The Veldt quiz

Questions and answers

1. 1

   Question 1. Which combination of genres best describes “The Veldt”?

   • Correct answer: Science Fiction & Dystopian Horror
   • Gothic Romance
   • Historical Realism
   • Comic Satire
   • Naturalism

   Science Fiction & Dystopian Horror is exactly right. The furniture is science fiction — a thought-reading nursery, a table that produces dinner, an air flue that vacuums people upstairs. The society is dystopian: a family that has handed every human task to machines. And the shape is horror: a locked room, screams in the night, blood on a scarf, and a truth withheld until the final lines.

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2. 2

   Question 2. What is the Happylife Home?

   • Correct answer: A fully automated house that clothes, feeds, and rocks the family to sleep
   • A government housing block assigned to families who cannot afford a home
   • A boarding school where wealthy parents send their children to be raised
   • A vacation resort the Hadleys visit for one month every summer as a family

   The Happylife Home cost thirty thousand dollars installed. It cooks, cleans, bathes, dresses, ties shoes, and rocks the Hadleys to sleep — it does everything a family once did for itself, which is exactly the problem.

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3. 3

   Question 3. How much did the Happylife Home cost the Hadleys, installed?

   • Three thousand dollars
   • Correct answer: Thirty thousand dollars
   • Three hundred thousand dollars
   • Three million dollars

   Thirty thousand dollars installed — and the nursery alone cost half again as much as the rest of the house. George's answer to any objection was that nothing is too good for his children.

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4. 4

   Question 4. What do George and Lydia see the first time they step into the nursery together?

   • A green forest with a river, a purple mountain, and Rima singing in the trees
   • Correct answer: An African veldt with vultures overhead and lions feeding in the distance
   • A tea party from Wonderland with Alice and the Mock Turtle sitting nearby
   • An empty white room whose walls have stopped responding to any commands

   The walls recede and an African veldt appears on all sides, reproduced down to the final pebble. The odorophonics blow the smell of hot lion grass and dust, and the lions have just finished eating something Lydia cannot identify.

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5. 5

   Question 5. What does "Veldt" mean in this story?

   • A dense tropical rainforest thick with hanging vines
   • Correct answer: An open grassland found in southern Africa
   • A dry riverbed that fills with water only in spring
   • A walled garden attached to a large country house

   A veldt is the open grassland of southern Africa — hot, exposed, and full of predators. Bradbury chooses the exact opposite of the padded, climate-controlled comfort the Hadleys paid for.

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6. 6

   Question 6. Why does Lydia want George to shut the whole house off for a few days?

   • She has discovered that running the machines costs more than they can afford
   • She wants to punish the children for breaking into the locked nursery at night
   • Correct answer: She feels unnecessary because the house has taken over everything a mother does
   • She believes the psychologist has ordered complete bed rest for her bad nerves

   Lydia says she feels she does not belong in her own home. The automatic scrub bath washes the children faster than she can, so she asks to fry the eggs, darn the socks, and sweep the floors again. She also tells George he is beginning to feel unnecessary too.

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7. 7

   Question 7. What does Lydia mean when she tells George, “The house is wife and mother now, and nursemaid”?

   • The house has finally freed her to spend real time with Wendy and Peter
   • The house is malfunctioning and needs a service call before they can travel
   • The house was a wedding present and reminds her of the family she left behind
   • Correct answer: The house has replaced her in every role that once gave her life its purpose

   Lydia has been made redundant in her own family. The machines feed, bathe, and comfort the children better than she can, and she can feel her children's affection following the machines rather than her.

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8. 8

   Question 8. What does "Odorophonics" mean in this story?

   • Correct answer: Hidden machinery that blows the smells of a scene into the room
   • Speakers that reproduce the sounds of animals moving through grass
   • Projectors that throw moving pictures onto all four nursery walls
   • Sensors that record a child's thoughts for a psychologist to study

   Odorophonics is Bradbury's invented word for the smell machinery. It blows hot straw, the cool green water hole, dust, and the rusty smell of animals at whoever stands in the nursery — a large part of why the veldt feels too real.

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9. 9

   Question 9. What happens when George stands in the nursery and demands that the room show him Aladdin and his lamp?

   • The scene flickers for a moment and then settles into a forest with Rima in it
   • Correct answer: Nothing happens; the veldtland remains and the lions mumble in their baked pelts
   • The walls go blank and a small voice apologizes for the delay in the service
   • The room obeys at once, which convinces George nothing is wrong with the house

   The room will not obey him. Lydia offers two explanations: either the children have thought about Africa and killing so long that the room is in a rut, or Peter has got into the machinery and set it to stay that way.

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10. 10

    Question 10. Which scene do the children put on the nursery walls to convince their father there is no Africa?

    • Correct answer: A green forest with Rima from Green Mansions
    • A snowfield with Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz
    • A sky ceiling with Pegasus flying across it
    • A tea party with Alice and the Mock Turtle

    Wendy runs ahead and changes the room. When the family arrives, the veldt is gone and Rima stands singing among butterflies — proof of how completely the children, not the parents, control the nursery.

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11. 11

    Question 11. What does George pick up in the nursery after the veldt has been replaced by the forest?

    • A pair of binoculars the children had hidden in the tall veldt grass
    • A picnic basket the children had carried in for a lunch on the glade
    • Correct answer: An old wallet of his, chewed, with blood smears on both of its sides
    • A bloody scarf that his wife had been wearing earlier that same evening

    The wallet smells of hot grass and of lion, and there are drops of saliva and blood on both sides. Bradbury plants it long before the ending. Lydia's bloody scarf turns up later, picked out of the grass by McClean.

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12. 12

    Question 12. What is psychologist David McClean's diagnosis of the nursery?

    • Correct answer: The room has become a channel toward destructive thoughts instead of a release from them
    • The room is mechanically broken and needs a technician to replace its thought sensors
    • The room is harmless and the children show only the usual violences of ordinary play
    • The room is dangerous only because George has been entering it far too often alone

    These nurseries were built so a psychologist could study the patterns a child's mind leaves on the walls and help the child. In the Hadley house the room has stopped draining the children's hostility and started feeding it. McClean prescribes tearing the room down and daily treatment for a year.

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13. 13

    Question 13. McClean tells George, “Where before they had a Santa Claus now they have a Scrooge.” What is his point?

    • George has been far too generous and should have spent the money on schooling
    • The children resent Christmas because their parents no longer celebrate it at home
    • Correct answer: George gave the children everything, then began taking things away, so they hate him
    • The children have grown greedy and will be cured as soon as they learn to share

    The Hadleys never set a limit, so the first limits look like cruelty. George refused the rocket trip to New York, removed the picture painter, and locked the nursery to make a point. McClean adds that children prefer Santas — withdrawal of gifts is felt as an attack, not as discipline.

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14. 14

    Question 14. What does "Spoor" mean in this story?

    • The low warning growl a lion makes just before it charges
    • The dry season when the grass of the veldt turns yellow
    • Correct answer: The track or scent trail that an animal leaves behind it
    • The shallow pool where grazing animals come down to drink

    A spoor is the trail an animal leaves for a hunter to follow. McClean says the paranoia in the house is so thick you can follow it like a spoor — a hunting word that quietly places the two men among the prey.

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15. 15

    Question 15. Why does Bradbury name the Hadley children Wendy and Peter?

    • To honor two child actors Bradbury had seen in a 1940s radio adaptation
    • To suggest the children are twins, since both names share the same origin
    • To signal that the family has English roots and recently moved to America
    • Correct answer: To echo Peter Pan, whose nursery opens onto a world with no parents in it

    In Barrie's story, Peter Pan flies into the Darling children's nursery and carries them off to a country where children never grow up and adults have no place. Bradbury's nursery is a mechanical Neverland — except that in his version it is the parents who never come home.

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16. 16

    Question 16. What do the lions on the nursery walls most clearly represent?

    • The natural world taking its revenge on a family that has abandoned it
    • Correct answer: The children's hatred for their parents, given a shape and given teeth
    • The dangers of foreign travel that George keeps warning his children about
    • The psychologist's professional authority over the Hadley family's future

    The nursery shows only what the children are thinking, and for over a month it has shown lions eating. As George notices at dinner, the pattern runs sun, giraffes, and death repeated again and again. The room does not create the hatred; it makes it visible, and finally it makes it lethal.

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17. 17

    Question 17. Which birds circle above the veldt in both the first nursery scene and the last?

    • Hawks
    • Crows
    • Correct answer: Vultures
    • Storks

    Lydia calls them filthy creatures in the opening scene, and in the final paragraphs their shadows flicker across McClean's hot face as they drop down the blazing sky. They frame the story with the same image: death waiting its turn.

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18. 18

    Question 18. Why do the screams coming from the nursery sound familiar to Lydia?

    • The room replays recordings of old arguments the parents once had at home
    • The children have been imitating their parents' voices in order to scare them
    • She has heard the same lion sounds every night since the nursery was built
    • Correct answer: The screams are her own and George's, rehearsed by the children in advance

    For over a month the children have been feeding their parents to the lions in imagination. The Hadleys hear two screams and a roar in the night, and Lydia says they sound awfully familiar. Only when they are locked in with the lions do they realize whose screams they had been hearing.

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19. 19

    Question 19. Which statement best expresses the central theme of the story?

    • Science fiction technology will eventually make human parents entirely unnecessary
    • Children are naturally cruel and will turn on anyone who tries to raise them well
    • Correct answer: Comfort that replaces love and limits does not raise children; it replaces parents
    • Wealthy families will always destroy themselves once they stop working for a living

    The Happylife Home is a marvel and Bradbury never calls it evil. The danger is that the Hadleys let it do the feeding, the loving, and the disciplining, and their children gave their loyalty to the room instead. McClean's verdict is that the room is now more important to Wendy and Peter than their real parents are.

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20. 20

    Question 20. What is the central irony of the story's ending?

    • Correct answer: The nursery built to protect children's minds is what destroys their parents
    • The parents escape the nursery just as the lions reach the edge of the clearing
    • The children realize too late that they loved their parents more than the room
    • David McClean arrives in time to save the Hadleys but is too frightened to act

    The room was designed as a safe outlet for a child's difficult feelings, a place where a psychologist could read them and help. In the Hadley house it becomes the instrument that carries out the very wish it was built to drain away.

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21. 21

    Question 21. What does "Neuroses" mean in this story?

    • Physical illnesses brought on by long exposure to intense heat
    • Fixed daily routines that a well-run household depends upon
    • Imaginary companions that young children invent while playing
    • Correct answer: Mild mental disturbances marked by anxiety, obsession, or fear

    Neuroses are anxieties and obsessions short of full mental illness. Lydia argues the nursery is supposed to let the children work theirs off harmlessly. McClean's finding is the reverse: the room has been feeding the disturbance instead of draining it.

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22. 22

    Question 22. How does the house feel to George once he has switched off every machine in it?

    • Like a fresh start, so peaceful that both children fall asleep within minutes
    • Correct answer: Like a mechanical cemetery, silent and full of what seem to be dead bodies
    • Like a hotel room, comfortable enough but missing anything that feels personal
    • Like a museum exhibit, each machine standing quietly behind its own glass case

    With the voice clocks, stoves, shoe shiners, and body scrubbers dead, the silence feels to George like a mechanical cemetery. McClean has already warned him that nothing ever likes to die, even a room — and Peter begs the ceiling not to let his father kill everything.

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23. 23

    Question 23. Which of these events actually happened in the story?

    • Lydia asks George to call in a psychologist to look at the nursery.

      Happened

      She makes the request in the story's opening lines, before either of them has stepped into the room that day.

    • George finds an old wallet of his in the nursery, chewed and smeared with blood.

      Happened

      He picks it up in the corner near where the lions had been, and it smells of hot grass and lion.

    • The nursery refuses to change when George demands Aladdin and his lamp.

      Happened

      The veldtland remains and the lions mumble in their pelts. George decides the fool room is out of order.

    • Wendy runs to the nursery ahead of her parents, and when they follow, the veldt is gone.

      Happened

      George had forgotten to lock the door. Wendy returns breathless to say it is not Africa, and the room now holds a forest with Rima in it. Later, in the dark, both parents agree that Wendy must have changed it.

    • George brings high-powered binoculars into the nursery to see what the lions are eating.

      Didn't happen

      He only wonders aloud whether binoculars would help. McClean laughs dryly and tells him hardly.

    • David McClean picks a bloody scarf out of the grass and George says it belongs to Lydia.

      Happened

      It happens just as the two men are leaving the nursery, moments before they throw the switch at the fuse box.

    • The Hadleys plan to leave the house and take a vacation in Iowa.

      Happened

      George says they will be on their way in five minutes, and that McClean is coming back to help them get to the airport.

    • Peter tells his father that he hates him and wishes that he were dead.

      Happened

      He says both once the house has been shut off, after first wailing at the ceiling for the house not to let his father kill everything.

    • The children apologize to their parents and agree to give up the nursery for good.

      Didn't happen

      They scream, sob, swear, and throw things, then beg for one more minute of nursery, which they use to lock their parents inside.

    • George smashes the nursery walls with an axe before McClean can examine the room.

      Didn't happen

      He never attacks the room physically. He and McClean go to the fuse box together and throw the switch that kills the nursery.

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