A Municipal Report – 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

A Game of Cards
Short Story by Witi Ihimaera. A Maori university student’s visit with his dying grandmother highlights some important aspects of his people’s approach to family, community and mortality. It also exposes the need for the educated younger generation to step up and take the lead in preserving their cultural heritage.
The Hungry Stones
Short Story by Rabindranath Tagore. While waiting for a delayed train, a passenger talks about the time he stayed alone in a deserted, seemingly haunted palace. According to local legend, those who slept there either disappeared or went mad. Unfortunately, the train arrives before he discloses the palace’s secret.
Clean Sweep
Grade 7-8 Story by Jane Bauer. This story about the healing power of memories contrasts two families: one brought closer through tragedy and the need to work together to secure their future, the other torn apart by a silly misunderstanding and too stubborn to make the first move towards reconciliation.

Kusum
Quick Read by Khushwant Singh. An overweight, physically unattractive young woman compensates by being a model student and good girl with a capital G. That is until her passions are stirred by an accidental encounter with a cheeky young street hawker who makes an obscene, possibly flirtatious gesture at her.
An Uncomfortable Bed
Quick Read by Guy de Moupassant. A man holidaying with friends becomes suspicious when they seem more jovial than usual one evening. They often play practical jokes on one another, but he doesn’t find anything in his room, The next day, they all have a good laugh at his expense.
Youth
Novelette by Isaac Asimov. Two boys capture some strange looking “animals”. Having no idea that they are actually aliens on an important mission, they plan to teach them tricks and display them in a circus. Fortunately for the world, their parents intervene and set the captives free.
The Day the Dancers Came
Short Story by Bienvenido Santos. After years of menial work in the United States, an aging Filipino expatriate has no remaining family and only one local Filipino friend. Feeling cut off from his culture, he decides to approach and offer to host to a group of visiting tinikling dancers.

The Ring
Short Story by Isak Dinesen. A recently married nineteen-year-old woman’s innocent, child-like view of the world is shattered by a chance encounter with a man covered in blood who is on the run for theft and murder. The triggers a re-evaluation of her naïve views on life and marriage.
Wakefield
Short Story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. A narrator provides a possible backstory for a newspaper account of a man who ‘disappeared’ after telling his wife he was going on a week’s holiday, stalked her for twenty years, and then returned home as if nothing had happened.
The Memsahib of Mandla
Short Story by Khushwant Singh. Nature and the ghost of a woman who founded a missionary school combine to drive a British man and his family from a forest officer’s rest house. The rest house was once the woman’s home, and has been empty since she died.