That Hideous Strength, Chapter 2: Dinner with the Sub-Warden quiz

Questions and answers

1. 1

   Question 1. At Curry's dinner, what does Mark say is the really important fact about the N.I.C.E.?

   • The Pragmatometer and its notice-board of lights
   • Sanitation Place called quite out of the ordinary
   • Correct answer: Having its own legal staff and its own police
   • Jules selling the plan in the Sunday papers

   Mark sets aside pragmatometers and sanitation de luxe. For him the point is science applied to social problems and backed by the whole force of the state, with its own lawyers and police.

   Read the passage
2. 2

   Question 2. What is Curry's actual academic subject?

   • Modern economics
   • Correct answer: Military history
   • National sanitation
   • Social anthropology

   Busby keeps calling Curry's unwritten book a work on economics. Curry has to remind him that he is a military historian.

   Read the passage
3. 3

   Question 3. How does Feverstone say Weston died?

   • Killed in a blitz, as Mark first assumes
   • Of a coughing fit after the college meeting
   • By suicide after an interplanetary voyage
   • Correct answer: Murdered by a Cambridge don with a game leg

   Mark assumes Weston was killed in a blitz. Feverstone says he was murdered by a respectable Cambridge don with weak eyes, a game leg, and a fair beard, for being on their side.

   Read the passage
4. 4

   Question 4. What does Feverstone want Mark to do with the N.I.C.E.'s real program?

   • Write it up as science for the Sunday papers
   • Correct answer: Write it down in order to camouflage the aims
   • Explain it to Curry's interlocking committees
   • Keep it a secret even from John Wither

   When Mark asks if they want him to write the program up, Feverstone says they want him to write it down in order to camouflage it, at first for committees of the House of Commons.

   Read the passage
5. 5

   Question 5. How does Feverstone describe Jules's place in the N.I.C.E.?

   • As the real director, whose orders Wither carries out
   • As a distinguished chemist who will run the laboratories
   • Correct answer: As a public mascot who sells the Institute in the papers
   • As Mark's future colleague in the sociology department

   Feverstone calls Jules a little mascot with nothing in his head except nineteenth-century socialist stuff. He is useful for the Sunday papers and draws a large salary, but has nothing to say to what really goes on.

   Read the passage
6. 6

   Question 6. Why does Jane refuse Mark's suggestion that Myrtle stay while he is away?

   • Myrtle is already visiting at St. Anne's
   • Correct answer: She is Mark's twin and would fuss over him
   • Myrtle dislikes Mrs. Maggs and will not come
   • Myrtle is already a patient of Dr. Brizeacre

   Myrtle is Mark's twin sister, with too much of the adoring sister's attitude. Jane will not spend the visit hearing about Mark's shirts and her own supposed good luck in marrying him.

   Read the passage
7. 7

   Question 7. What happens when Feverstone calls at the Studdocks' flat?

   • He meets Jane and praises her academic work
   • He waits in the car and will not come in
   • Correct answer: He mistakes Mrs. Maggs for Jane at the door
   • He tells Jane that Mark must stay in Edgestow

   Mrs. Maggs arrives at the same moment. Because she and Jane are of an age and similarly dressed, Feverstone shakes the wrong woman's hand, which does not sweeten the departure.

   Read the passage
8. 8

   Question 8. How does Lewis stage Mark's and Jane's departures at the end of the chapter?

   • They share a taxi as far as Edgestow station
   • Correct answer: An observer sees a fast car and a slow train
   • Jane follows the car on a bicycle to Belbury
   • Both stay in Edgestow and only plan to leave

   An observer above Edgestow would see Feverstone's car on a main road to the south and, later, the smoke of Jane's branch-line train to the east. The car reaches Belbury while she is still ringing the bell at St. Anne's.

   Read the passage
9. 9

   Question 9. Which of these events actually occur in Chapter 2?

   • Curry leaves the table to call on Warden Place after dinner.

     Happened

   • Feverstone winks at Mark to show that Curry is the joke.

     Didn't happen

   • Jane telephones the Dimbles and is given Miss Ironwood's address.

     Happened

   • Mark has a private interview with John Wither before leaving Edgestow.

     Didn't happen

   Read the passage
10. 10

    Question 10. Which of these events actually occur on the journeys that close the chapter?

    • Feverstone's car runs over a hen on the road to Belbury.

      Happened

    • Jane looks down from the train into Bragdon Wood.

      Happened

    • Jane is admitted and speaks with Miss Ironwood before the chapter ends.

      Didn't happen

    • Jules himself drives Mark from Edgestow to the Blood Transfusion Office.

      Didn't happen

    Read the passage
11. 11

    Question 11. What does obscurantism mean as Feverstone uses it in "which side one's on—obscurantism or order"?

    • Correct answer: Hostility to inquiry, named as the foe of order
    • A method for printing reports in coloured lights
    • Concern for the great heart of the British public
    • The Bracton custom of calling a servant Shooter

    Feverstone reduces the choice to obscurantism or order. Obscurantism is the name he gives anyone who would keep Science from taking over and reconditioning the human race.

    Read the passage
12. 12

    Question 12. What does camouflage mean in Feverstone's line "We want you to write it down—to camouflage it"?

    • To cast the program into the college's statutes
    • Correct answer: To hide the Institute's real aims in official prose
    • To screen Bragdon Wood behind new laboratories
    • To keep Mark's new salary a secret from Jane

    Feverstone does not want popular journalism. He wants Mark to recast experiments and coercion in words committees will swallow, such as re-education of the mal-adjusted.

    Read the passage
13. 13

    Question 13. What does enigmatic mean in "looked steadily at Mark for some seconds with an enigmatic expression"?

    • Openly affectionate, like Busby after wine
    • Drowsy from Curry's port and the late hour
    • Correct answer: Hard to read, just before Feverstone's laugh
    • Frightened, like Jane later on the door-mat

    Once Curry and Busby have gone, Feverstone looks at Mark with an enigmatic expression, then chuckles into helpless laughter. The look is unreadable until the mockery begins.

    Read the passage