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Hola, GED learners! I was just looking around on the Internet, and I came across something I never really thought about too much… how many books have been banned in different places at different times. Books like Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and a lot of other ones you wouldn’t think of, really. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a little boy… I want to be careful what he watches on TV or reads, but I just can’t see taking good books out of school libraries, or banning books in another way. So, I thought what I’d do is do a GED reading practice question about a passage from a banned book. Before I do the question, here’s some websites with information about banned books… maybe they’ll make some good reading for GED practice.

Celebrate Banned Books Week

Banned Books Online

Controversial and Banned Books

Okay, now here’s the practice question… from William Faulkner’s book As I Lay Dying, which was banned in 1986 by the Graves County, Kentucky school board:

Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cottonhouse can see Jewel’s frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own.

The path runs straight as a plumb-line, worn smooth by feet and baked brick-hard by July, between the green rows of laidby cotton, to the cottonhouse in the center of the field, where it turns and circles the cottonhouse at four soft right angles and goes on across the field again, worn so by feet in fading precision.

The cottonhouse is of rough logs, from between which the chinking has long fallen. Square, with a broken roof set at a single pitch, it leans in empty and shimmering dilapidation in the sunlight, a single broad window in two opposite walls giving onto the approaches of the path. When we reach it I turn and follow the path which circles the house. Jewel, fifteen feet behind me, looking straight ahead, steps in a single stride through the window. Still staring straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face, he crosses the floor in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar store Indian dressed in patched overalls and endued with life from the hips down, and steps in a single stride through the opposite window and into the path again just as I come around the corner. In single file and five feet apart and Jewel now in front, we go on up the path toward the foot of the bluff.

When the writer says Jewel has “the rigid gravity of a cigar store Indian,” he means:

1) Jewel is part Native American.

2) Jewel is not moving at all.

3) Jewel seems tense and stiff.

4) Jewel is smokng a cigar.

5) Jewel is excitable but hiding his feelngs.

So, what did you think? Do you find the answer? This is what’s called a metaphor. The author is comparing Jewel to a wooden Indian that stands outside a cigar store. Now, there aren’t any cigar stores with wooden Indians outside them anymore, anyway not a lot of them, so who knows anything about that? But you can probably tell that it’s a metaphor, he’s not really saying Jewel is an Indian or anything about Jewel smoking a cigar. It’s also not saying Jewel is not moving at all, because Jewel is walking. So that leaves answers 3 and 5. Answer 5 says Jewel is excitable… but there’s not anything in the passage to hint at that. It would be reading too much into it. The answer is 3… Jewel is stiff, like a wood statue of an Indian. Do you think you could think that one through?

Good luck on your GED!

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