The Bet – Quiz | shortsonline

The Bet – General Understanding Quiz

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Approximate Reading Times

Quick Read: under 5 minutes
Short Story: 5 to 30 minutes
Novelette: 30 to 90 minutes
Novella: 1.5 to 2.5 hours

Other stories you may like:

No Witchcraft for Sale
Short Story by Doris Lessing. The native cook on a Rhodesian family’s farm doubles as a local medicine man. One day, he uses “bush medicine” to save their son’s eyesight. The parents’ gratitude turns to anger when he refuses to reveal the secret of the cure to a greedy scientist.
Inem
Short Story by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. A six-year-old boy’s best friend, an eight-year-old girl, is married off to a seventeen-year-old-man. Her family are neighbors, and for months afterwards he is kept awake by her screams at night. A year later she is divorced, a tainted “woman” facing a miserable future.
To Room Nineteen
Novelette by Doris Lessing. “Happily” married, financially secure, big house, healthy well-adjusted children, home help; what more could a woman want? The protagonist’s anguish about losing her independence and lack of fulfillment leads to depression, mental decline, and temporary escape from her demons in Room 19 of a seedy hotel.
A City of Churches
Quick Read by Donald Barthelme. Every building in Prester is a church of some kind. A woman talks to a realtor about moving there to open a car rental business. When told that nobody in the city rents cars, she decides to leave. The realtor has other ideas.
The Color Master
Short Story by Aimee Bender. A group of artisans skilled in making fine clothing receive several difficult commissions from a king. While directing the work, the dying Color Master anoints a successor and, in instructing her to put anger into the creations, saves a princess from a terrible fate.

The Color Master
Short Story by Aimee Bender. A group of artisans skilled in making fine clothing receive several difficult commissions from a king. While directing the work, the dying Color Master anoints a successor and, in instructing her to put anger into the creations, saves a princess from a terrible fate.
Champoon
Short Story by Dhep Mahapaoraya. A Chinese towkay beats and locks up his daughter after learning she is in love with a young Thai man. The determined girl escapes, but meets a grisly end in the jaws of a crocodile after finding her lover in the arms of a prostitute.
The Address
Short Story by Marga Minco. A young Jewish woman visits a ‘friend’ of her mother’s with whom she had entrusted family valuables for safekeeping during World War 2. She is horrified to see her precious family heirlooms tastelessly displayed on the walls and furniture of the woman’s house.
The Disk
Quick Read by Jorge Borges. A traveler arrives at an isolated woodcutter’s hut claiming to be an exiled king descended from Odin, the Norse king of the gods. He then makes a fatal mistake, showing the woodcutter the disk of Odin, the only one-dimensional object in the universe.
Speech Sounds
Short Story by Octavia Butler. A virus has killed billions and left most survivors unable to speak, read, write or understand spoken language. The protagonist, having lost her husband and children, is contemplating suicide. The desperate woman finds and cruelly loses new lover, but discovers a renewed purpose in life.