GED and HiSET language arts — poems and scenes from plays

Literary texts make up about 40 percent of the HiSET Language Arts – Reading subtest, and ETS lists poetry among the forms that can appear. The GED Reasoning Through Language Arts test also draws on literary texts. For many adults returning to study, poems and plays are the least familiar reading of all: a poem compresses meaning into a few lines, and a play tells its story almost entirely through dialogue and stage directions, with no narrator to explain.

This material works with complete texts by American writers whose work is in the public domain, printed in full inside each question. Emily Dickinson's 'Because I could not stop for Death' asks how Death is presented, what the 'house' that is only a swelling of the ground must be, and where the speaker is when she says that centuries feel shorter than a day. Paul Laurence Dunbar's 'We Wear the Mask' asks what the mask stands for, what the speakers want the world to see, and what changes when the third stanza turns to prayer. Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken' asks what the speaker admits about the two roads and what that admission does to the famous last lines. Stephen Crane's five-line poem about a man and the universe asks about tone. Two scenes from Susan Glaspell's one-act play Trifles (1916), in which the men searching a farmhouse for evidence overlook what the women notice, ask about a stage direction, the meaning of the title, and the double meaning of the play's last line.

The twelve questions each have one answer that the words on the page support, and every explanation points to the lines that decide it. The flashcards cover the terms these questions use: personification, extended metaphor, imagery, speaker, tone, irony, stanza, rhyme, stage directions, dialogue, dramatic irony and double meaning.

The written work asks you to explain images and comparisons in your own words, to describe a shift in a poem, to explain what a stage direction shows without dialogue, and to write about irony. The oral exam gives you a short stanza or a few lines of dialogue and asks what it compares, what it suggests, and how you know.

All the texts were published in the United States before 1930 and are quoted from their original editions. Zestly is an independent study tool, not affiliated with GED Testing Service or the HiSET program, and no score is promised.

• Explain personification and extended metaphor in a complete poem
• Identify a speaker's tone and a shift in tone between stanzas
• Explain irony in a poem, including a gap between what a speaker admits and what he later claims
• Read stage directions for what a character feels but does not say
• Explain dramatic irony and the double meaning of a line in a play

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the HiSET Language Arts – Reading literary-text category (about 40 percent of the test; forms include poetry) and the GED Reasoning Through Language Arts reading topics. Texts, all public domain: Emily Dickinson, 'Because I could not stop for Death' (Poems, 1890) and 'Hope is the thing with feathers' (Poems, 1891); Paul Laurence Dunbar, 'We Wear the Mask' (1896); Robert Frost, 'The Road Not Taken' (Mountain Interval, 1916); Stephen Crane, 'A man said to the universe' (War Is Kind, 1899); Susan Glaspell, Trifles (1916).