Unit 7 Lesson 7: Cultural Context

Question 1

context

Answer 1

the setting or background of a story

Question 2

If you are not familiar with the culture or a cultural experience depicted in a story, then you may take the following steps:

Answer 2

• Notice characters, events, references, allusions, and practices or rituals in the story that are not familiar to you and ask questions about them.
• Collect information to answer your questions. Occasionally, an author will provide the context you need in the form of an introduction, sidebar, or footnotes. If they do not, you should do some research on your own by looking online at reliable sources of information about the story’s cultural context.
• Make connections to your own cultural experiences. Many experiences, such as mealtimes, marriage, childbirth, and death, are universal, but the rituals and practices around them are not. Learning about different cultural experiences will widen your understanding not only of the story but also of the world you live in. The stories you will read today both hinge on the British ritual of taking afternoon tea, and with a little research you can deepen your understanding of the stories and not feel alienated by experiences that do not reflect your own culture.

Question 3

allusion

Answer 3

an unexplained reference to something or someone outside the text, including another literary work

Question 4

extended metaphor

Answer 4

a metaphor that extends over several lines or paragraphs

Question 5

imagery

Answer 5

an author’s use of language to create vivid pictures in readers’ minds

Question 5

figurative language

Answer 5

a way of expressing information in nonliteral ways using figures of speech

Question 6

implied metaphor

Answer 6

a figure of speech that compares two unlike things by saying something is something else without directly referencing one of the things

Question 7

metaphor

Answer 7

a figure of speech that compares two unlike things by saying something is something else

Question 8

personification

Answer 8

giving human characteristics to animals, inanimate objects, ideas, or forces of nature

Question 9

simile

Answer 9

a figure of speech that compares two unlike things by saying something is like something else

Question 10

synecdoche

Answer 10

a figure of speech that uses part of something to refer to its whole, or less often, uses the whole to refer to one of its parts