

(B) a sudden change from third person to first person.

(C) a comic rhyme that trivializes Carton's despair.

(D) a detailed explanation of why the vision disappears.

(E) a shift from urban imagery to courtroom imagery.

48. The passage's elevated allegorical diction most complicates Carton by suggesting that

(A) he secretly despises Lucie's goodness.

(B) his imagination is too shallow to produce moral insight.

(C) he values professional success above spiritual renewal.

(D) his despair is caused only by poverty.

(E) his degradation is tragic because he can still imagine nobility vividly.

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

Passage VII: Saint Antoine in Motion
Book the Second, Chapter 21, 'Echoing Footsteps'

Questions 49–56. Read the following carefully before you choose your answers.

Saint Antoine had been, that morning, a vast dusky mass of scarecrows
heaving to and fro, with frequent gleams of light above the billowy heads,
where steel blades and bayonets shone in the sun. A tremendous roar arose
from the throat of Saint Antoine, and a forest of naked arms struggled in
5 the air like shrivelled branches of trees in a winter wind: all the fingers
convulsively clutching at every weapon or semblance of a weapon that was
thrown up from the depths below, no matter how far off. Who gave them out,
whence they last came, where they began, through what agency they crookedly
quivered and jerked, scores at a time, over the heads of the crowd, like a
10 kind of lightning, no eye in the throng could have told; but, muskets were
being distributed—so were cartridges, powder, and ball, bars of iron and
wood, knives, axes, pikes, every weapon that distracted ingenuity could
discover or devise. People who could lay hold of nothing else, set
themselves with bleeding hands to force stones and bricks out of their
15 places in walls. Every pulse and heart in Saint Antoine was on high- fever
strain and at high-fever heat. Every living creature there held life as of
no account, and was demented with a passionate readiness to sacrifice it. As
a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so all this raging circled
round Defarge’s wine-shop, and every human drop in the caldron had a
20 tendency to be sucked towards the vortex where Defarge himself, already
begrimed with gunpowder and sweat, issued orders, issued arms, thrust this
man back, dragged this man forward, disarmed one to arm another, laboured
and strove in the thickest of the uproar. “Keep near to me, Jacques Three,”
cried Defarge; “and do you, Jacques One and Two, separate and put yourselves
25 at the head of as many of these patriots as you can. Where is my wife?” “Eh,
well! Here you see me!” said madame, composed as ever, but not knitting to-
day. Madame’s resolute right hand was occupied with an axe, in place of the
usual softer implements, and in her girdle were a pistol and a cruel knife.
“Where do you go, my wife?” “I go,” said madame, “with you at present. You
30 shall see me at the head of women, by and by.” “Come, then!” cried Defarge,
in a resounding voice. “Patriots and friends, we are ready! The Bastille!”
With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped into
the detested word, the living sea rose, wave on wave, depth on depth, and
overflowed the city to that point. Alarm-bells ringing, drums beating, the
35 sea raging and thundering on its new beach, the attack began. Deep ditches,
double drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great towers, cannon, muskets,
fire and smoke. Through the fire and through the smoke—in the fire and in
the smoke, for the sea cast him up against a cannon, and on the instant he
became a cannonier—Defarge of the wine-shop worked like a manful soldier,
40 two fierce hours. Deep ditch, single drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight
great towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. One drawbridge down! “Work,
comrades all, work! Work, Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques One Thousand,
Jacques Two Thousand, Jacques Five-and-Twenty Thousand; in the name of all
the Angels or the Devils—which you prefer—work!” Thus Defarge of the
45 wine-shop, still at his gun, which had long grown hot. “To me, women!” cried
madame his wife. “What! We can kill as well as the men when the place is
taken!” And to her, with a shrill thirsty cry, trooping women variously
armed, but all armed alike in hunger and revenge. Cannon, muskets, fire and
smoke; but, still the deep ditch, the single drawbridge, the massive stone
50 walls, and the eight great towers. Slight displacements of the raging sea,
made by the falling wounded. Flashing weapons, blazing torches, smoking
waggon- loads of wet straw, hard work at neighbouring barricades in all
directions, shrieks, volleys, execrations, bravery without stint, boom,
smash and rattle, and the furious sounding of the living sea; but, still the
55 deep ditch, and the single drawbridge, and the massive stone walls, and the
eight great towers, and still Defarge of the wine-shop at his gun, grown
doubly hot by the service of four fierce hours. A white flag from within the
fortress, and a parley—this dimly perceptible through the raging storm,
nothing audible in it—suddenly the sea rose immeasurably wider and higher,
60 and swept Defarge of the wine-shop over the lowered drawbridge, past the
massive stone outer walls, in among the eight great towers surrendered! So
resistless was the force of the ocean bearing him on, that even to draw his
breath or turn his head was as impracticable as if he had been struggling in
the surf at the South Sea, until he was landed in the outer courtyard of the

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

 65 Bastille. There, against an angle of a wall, he made a struggle to look
about him. Jacques Three was nearly at his side; Madame Defarge, still
heading some of her women, was visible in the inner distance, and her knife
was in her hand. Everywhere was tumult, exultation, deafening and maniacal
bewilderment, astounding noise, yet furious dumb-show. “The prisoners!” “The
70 records!” “The secret cells!” “The instruments of torture!” “The prisoners!”
Of all these cries, and ten thousand incoherencies, “The prisoners!” was the
cry most taken up by the sea that rushed in, as if there were an eternity of
people, as well as of time and space. When the foremost billows rolled past,
bearing the prison officers with them, and threatening them all with instant
75 death if any secret nook remained undisclosed, Defarge laid his strong hand
on the breast of one of these men—a man with a gray head, who had a lighted
torch in his hand—separated him from the rest, and got him between himself
and the wall. “Show me the North Tower!” said Defarge. “Quick!” “I will
faithfully,” replied the man, “if you will come with me. But there is no one
80 there.” “What is the meaning of One Hundred and Five, North Tower?” asked
Defarge. “Quick!” “The meaning, monsieur?” “Does it mean a captive, or a
place of captivity? Or do you mean that I shall strike you dead?” “Kill
him!” croaked Jacques Three, who had come close up.

49. The description of Saint Antoine as a 'vast dusky mass' chiefly transforms the crowd into

(A) a disciplined army whose hierarchy is clearly visible.

(B) a collective body whose individual members are nearly submerged by revolutionary momentum.

(C) a peaceful civic assembly exercising orderly rights.

(D) a comic chorus incapable of real danger.

(E) a group of isolated figures unrelated to one another.

50. The comparison of arms to shrivelled branches most strongly combines

(A) pastoral abundance with aristocratic ceremony.

(B) religious consolation with private grief.

(C) natural imagery with deprivation, making violence grow out of barrenness.

(D) military discipline with comic disorder.

(E) domestic tenderness with legal procedure.

51. The uncertainty over who distributed weapons primarily suggests

(A) the narrator's indifference to factual accuracy.

(B) a revolutionary force that exceeds individual agency and traceable command.

(C) Defarge's incompetence as an organizer.

(D) the absence of any real political grievance.

(E) the crowd's complete dependence on aristocratic permission.

52. The passage's kinetic verbs and unstable directions create

(A) an impression of leisure and ceremonial restraint.

(B) a legal record of military tactics.

(C) a comic picture of confused but harmless motion.

(D) a sense of energy that is both spontaneous and terrifyingly organized by need.

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

 (E) a pastoral rhythm detached from violence.

53. The passage's political imagination is best characterized as

(A) wholly celebratory of mob violence.

(B) wholly dismissive of popular suffering.

(C) ambivalent: it understands oppression's force while fearing what released force becomes.

(D) neutral and merely journalistic.

(E) nostalgic for aristocratic stability without reservation.

54. The image of weapons moving 'like a kind of lightning' most strongly conveys

(A) sudden collective ignition without visible central control.

(B) aristocratic punishment descending from above.

(C) a peaceful illumination of civic reason.

(D) the narrator's indifference to physical danger.

(E) the comic clumsiness of an undisciplined crowd.

55. The phrase 'no matter how far off' chiefly intensifies the sense that

(A) the weapons are too distant to affect the crowd.

(B) geography has replaced hunger as the passage's concern.

(C) the narrator admires the crowd's tactical patience.

(D) Defarge has issued precise instructions to each person.

(E) the crowd's desire for instruments of violence has become magnetically indiscriminate.

56. The passage's syntax often withholds a stable grammatical subject, thereby

(A) eliminating the crowd's responsibility altogether.

(B) proving that the narrator cannot follow the action.

(C) turning the scene into a calm historical summary.

(D) making Defarge the sole moral center of the passage.

(E) making agency seem dispersed through the crowd rather than lodged in a single commander.

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

Passage VIII: The Last Vision
Book the Third, Chapter 15, 'The Footsteps Die Out For Ever'

Questions 57–64. Read the following carefully before you choose your answers.

ALONG THE Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six
tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and
insatiate monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused
in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its
5 rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a
peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than
those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more,
under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured
forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and
10 it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind. Six tumbrils roll
along the streets. Change these back again to what they were, thou powerful
enchanter, Time, and they shall be seen to be the carriages of absolute
monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles, the toilettes of flaring Jezebels,
the churches that are not my Father’s house but dens of thieves, the huts of
15 millions of starving peasants! No; the great magician who majestically works
out the appointed order of the Creator never reverses his transformations.
“If thou be changed into this shape by the will of God,” say the seers to
the enchanted, in the wise Arabian stories, “then remain so! But, if thou
wear this form through mere passing conjuration, then resume thy former
20 aspect!” Changeless and hopeless, the tumbrils roll along. As the sombre
wheels of the six carts go round, they seem to plough up a long crooked
furrow among the populace in the streets. Ridges of faces are thrown to this
side and to that, and the ploughs go steadily onward. So used are the
regular inhabitants of the houses to the spectacle, that in many windows
25 there are no people, and in some the occupation of the hands is not so much
as suspended, while the eyes survey the faces in the tumbrils. Here and
there, the inmate has visitors to see the sight; then he points his finger,
with something of the complacency of a curator or authorised exponent, to
this cart and to this, and seems to tell who sat here yesterday, and who
30 there the day before. Of the riders in the tumbrils, some observe these
things, and all things on their last roadside, with an impassive stare;
others, with a lingering interest in the ways of life and men. Some, seated
with drooping heads, are sunk in silent despair; again, there are some so
heedful of their looks that they cast upon the multitude such glances as
35 they have seen in theatres, and in pictures. Several close their eyes, and
think, or try to get their straying thoughts together. Only one, and he a
miserable creature, of a crazed aspect, is so shattered and made drunk by
horror, that he sings, and tries to dance. Not one of the whole number
appeals, by look or gesture, to the pity of the people. There is a guard of
40 sundry horsemen riding abreast of the tumbrils, and faces are often turned
up to some of them, and they are asked some questions. It would seem to be
always the same question, for, it is always followed by a press of people
towards the third cart. The horsemen abreast of that cart frequently point
out one man in it with their swords. The leading curiosity is to know which
45 is he; he stands at the back of the tumbril with his head bent down, to
converse with a mere girl who sits on the side of the cart, and holds his
hand. He has no curiosity or care for the scene about him, and always speaks
to the girl. Here and there in the long street of St. Honoré, cries are
raised against him. If they move him at all, it is only to a quiet smile, as
50 he shakes his hair a little more loosely about his face. He cannot easily
touch his face, his arms being bound. On the steps of a church, awaiting the
coming-up of the tumbrils, stands the spy and prison-sheep. He looks into
the first of them: not there. He looks into the second: not there. He
already asks himself, “Has he sacrificed me?” when his face clears, as he
55 looks into the third. “Which is Evrémonde?” says a man behind him. “That. At
the back there.” “With his hand in the girl’s?” “Yes.” The man cries, “Down,
Evrémonde! To the Guillotine all aristocrats. Down, Evrémonde!” “Hush,
hush!” the spy entreats him, timidly. “And why not, citizen?” “He is going
to pay the forfeit: it will be paid in five minutes more. Let him be at
60 peace.” But the man continuing to exclaim, “Down, Evrémonde!” the face of
Evrémonde is for a moment turned towards him. Evrémonde then sees the spy,
and looks attentively at him, and goes his way. The clocks are on the stroke
of three, and the furrow ploughed among the populace is turning round, to
come on into the place of execution, and end. The ridges thrown to this side

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

 65 and to that, now crumble in and close behind the last plough as it passes
on, for all are following to the Guillotine. In front of it, seated in
chairs, as in a garden of public diversion, are a number of women, busily
knitting. On one of the foremost chairs stands The Vengeance, looking about
for her friend. “Thérèse!” she cries, in her shrill tones. “Who has seen
70 her? Thérèse Defarge!” “She never missed before,” says a knitting-woman of
the sisterhood. “No; nor will she miss now,” cries The Vengeance,
petulantly. “Thérèse!” “Louder,” the woman recommends. Ay! Louder,
Vengeance, much louder, and still she will scarcely hear thee. Louder yet,
Vengeance, with a little oath or so added, and yet it will hardly bring her.
75 Send other women up and down to seek her, lingering somewhere; and yet,
although the messengers have done dread deeds, it is questionable whether of
their own will they will go far enough to find her! “Bad Fortune!” cries The
Vengeance, stamping her foot in the chair, “and here are the tumbrils! And
Evrémonde will be despatched in a wink, and she not here! See her knitting
80 in my hand, and her empty chair ready for her. I cry with vexation and
disappointment!” As The Vengeance descends from her elevation to do it, the
tumbrils begin to discharge their loads. The ministers of Sainte Guillotine
are robed and ready. Crash!— A head is held up, and the knitting-women who
scarcely lifted their eyes to look at it a moment ago when it could think
85 and speak, count One. The second tumbril empties and moves on; the third
comes up. Crash!—And the knitting-women, never faltering or pausing in their
work, count Two. The supposed Evrémonde descends, and the seamstress is
lifted out next after him. He has not relinquished her patient hand in
getting out, but still holds it as he promised. He gently places her with
90 her back to the crashing engine that constantly whirrs up and falls, and she
looks into his face and thanks him.

57. The repeated phrase 'I see' primarily gives Carton's final vision the quality of

(A) legal testimony offered to prove his innocence.

(B) self-deception meant to conceal fear.

(C) prophetic assurance that converts death into moral futurity.

(D) ordinary memory returning before execution.

(E) political analysis detached from personal feeling.

58. The 'beautiful city' rising from the abyss most strongly represents

(A) the possibility that historical suffering may eventually be redeemed without being denied.

(B) a simple approval of revolutionary violence.

(C) a literal description of Paris at the moment of execution.

(D) Carton's wish to become politically famous.

(E) the narrator's belief that evil disappears immediately.

59. Carton's vision of the lives he saves is significant because it

(A) erases Lucie's family from the meaning of his death.

(B) shows that he values reputation more than love.

(C) limits redemption to political victory alone.

(D) makes his private sacrifice generative across domestic, social, and moral time.

(E) turns the ending into a rejection of domestic life.

60. The passage's movement from public city to intimate family to remembered name chiefly

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

 (A) reduces politics to sentimental distraction.

(B) links historical renewal with private continuity.

(C) abandons the novel's public concerns at the final moment.

(D) makes family memory more corrupt than public violence.

(E) suggests that Carton's act has no social consequence.

61. The ending's moral logic is best described as

(A) nihilistic, because no action survives death.

(B) comic, because mistaken identity solves every conflict harmlessly.

(C) redemptive but costly, insisting that renewal emerges through sacrifice rather than escape from suffering.

(D) strictly political, because personal love is irrelevant.

(E) deterministic, because individual choice has no effect.

62. The phrase 'through long long years to come' chiefly prevents the ending from becoming

(A) a private farewell to Lucie.

(B) a prophetic utterance before death.

(C) a vision that includes future generations.

(D) a formal conclusion to Carton's legal case.

(E) an easy fantasy of instantaneous political redemption.

63. The vision's repeated future-tense seeing most strongly transforms Carton's death into

(A) a demand for immediate public recognition.

(B) an act whose meaning is deferred into lives he will not witness.

(C) a denial that he is about to die.

(D) a private fantasy unrelated to others.

(E) an accusation against the family he saves.

64. The passage's final moral authority depends on its fusion of

(A) legal acquittal, comic coincidence, and social satire.

(B) military victory, aristocratic restoration, and public reward.

(C) economic reform, professional ambition, and private secrecy.

(D) personal renunciation, historical hope, and remembered love.

(E) domestic resentment, political vengeance, and narrative detachment.

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

Answer Key and Brief Rationales
Correct letters are distributed deliberately across the sixty-four questions so no option becomes predictable.

1. C Structure: The antithetical clauses make history feel simultaneously legible and self-contradicting.
2. E Tone: The sentence sounds oracular, but the pointed adjective makes the authority of public judgment suspect.
3. B Imagery: The figures silently prepare guillotine wood and tumbrils before the Revolution becomes visible.
4. D Narrative: The opening narrows from nations and rulers toward the people whose fates the chronicle will follow.
5. A Tone: The passage combines high prophecy with sarcasm and ominous images of future execution.
6. D Diction: The apparent clarity belongs to those who cannot perceive imminent collapse.
7. A Allusion: The biblical phrase is turned into an image of protected privilege and appetite.
8. E Style: Grand forces appear beside sharply comic particulars such as jaws, faces, and prophetic oddities.
9. B Theme: The houses, rooms, and hearts are near one another yet sealed in mystery.
10. C Structure: Each repetition narrows the physical scale and enlarges the philosophical claim.
11. B Theme: Death becomes the only fully closed secret, intensifying the meditation.
12. D Tone: The language of solemn consideration and awfulness gives the passage its grave wonder.
13. C Context: The novel repeatedly turns on hidden histories and mistaken or doubled identities.
14. A Theme: Every house, room, and heart contains secrecy, so mystery becomes the rule of human life.
15. E Structure: The passage shrinks its physical units while making mystery more profound.
16. E Diction: The diction makes hiddenness an existential condition, not just a device for suspense.
17. C Symbol: The red stain and the written word point forward to revolutionary blood.
18. A Imagery: Physical staining makes appetite look like premonitory violence.
19. D Foreshadowing: The moment is casual, but the narration immediately turns it into prophecy.
20. B Tone: The passage recognizes deprivation while making the tigerish smear ominous.
21. C Structure: The narration moves from one street accident toward future blood on street-stones.
22. E Diction: The adjective is frightening, but the scene has already grounded the crowd's condition in want.
23. B Symbol: The stain touches people and setting alike, making the district itself prophetic.
24. D Narrative Voice: The narrator reads the accident as an omen of later bloodshed.
25. A Imagery: The images all suggest a human presence reduced almost beyond recognition.
26. D Theme: The voice has faded because it has not been used in human relation.
27. A Syntax: The anaphora adds layer after layer of insufficiency and damage.
28. E Figurative Language: The simile translates psychological starvation into bodily exhaustion.
29. B Theme: The man is alive, but his voice shows how much of him confinement has consumed.
30. C Imagery: The voice is an echo, a faded color, and an underground sound because one figure is insufficient.
31. B Figurative Language: The simile makes imprisonment resemble burial while the speaker remains alive.
32. D Theme: The prisoner lives, but solitude has damaged the faculties by which he meets others.
33. C Tone: The passage exposes fascination with mangling rather than concern for justice.
34. A Diction: The phrase contrasts the soul's dignity with the body's threatened dismemberment.
35. E Structure: The imagined reduction of punishment would reduce the spectacle's attraction.
36. E Narrative Voice: The passage moves past self-deceiving glosses to name the underlying impulse.
37. C Context: The English court is orderly, yet the passage shows its appetite for brutality.
38. A Tone: The crowd's interest sharpens as the sentence's bodily details become more horrible.
39. D Syntax: The phrase grants variety only at the level of excuse, not moral motive.
40. B Diction: Bodily diction punctures the court's formal language and exposes its violence.
41. C Characterization: The phrase implies power, but power squandered into barrenness.
42. E Imagery: The vision appears before him and vanishes, like impossible refreshment in a desert.
43. B Symbol: The idealized city figures the life he cannot sustain against his inner desert.
44. D Allusion: The phrase makes the vision feel classical and morally idealized.

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice

45. A Effect: Carton sees the honorable life, but the vision disappears rather than changing him at once.
46. D Imagery: The water belongs to the vision, intensifying the dryness of Carton's actual condition.
47. A Syntax: The brief sentence collapses the elaborate imagined city in an instant.
48. E Characterization: The richness of the vision shows that his wasted life contains a living moral imagination.
49. B Imagery: The crowd is rendered as a mass with billowy heads and a single throat.
50. C Figurative Language: The winter branches image links the crowd's weapons to hunger and deprivation.
51. B Narrative: No eye can tell the source; agency is diffuse and collective.
52. D Style: The motion is convulsive and disordered, yet driven by a common hunger for arms.
53. C Theme: The imagery both explains the crowd's energy and renders it frightening.
54. A Figurative Language: Lightning suggests speed, danger, and an agency difficult to locate.
55. E Diction: Distance ceases to matter once any weapon or semblance of one appears.
56. E Syntax: Uncertain subjects and passive constructions make collective motion dominate individual agency.
57. C Syntax: The anaphora makes the vision sound prophetic and certain.
58. A Symbol: The city rises from the abyss while still acknowledging long struggles and expiation.
59. D Theme: He imagines peaceful future lives made possible by his death.
60. B Structure: The vision joins national future, family survival, and Carton's remembered name.
61. C Interpretation: Carton's death gives the future meaning while preserving the cost of that meaning.
62. E Diction: The repeated adjective stretches renewal across difficult historical duration.
63. B Theme: He imagines consequences that will unfold after his own life ends.
64. D Interpretation: The ending joins Carton's sacrifice, the city's future, and the saved family's memory.

A Tale of Two Cities Advanced Prose Practice