12 GRADE: THE BLACK CAT STUDY GUIDE

Greetings guys,

Here is your study guide for the bimestral test, to help you out with the story of the black cat. It will also help you out to study for your bimestral exams.

Have a nice Day.
Mrs. Catalina Toro

SHORT ANSWER STUDY GUIDE QUESTIONS

The Black Cat

Vocabulary

Part I: Using Prior Knowledge and Contextual Clues

Read the sentence. Use any clues you can find in the sentence combined with your prior

knowledge, and write what you think the underlined words mean on the lines provided.

1. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife.

 

2. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish

 malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.

 

3-4. And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of perverseness.

 

5. I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the

 disaster and the atrocity.

6 . When I first beheld this apparition--for I could scarcely regard it as less--my wonder and my

 terror were extreme.

 

7. ...I came to look upon it with unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from its odious

 presence, as from the breath of a pestilence.

 

8. It followed my footsteps with a pertinacity which would be difficult to make the reader

 comprehend.

 

9. ...the feeble remnant of the good within me succumbed. Evil thoughts became my sole

 intimates...

 

10. Upon its head,...sat the hideous beast whose craft had...whose voice had consigned me to the

 hangman.

 

Part II. Determining the Meaning -- Match the vocabulary words to their definitions

___ 1. intemperate                                                   A. Can't be turned back

___ 2. malevolence                                                  B. Quality of being directed away from what is 

___ 3. irrevocable right or good                               C. Not moderate

___ 4. perverseness                                                 D. A ghostly figure     

___ 5. atrocity                                                          E. Handed over

___ 6. apparition                                                      F. Ill will toward others; rancor; malice; evil 

___ 7. odious                                                           G. An appalling or atrocious action, situation, or object

___ 8. pertinacity influence, especially supernatural    H. Gave in

___ 9. succumbed                                                    I. Evoking feelings or repulsion

___ 10. consigned                                                    J. Persistence; tenacity; without quitting

Reading Comprehension 

 1. In the first few paragraphs, the narrator gives us some background information about

 himself. What does he most stress?
 2. Who was Pluto?
 3. Describe the relationship between Pluto and the narrator.
 4. What was the first violent act the narrator did to Pluto?
 5. What second act (the narrator describes as being done in the spirit of perverseness) did he
 commit on Pluto?
 6. On the night the narrator killed Pluto, what happened to his home?
 7. Describe the second cat.
 8. Describe the relationship between the second cat and the narrator.
 9. What peculiar mark did the cat have?
10. Why did the narrator kill his wife?
11. How did he dispose of the body?
12. Who came on the fourth day after the murder?
13. What was the narrator's reaction to the police?
14. How did the police discover the body?
15. Where is the climax of the story?
16. Which is more important to Poe's purpose: the murders or the revealing of the narrator's
 mental state?
17. Why is the setting of the story vague?
18. What value does using the first person narrative add to the story?
19. "Have we not a perpetual inclination . . . to violate that which is Law, merely because we
 understand it to be such?" Answer Poe's rhetorical question.