Quiz: Figures of Speech
Identify the figure of speech in each quoted line.
ENGLISH 11A: Literature and Composition
Quiz - Figures of Speech
Name
Date Per.
Mr. Reed
Select the term that best identifies the underlined figure in each item.
- 1. What a pity youth must be wasted on the young. — George Bernard Shaw
- A. apostrophe
- B. metaphor
- C. paradox
- D. understatement
- 2. England expects every man to do his duty. — Lord Nelson
- A. allegory
- B. denotation
- C. paradox
- D. personification
- 3. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. —Winston Churchill
- A. irony
- B. metaphor
- C. olfactory image
- D. simile
- 4. By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread. — Genesis
- A. allegory
- B. hyperbole
- C. metonymy
- D. organic image
- 5. War is not healthy for children and other living things.
- A. apostrophe
- B. metaphor
- C. paradox
- D. understatement
- 6. The Fog comes
on little cat feet. — Carl Sandburg- A. apostrophe
- B. metaphor
- C. paradox
- D. understatement
- 7. My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow,
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thine forehead gaze . . . — Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”- A. allegory
- B. hyperbole
- C. metonymy
- D. organic image
- 8. The merry World did on a day
With his train-bands and mates agree
To meet together, where I lay,
And all in sport to jeer at me.- A. allegory
- B. denotation
- C. paradox
- D. personification
- 9. Let us go then, you and I,
While the evening is spread out against the sky,
Like a patient etherized upon a table . . . — T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”- A. irony
- B. metaphor
- C. olfactory image
- D. simile
- 10. Two animal rights activists were protesting the cruelty of sending pigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn. Suddenly, the pigs, all two thousand of them, escaped through a broken fence and stampeded, trampling the two hapless protesters to death.
- A. irony
- B. metaphor
- C. olfactory image
- D. simile
- 11. Ah, Sorrow, you consume us.
- A. apostrophe
- B. metaphor
- C. paradox
- D. understatement
- 12. Dante’s ascent of Mount Purgatory.
- A. allegory
- B. hyperbole
- C. irony
- D. paradox
- 13. Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
— Thomas Marlowe, Dr. Faustus- A. allegory
- B. hyperbole
- C. metonymy
- D. organic image
- 14. For what the waves could never wash away
This proper youth has wasted in a day.
— The Art of English Poesy- A. apostrophe
- B. metaphor
- C. paradox
- D. understatement
- 15. His legs bestrid the ocean, his reared arm
Crested the world; his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres.
— William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra- A. allegory
- B. hyperbole
- C. metonymy
- D. organic image
- 16. Pay tribute to the crown.
- A. allegory
- B. hyperbole
- C. metonymy
- D. organic image
- 17. Till all the seas go dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt with the sun!
And I will love thee still, my dear . . .
— Robert Burns, “A Red, Red Rose”- A. allegory
- B. hyperbole
- C. metonymy
- D. organic image
- 18. Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson- A. apostrophe
- B. metaphor
- C. paradox
- D. understatement
- 19. Bright April shakes out her rain-drenched hair. — Sara Teasdale
- A. allegory
- B. denotation
- C. paradox
- D. personification
- 20. Tockytock, tockytock
clumped our Alpine, Edwardian cuckoo clock,
slung with strangled, wooden game.- A. auditory image
- B. gustatory image
- C. tactile image
- D. visual image