AP Free-Response Questions Inventory
Question 1
Question 2
Question 3
2010
“The Century Quilt” by
Marilyn Nelson—meanings
of the quilt
complex character in excerpt
from Belinda by Maria
Hedgeworth (1801)
exile as alienating and
enriching
2010 (B)
young man coming of age in narrator's memories from fifth character leaves home,
S. Johnson's “To Sir John
grade summer in Maxine
yet that home remains
Lade, on His Coming of Age” Clair's “Cherry Bomb”
significant
and Housman's “When I Was
One-and-Twenty”
2009
dismissal of Cardinal Wolsey Lutie Johnson's relationship to how a symbol functions
from the court of Henry VIII the urban setting in Ann
in a work—plot, theme,
Petry's 1946 The Street
characterization
2009 (B)
Edward Fields' “Icarus”
2008
Keats' “When I Have Fears” exchange student Arun's
and Longfellow's “Mezzo
experience in Anita Desai's
Cammin”
1999 Fasting, Feasting
2008 (B)
animal eye views in Ted
Hughes' “Hawk Roosting”
and Mark Doty's “Golden
Retrievals”
2007
adult explanations for
relationship between son and
children in Richard Wilbur's father in Dalton Trumbo's
“Barred Owl” and Billy
1939 Johnny Got His Gun
Collins' “The History
Teacher”
character contending
with some aspect of the
past
2007 (B)
attitude toward place in
Philip Larkin's “Here”
acts of betrayal
2006
scene, mood, and meaning in values of characters in Oscar
Robert Penn Warren's
Wilde's 1892 Lady
“Evening Hawk”
Windermere's Fan
country setting
establishing values
2006 (B)
speaker's attitude toward
nature in Ted Hughs' “To
Paint a Water Lily”
narrator's style revealing
attitudes in a 19th century
novel
physical journey playing
a central role
2005
William Blake's 1789 and
1794 two versions of “The
Chimney Sweeper”
literary devices to achieve
purpose in Katharine Brush's
1946 “The Birthday Party”
conforming outwardly
and questioning
inwardly
2005 (B)
morning surroundings in
William Stafford's “Five
narrator's attitude toward
McTeague
freeing oneself from the
power of another or
characterization in Zora Neale political or social issue
Hurston's 1948 Seraph on the
Suwanee
foil character
characterization of Catherine childhood and
Morland in Jane Austen's 1818 adolescence
Northanger Abbey
novelist Seamus Deane's
reflections on childhood and
reading and writing
A.M.” and Elizabeth
Bishop's “Five Flights Up”
gaining power over
someone else
2004
significance of dark or night relationships among characters
in Emily Dickinson's “We
in Henry James's 1891 The
grow accustomed to the
Pupil
dark” and Robert Frost's
“Acquainted with the Night”
Roland Barthes'
“Literature is the
question minus the
answer.”
2004 (B)
social commentary in
Elizabeth Gaskell's 1848
Mary Barton
relationship between speaker
and swamp in Mary Oliver's
“Crossing the Swamp”
death scene
2003
two poems about Eros by
Robert Bridges and Anne
Stevenson
social commentary in Mavis
Gallant's “The Other Paris”
tragic heroes as
instrument of suffering
in others
2003 (B)
excerpt from George
Meredith's Modern Love
characterization of the speaker colliding cultures and
in Joyce Carol Oates's 1996
sense of identity
We Were the Mulvaneys
2002
how the author creates comic attitude toward sinking of the
effect in Alain de Botton's
sink in Thomas Hardy's “The
Kiss and Tell
Convergence of the Twain”
2002 (B)
vivid characterization of
Quoyle in a contemporary
onvel
2001
conditions of particular place characterization in Henry
and time in William
Fielding's 1749 Tom Jones
Wordsworth's “London,
1802” and Paul Laurence
Dunbar's “Douglass”
2000
portrayals of the Sirens in a
translation and Margaret
Atwood's “Siren Song”
characterization and satire in a characters confronting a
piece by Joseph Addison in a mystery
1912 issue of The Spectator
1999
Seamus Heaney's
“Blackberry-Picking”
dramatic experience impacting character pulled in
the main character in Cormac conflicting directions
McCarthy's 1994 The Crossing
1998
speaker's conception of a
woman's world in Eavan
Boland's “It's a Woman's
World”
narrator's attitude toward
Dorothea Brooke in George
Eliot's 1871 Middlemarch
1997
speaker's response in
narrator's attitude toward the
Richard Wilbur's “The Death past in Joy Kogawa's Obasan
of a Toad”
scenes of weddings,
funerals, parties, and
other social occasions
1996
character of Judge Pycheon
in Nathaniel Hawthorn's
spiritual assessment and
moral reconciliation by
morally ambiguous
characters
formal elements of a villanelle keeping or revealing a
contributing to meaning in W. secret
H. Auden's “If I Could Tell
You”
controlling metaphor and
attitude in Anne Bradstreet's
apparent madness and
irrational behavior
playing an important
role
a work you initially
thought tame but then
saw for its free and wild
thinking
1851 The House of Seven
Gables
“An Author to Her Book”
the end of a work
1995
attitude toward love in John characterization in Sandra
characters alienated
Donne's “The Broken Heart” Cisneros's “Eleven” from the within a culture
1991 Woman Hollering Creek
1994
dramatization of Sylvia's
adventure in Sarah Orne
Jewett's “A White Heron”
contrasting views of Helen of a character who appears
Troy in Edgar Allan Poe's “To briefly or not at all as a
Helen” and Hilda Doolittle's
significance presence
“Helen”
1993
language and meaning in
May Swenson's “The
Centaur”
Lytton Strachey's conception
of Florence Nightingale
1992
speaker's response to the
mother's attitude toward
natural world in William
daughter in Tillie Olsen's “I
Wordsworth's “The Prelude” Stand Here Ironing”
scene or character
awakening “thoughtful
laughter” in the reader
the function of a
confidant(e)