1984, Part Two quiz

Questions and answers

1. 1

   Question 1. Winston can see the four Ministries from his window. Which one is in charge of Oceania's war?

   • The Ministry of Love, which handles law and order
   • The Ministry of Truth, which handles news and records
   • The Ministry of Plenty, which handles economic affairs
   • Correct answer: The Ministry of Peace, which concerns itself with war

   The Ministry of Peace runs the war. Each of the four Ministries is named for the opposite of what it does, and Winston works in the Ministry of Truth, which falsifies the record.

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2. 2

   Question 2. What do the Parsons children do while Winston repairs their kitchen sink?

   • They pester him for sweets and ask about work
   • They ignore him and keep watching the telescreen
   • Correct answer: They call him a thought-criminal and a traitor
   • They report him to the patrols for wearing odd shoes

   In their Spies uniforms the two children circle Winston shouting that he is a traitor and a thought-criminal, and the boy fires a catapult at him as he leaves.

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3. 3

   Question 3. Which memory does Winston hold on to that the Party's records now deny?

   • Correct answer: That Oceania was at war with Eastasia, not Eurasia
   • That the war on the Malabar front ended in defeat
   • That Eurasia and Eastasia were once a single state
   • That Big Brother personally led troops into battle

   Winston remembers that a few years earlier Oceania was at war with Eastasia and allied with Eurasia, though every surviving record now says the enemy has always been Eurasia.

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4. 4

   Question 4. Why does Winston invent the war hero Comrade Ogilvy?

   • To test whether the Ministry checks his work
   • To honor a comrade killed at the Malabar front
   • To pad out the Ministry's daily output figures
   • Correct answer: To replace a purged man in an old Party speech

   A man once praised in a Big Brother speech has become an unperson, so Winston writes a heroic life that never existed to fill the hole in the record.

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5. 5

   Question 5. Which of these events actually happen in Part One?

   • Winston writes DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER over and over in his diary.

     Happened

     He looks down and finds he has scrawled the words in capitals across half a page, and he knows at once that the Thought Police will come for him eventually.

   • Winston helps Mrs. Parsons clear a blocked kitchen sink.

     Happened

     His neighbour knocks while he is writing and asks for help with the drain, which is how Winston ends up inside the Parsons flat with the children.

   • Winston refuses to join in the shouting at the Two Minutes Hate.

     Didn't happen

     The horror of the Hate for Winston is that he cannot keep out of it. He finds himself shouting with everyone else even while he despises what the ritual is doing to him.

   • Syme is arrested in the canteen while Winston watches.

     Didn't happen

     Nothing happens to Syme in front of Winston. Winston only decides, privately, that Syme is too clever and too talkative to survive.

   • Winston invents Comrade Ogilvy to fill a gap in a Big Brother speech.

     Happened

     The rectification job gives him a small, chilling pleasure: a man who never lived now exists in the archive as solidly as any historical figure.

   • Winston tells O'Brien that he keeps a diary.

     Didn't happen

     The two men exchange nothing but a glance in Part One. Winston builds his whole hope on that look and on a voice in a dream.

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6. 6

   Question 6. How does Syme describe the purpose of Newspeak over lunch in the canteen?

   • To make Party announcements easier to broadcast
   • To replace English in all three superstates
   • Correct answer: To narrow thought until thoughtcrime is impossible
   • To preserve English as it was before Ingsoc

   Syme is delighted that the Eleventh Edition of the dictionary destroys words every year. Shrink the vocabulary far enough, he says, and there will be no words left in which to think a forbidden thought.

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7. 7

   Question 7. Winston's diary sends greetings to an age of 'doublethink'. What does the word mean?

   • Correct answer: Believing two contradictory things at the same time
   • Saying one thing in public and another in private
   • Reading a Party message twice to catch its real meaning
   • Thinking in Newspeak while speaking in Oldspeak

   Doublethink is the trained habit of holding two contradictory beliefs at once and accepting both. It is what lets a Records clerk alter a fact and sincerely believe nothing was altered.

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8. 8

   Question 8. Winston writes that if there is hope, it lies in the proles. What is his reasoning?

   • Correct answer: Because they are 85 per cent of Oceania's population
   • Because Goldstein's Brotherhood recruits among them
   • Because the Thought Police ignore their streets
   • Because they alone still remember the Revolution

   The proles vastly outnumber the Party and could shake it off like a horse shaking off flies. The trouble, Winston sees, is that they have never become conscious of that strength.

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9. 9

   Question 9. A man praised in an old speech has become an 'unperson'. What does that mean?

   • A citizen demoted from the Inner to the Outer Party
   • Correct answer: A person erased from every record as if never born
   • A prole who has no Party file of any kind at all
   • A worker sent to a forced-labor camp for a term

   An unperson has been vaporized and then written out of history, so that no document, photograph or spoken name is allowed to show the person ever lived.

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10. 10

    Question 10. Why does the Party work to drain the pleasure out of sex?

    • It distracts workers from meeting production quotas
    • Correct answer: It creates a private loyalty the Party cannot reach
    • It spreads disease through the Outer Party districts
    • It is forbidden outright by a law passed in 1960

    Winston's marriage to Katharine is the Party's ideal: sex as a joyless duty. Real intimacy would build a bond between two people that the Party cannot enter, monitor or direct, and the frustration it forces instead is rerouted into hatred and hero-worship.

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11. 11

    Question 11. Which of these events actually happen in Part One?

    • Tom Parsons boasts that his daughter reported a stranger to the patrols.

      Happened

      She trailed the man for hours and turned him in because of his shoes. Parsons tells the story in the canteen as proof of good parenting.

    • An old man in a prole pub gives Winston a clear account of life before the Revolution.

      Didn't happen

      The old man remembers a top hat, a pub brawl and the size of a beer glass. He cannot compare one social system with another, so Winston leaves with nothing.

    • Winston buys a glass paperweight at Mr. Charrington's shop.

      Happened

      He pays four dollars for a heavy dome of glass with a scrap of coral inside, an object with no use at all beyond its beauty.

    • The dark-haired girl passes Winston a folded note in the corridor.

      Didn't happen

      In Part One she only appears where Winston does not expect her, and he takes her for a Thought Police spy. The note belongs to a later part of the novel.

    • Mr. Charrington shows Winston a room above the shop with no telescreen.

      Happened

      The upstairs room has an old bed, a twelve-hour clock, an engraving of St Clement Danes, and no screen on the wall, which is what Winston cannot stop thinking about.

    • Winston rents the room above the shop before Part One ends.

      Didn't happen

      He only looks at it and leaves. Renting the room is a decision he makes much later, after Part One is over.

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12. 12

    Question 12. On what does Winston base his hope that O'Brien is secretly an ally?

    • O'Brien warns him about the girl from Fiction
    • Correct answer: A glance during the Hate and a voice in a dream
    • O'Brien hands him a copy of Goldstein's book
    • O'Brien is his superior in the Records Department

    Winston has nothing to go on but a look exchanged during the Two Minutes Hate and a dream voice he believes was O'Brien's, saying they would meet in the place where there is no darkness.

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13. 13

    Question 13. Watching Syme talk, Winston thinks that 'orthodoxy is unconsciousness'. What does orthodoxy mean here?

    • Open dissent from the Party's official line
    • Skill at reciting the Newspeak dictionary aloud
    • Loyalty to a leader rather than to a written creed
    • Correct answer: Correct belief, held without any need to think

    Orthodoxy means correct belief. Winston's point is that the ideal Party member never has to think at all, which is exactly why the clever, candid Syme is in danger.

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14. 14

    Question 14. What did the newspaper photograph of Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford prove?

    • That Big Brother had never existed as a real man
    • That the three men had been executed without a trial
    • That the Brotherhood had agents inside the Party
    • Correct answer: That their confessions of treason had been false

    The picture placed the three men in New York on a date when they had confessed to being on Eurasian soil. Winston held the proof for a few minutes and then dropped it down the memory hole.

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15. 15

    Question 15. What draws Winston to the glass paperweight in Mr. Charrington's shop?

    • It is stamped with a date from before the Revolution
    • It is worth more than a month of Party wages
    • Correct answer: It is a useless, beautiful scrap of the past
    • It is heavy enough to serve him as a weapon

    The coral under glass is beautiful and good for nothing, a fragment of a world the Party has not rewritten. That uselessness is precisely what makes Winston want it.

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