American Literature / Unit 19 AML 1815 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Drill 1: The Seventeenth-Century Poet
The idea
The board's first sample question describes a seventeenth-century Massachusetts wife and mother whose poems were initially published in England in the sixteen fifties, and asks who she was. The five choices are Abigail Adams, Sarah Kemble Knight, Mary Rowlandson, Anne Bradstreet and Julia Ward Howe. The answer is Anne Bradstreet. Three facts settle it together. She lived in Massachusetts Bay, she was a wife and the mother of eight, and The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America was carried to London and printed there in sixteen fifty without her knowledge. Test the distractors. Abigail Adams belongs to the revolutionary generation a century later and wrote letters, not poems. Knight wrote a travel journal. Rowlandson wrote a captivity narrative in prose. Howe is a nineteenth-century writer.
In practice
Massachusetts, a mother, London, sixteen fifty.
Where people slip
Rowlandson is the strong distractor because she is the other famous Puritan woman writer. The question says poems and says the sixteen fifties, and both of those exclude her.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
Unlocks
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