Teenage Wasteland – Quiz

Teenage Wasteland – 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:

Christmas Not Just Once a Year
Novelette by Heinrich Böll. After years of austerity during World War II, a German businessman’s wife becomes hysterical when the tree for the traditional lavish family Christmas of 1946 is taken down. To prevent her being institutionalized, her family agree to re-celebrate Christmas Eve every day of the year.
Zebra
Short Story by Chaim Potok. Zebra (aka Adam) is hit by a car while pursuing his passion for running. His physical injuries are healing, but he is depressed over the prospect of never being able to run well again. A volunteer art teacher inspires him to face life more positively.
Native Land / Lupang Tinubuan
Short Story by Narciso G. Reyes. A young boy attends a funeral in his father’s home village. He bonds with extended family he has never met, connects with his father’s childhood, and comes to love and find peace in the land others describe as having “nothing beautiful except the sky”.
Leiningen Versus the Ants
Novelette by Carl Stephenson. A Brazilian plantation owner is advised to flee before an army of killer ants overruns his farm. He boasts about his superior intelligence and faultless preparations (which fail), and it is a last-minute idea, which he had previously overlooked, that saves the day.
Landscape with Flatiron
Short Story by Haruki Murakami. A troubled young woman and middle-aged artist bond over bonfires the artist constructs on a beach. Both appear to be trying to escape unstated traumas from their past. Their lives are contrasted with that of the woman’s boyfriend, a carefree surfer and musician.

The Man Who Could Work Miracles (A Pantoum in Prose)
Short Story by H. G. Wells. A man known as a sceptic as far as miracles are concerned suddenly discovers he can make things happen just by thinking about them. He and his parish priest become so obsessed with using the power for good that they bring about global catastrophe.
The Khaki Coat
Short Story by Nhat Tien. Set in the early days of the Vietnamese socialist government, a girl who supports her younger siblings by hawking items she digs up in graveyards cleverly avoids prison after being arrested when a widow recognizes the fashionable khaki coat her husband was buried in.
A Sound of Thunder
Short Story by Ray Bradbury. Five men travel back in time on a safari to hunt a T-Rex. One of them panics when he sees the monster and steps off a specially prepared path. The last thing the clumsy man hears is a sound of thunder.
The Dead Past
Novelette by Isaac Assimov. A young physicist builds a home “chronoscope” that can look back in time up to one hundred and fifty years. Too late, the government tries to censor his work, pointing out its potential to destroy an important aspect of life everyone takes for granted.
The Spinoza of Market Street
Short Story by Isaac Singer. Frustrated, sickly and too weak from hunger to get out of bed, an aging philosopher is nursed back to health by a reclusive spinster. Her kindness leads to marriage and a wedding night in which he miraculously regains his youthful virility and passion for life.