The Great Gatsby study guide

THE GREAT GATSBY:
A UNIT PLAN
Second Edition
Based on the book by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Written by Mary B. Collins
This LitPlan for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s

The Great Gatsby
has been brought to you by Teacher’s Pet Publications, Inc.
Copyright Teacher’s Pet Publications 1999
11504 Hammock Point
Berlin MD 21811
STUDY GUIDE QUESTIONS

SHORT ANSWER STUDY GUIDE QUESTIONS - The Great Gatsby
Chapter 1
1. How does the narrator describe Gatsby?
2. From where did the narrator come and why?
3. Describe the narrator's house.
4. Describe the Buchanans' house.
5. How does Nick know Daisy and Tom?
6. Describe Tom. What is our impression of him in Chapter 1?
7. What kind of person is Daisy?
8. What did Miss Baker tell Nick about Tom?
9. When asked about her daughter, what does Daisy say?
10. How is Gatsby introduced into the novel?
Chapter 2
1. What is the "valley of ashes"?
2. What are the "eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg?
3. Who did Tom take Nick to meet?
4. Identify Myrtle and George Wilson.
5. What did Mrs. Wilson buy while she was out with Tom and Nick?
6. Where did they go? What was at 158th Street?
7. Identify Catherine and Mr. & Mrs. McKee.
8. What does Mr. McKee tell Nick about Gatsby?
9. What reason did Myrtle give for marrying George Wilson?
10. What did Tom do to Myrtle when she mentioned Daisy's name?
Chapter 3
1. Describe Gatsby's wealth. List some of the things that represent wealth.
2. What kind of people come to Gatsby's parties?
3. Why did Nick Carraway go to the party?
4. How does Nick meet Gatsby?
5. What are some of the stories about Gatsby?
6. Is Gatsby a "phony"?
7. Describe Nick's relationship with Jordan.
Chapter 4
1. Who is Klipspringer?
2. What does Gatsby tell Nick about himself?
3. What "matter" did Gatsby have Jordan Baker discuss with Nick?
4. Who is Mr. Wolfshiem?
5. What does Mr. Wolfshiem tell Nick about Gatsby?
6. What does Jordan tell Nick about Daisy, Gatsby and Tom?
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Gatsby Short Answer Study Guide Page 2
Chapter 5
1. Describe the meeting between Gatsby and Daisy. Why was he so nervous?
2. How long did it take Gatsby to make the money to buy the mansion?
3. Why did Gatsby want Daisy to see the house and his clothes?
4. What had the green light on the dock meant to Gatsby?
5. What had Gatsby turned Daisy into in his own mind?
Chapter 6
1. What is Gatsby's real history? Where is he from, and what is his name?
2. What did Dan Cody do for Gatsby?
3. What is Daisy's opinion of Gatsby's party? How does this affect him?
4. What does Gatsby want from Daisy?
Chapter 7
1. What was Gatsby's reaction to Daisy's child?
2. What did Wilson do to Myrtle? Why?
3. Why do the five drive into the city on such a hot afternoon?
4. What does Gatsby think about Daisy's relationship with Tom?
5. What is Daisy's reaction to both men?
6. What happens on the way home from New York?
7. How do these people react to Myrtle's death:
a. Wilson:
b. Tom:
c. Nick:
d. Gatsby:
8. What is the true relationship between Daisy and Tom?
Chapter 8
1. What does Gatsby tell Nick about his past? Is it true?
2. What does Michaelis believe caused Myrtle to run?
3. Why did she run?
4. Why does Wilson believe that Gatsby killed Myrtle?
5. What does Wilson do?
Chapter 9
1. Why couldn't Nick get anyone to come to Gatsby's funeral?
2. Who is Henry C. Gatz?
3. What is the book Henry Gatz shows Nick? Why is it important to the novel?
4. What happens between Nick and Jordan Baker?
5. What does Nick say about people like Daisy and Tom?

PREREADING VOCABULARY
WORKSHEETS

VOCABULARY - The Great Gatsby
Chapter 1 & 2 Part I: Using Prior Knowledge and Contextual Clues
Below are the sentences in which the vocabulary words above appear in the text. Read the sentence. Use any clues you can find in the sentence combined with your prior knowledge, and write what you think the underlined words mean in the space provided.
1. This isn't just an epigram - life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
2. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner.
3. She was only extemporizing but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words.
4. I knew now why her face was familiar-its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at . . . Palm Beach.
5. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished her peremptory heart.
6. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice . . . and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away.
7. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing.
8. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur.
Part II: Determining the Meaning - Match the vocabulary words to their dictionary definitions.
1. epigram                              A. to take the place of
2. supercilious                        B. connecting without a break
3. extemporizing                    C. haughtiness in bearing and attitude
4. rotogravure                                    D. printed material, such as a newspaper
5. peremptory                         E. a short, witty poem expressing a single thought
6. oculist                                 F. feeling or showing haughty disdain
7. contiguous                          G. a physician who treats diseases of the eyes
8. hauteur                               H. to perform without prior preparation

Vocabulary - The Great Gatsby Chapter 3
Part I: Using Prior Knowledge and Contextual Clues
Below are the sentences in which the vocabulary words above appear in the text. Read the sentence. Use any clues you can find in the sentence combined with your prior knowledge, and write what you think the underlined words mean in the space provided.
1. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city, between one in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains.
2. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around what she is Gilda Gray's understudy from the "Follies."
3. There were three married couples and Jordan's escort, a persistent undergraduate given to violent innuendo and obviously under the impression that sooner or later Jordan was going to yield to him her person, to a greater or lesser degree.
4. When the "Jazz History of the World" was over girls were putting their heads on men's
shoulders in a puppyish, convivial way, girls were swooning backward playfully into men's arms...
5. Eluding Jordan's undergraduate who was now engaged in an obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls and who implored me to join him, I went inside.
6. The tears coursed down her cheeks-not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets.
7. The caterwauling horns had reached a crescendo and I turned away and cut across the lawn toward home.
8. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something-most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don't in the beginning-and one day I found what it was.
9. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this unwillingness I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her jaunty body.

Vocabulary - The Great Gatsby Chapter 3 Continued
Part II: Determining the Meaning Match the vocabulary words to their dictionary definitions.
9. omnibus                              A. medical practice that deals with pregnant women
10. erroneous                          B. a shrill, discordant sound
11. innuendo                          C. a show, pretense or display
12. convivial                          D. a small brook or stream
13. obstetrical                                    E. a long motor vehicle for passengers
14. rivulets                             F. merry; festive
15. caterwauling                     G. mistaken
16. affectations                       H. a deceptive stratagem or device
17. subterfuges                       I. an indirect, derogatory implication in expression
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Vocabulary - The Great Gatsby Chapters 4 & 5
Part I: Using Prior Knowledge and Contextual Clues
Below are the sentences in which the vocabulary words above appear in the text. Read the sentence. Use any clues you can find in the sentence combined with your prior knowledge, and write what you think the underlined words mean in the space provided.
1. It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in it monstrous length with triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns.
2. "After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe-Paris, Venice, Rome collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that happened to me long ago.
3. Gatsby took an arm of each of us and moved forward into the restaurant whereupon Mr. Wolfshiem swallowed a new sentence he was starting and lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction.
4. He's quite a character around New York-a denizen of Broadway."
5. The flowers were unnecessary, for at two o'clock a greenhouse arrived from Gatsby's with innumerable receptacles to contain it.
6. After the house we were to see the grounds and the swimming pool and the hydroplane and the midsummer flowers-but outside Gatsby's window it began to rain again so we stood in a row looking at the corrugated surface of the Sound.
7. He was now decently clothed in a "sport-shirt" open at the neck, sneakers and duck trousers of a nebulous hue.

Vocabulary - The Great Gatsby Chapters 4 & 5 Continued
Part II: Determining the Meaning Match the vocabulary words to their dictionary definitions.
18. labyrinth                           A. to walk in a sleep-like condition
19. raja                                               B. containers that hold items
20. somnambulatory               C. shaped into folds or parallel
21. denizen                             D. cloudy, misty, or hazy
22. receptacles                        E. prince, or chief in India or East Indies
23. corrugated                        F. a intricate structure of interconnecting passages
24. nebulous                           G. an inhabitant
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Vocabulary - The Great Gatsby Chapters 6 & 7
Part I: Using Prior Knowledge and Contextual Clues
Below are the sentences in which the vocabulary words above appear in the text. Read the sentence. Use any clues you can find in the sentence combined with your prior knowledge, and write what you think the underlined words mean in the space provided.
1. He was a son of God - a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that-and he must be about His Father's Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.
2. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented "place" that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village-appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms,
3. So the whole caravansary had fallen in like a card house at the disapproval in her eyes.
4. The immediate contingency overtook him, pulled him back from the edge of the theoretical abyss.
5. Her expression was curiously familiar-it was an expression I had often seen on women's faces but on Myrtle Wilson's face it seemed purposeless and inexplicable until I realized that her eyes, wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom but on Jordan Baker, whom she took to be his wife.
6. The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.
7. The circle closed up again with a running murmur of expostulations it was a minute before could see anything at all.
8. I walked back along the border of the law, traversed the gravel softly and tiptoed up the veranda steps.
9. He put his hands in his coat pockets and turned back eagerly to his scrutiny of the house, as though my presence marred the sacredness of the vigil.

Vocabulary - The Great Gatsby Chapters 6 & 7 Continued
Part II: Determining the Meaning Match the vocabulary words to their dictionary definitions.
25. meretricious                     A. difficult or impossible to explain or account for
26. euphemisms                     B. close observation
27. caravansary                      C. attracting attention in a vulgar manner
28. contingency                      D. to dissuade or correct
29. inexplicable                      E. a large inn
30. libertine                            F. to travel or pass across or over
31. expostulation                    G. something incidental to something else
32. traversed                           H. one who acts without moral restraint
33. scrutiny                            I. the act of substituting a vague statement for
one considered blunt or offensive

Vocabulary - The Great Gatsby Chapters 8 & 9
Part I: Using Prior Knowledge and Contextual Clues
Below are the sentences in which the vocabulary words above appear in the text. Read the sentence. Use any clues you can find in the sentence combined with your prior knowledge, and write what you think the underlined words mean in the space provided.
1. ... and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and
breathing and redolent
2. He looked at me anxiously as if he hoped I'd corroborate this.
3. He stopped at the garage for a pneumatic mattress that had amused his guests during the summer, and the chauffeur helped him pump it up.
4. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him throughout the amorphous trees.
5. ...I thought the whole talk would shortly be served up in racy pasquinade-but Catherine, who might have said anything didn't say a word.
6. ...and then hasty addenda beneath:
7. After a little while Mr. Gatz opened the door and came out, his mouth ajar, his face flushed slightly, his eyes leaking isolated and unpunctual tears.
8. The he went into the jewelry store to buy a pearl necklace-or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons-rid of my provincial squeamishness forever.
9. I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more.

Vocabulary - The Great Gatsby Chapters 8 & 9 Continued
10. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams;
11. ...face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
Part II: Determining the Meaning Match the vocabulary words to their dictionary definitions.
34. redolent                            A. something added, especially a supplement to a book
35. corroborate                       B. to act as a go-between in sexual intrigues
36. pneumatic                                    C. limited in perspective
37. amorphous                        D. unable to think in a clear or orderly manner
38. addenda                            E. corresponding in size or degree
39. unpunctual                        F. to strengthen or support with other evidence
40. provincial                         G. relating to air or other gases
41. incoherent                                    H. lacking definite form
42. pandered                           I. acting or arriving late for an appointment
43. commensurate                  J. suggestive