Name: Date:

“There Will Come Soft Rains”

Ray Bradbury

FIRST READ: Comprehension

Identify the choice that best answers the question.

1. How does the reader learn where and when “There Will Come Soft Rains”
takes place?
a. The date and location are burned into the side of the house.
b. The reader must figure it out using a variety of clues throughout the story.
c. An electronic device states the time, date, and location at the beginning of
the story.
d. There is a newspaper on the kitchen table that shows the date and
location of the story.

2. Where are the human beings in “There Will Come Soft Rains”?
a. They are at work or at school.
b. They have moved to a different city.
c. They have been killed by a nuclear bomb.
d. They are being held prisoner in the basement of an automated house.

3. Which details show what has happened to the owners of the house in “There
Will Come Soft Rains”?
a. The stove prepares a breakfast that goes uneaten.
b. Mrs. McClellan likes to listen to poetry in the evenings.
c. The house keeps itself clean and protects itself from harm.
d. The shapes of four people are burned into the side of the house.

4. At the beginning of “There Will Come Soft Rains,” the stove prepares eight
pieces of toast, eight eggs, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two glasses
of milk. What can you conclude is most likely to be true about the McClellan
family, based on this information and other details?
a. The family is having guests over for breakfast.
b. Two of the family members are allergic to milk.
c. The stove usually burns the toast and undercooks the eggs.
d. There are four family members, and two of them are children.

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 GRADE 9 • UNIT 6 • SELECTION TEST

“THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” BY RAY BRADBURY

Name: Date:

5. How does the automated house “die” in “There Will Come Soft Rains”?
a. It is blown up in a nuclear blast.
b. The electronic mice tear it down.
c. It catches on fire and is unable to put the fire out.
d. The owners move away, and the house stops functioning.

FIRST READ: Concept Vocabulary

Identify the choice that best answers the question.

6. What is the most likely meaning of the word attending as it is used in this
sentence?
The man stayed at his daughter’s bedside while she had the flu, attending to her by
giving her water and wiping her brow when she woke throughout the night.

a. taking charge of
b. making believe that
c. helping or caring for
d. listening carefully to

7. If a writer manipulated words to create an advertisement, what did the writer

do?
a. treated words badly
b. used words skillfully
c. corrected another writer’s mistakes
d. persuaded people to like her writing

8. Which of the following situations is most likely to make a person feel

tremulous?
a. performing a solo while experiencing stage fright
b. learning that an exam has been moved to a later date
c. getting a good grade on a research paper
d. hearing one’s favorite song on the radio

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 GRADE 9 • UNIT 6 • SELECTION TEST

“THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” BY RAY BRADBURY

Name: Date:

CLOSE READ: Analyze the Text

Identify the choice that best answers the question.

9. The following question has two parts. Answer Part A first, and then Part B.

Part A In “There Will Come Soft Rains,” what are the parents doing at the
time of the tragedy?
a. They are downstairs in the basement.
b. They are outside working in the garden.
c. They are sitting together in the nursery.
d. They are playing bridge at the card table.

Part B What passage from the story supports the answer to Part A?
a. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a
photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers.
b. In the cellar, the incinerator glowed suddenly and a whirl of sparks
leaped up the chimney.
c. Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing cards fluttered onto pads
in a shower of pips.
d. A voice spoke from the study ceiling: “Mrs. McClellan, which poem
would you like this evening?”

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 GRADE 9 • UNIT 6 • SELECTION TEST

“THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” BY RAY BRADBURY

Name: Date:

10. The following question has two parts. Answer Part A first, and then Part B.

Part A What is surprising about what happens to the dog in “There Will Come
Soft Rains”?
a. The robot mice are trained to recognize the dog but do not help it.
b. The house tries to provide medical aid to the dog but it refuses help.
c. The dog gets sick even though it has no outward symptoms of illness.
d. The hungry dog cannot get food even though the house can still cook.

Part B What detail from the story supports the answer to Part A?
a. A dog whined, shivering, on the front porch. The front door recognized the
dog voice and opened.
b. The dog, once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with
sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud.
c. [The] dog sniffed the air and scratched the kitchen door. Behind the door,
the stove was making pancakes which filled the house with a rich baked
odor and the scent of maple syrup. The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at
the door, sniffing . …
d. [The dog] ran wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died.
It lay in the parlor for an hour. … Delicately sensing decay at last, the
regiments of mice hummed out as softly as blown gray leaves in an
electrical wind. Two-fifteen. The dog was gone.

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 GRADE 9 • UNIT 6 • SELECTION TEST

“THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” BY RAY BRADBURY

Name: Date:

11. Read this passage from “There Will Come Soft Rains.”
The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing,
attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion
continued senselessly, uselessly.

Which answer choice gives the most important reason the author chose to
make this comparison?
a. to show that the house works without a purpose now that the people it
served are gone
b. to show that the house continues to function exactly as it did when people
lived there
c. to show that the house has destroyed the people instead of serving them
d. to show that the house was once a popular and well-attended church

12. What conflict, or struggle, is presented in this scene from “There Will Come
Soft Rains”?
“Fire!” screamed a voice. The house lights flashed, water pumps shot water from
the ceilings. But the solvent spread on the linoleum, licking, eating, under the
kitchen door, while the voices took it up in chorus: “Fire, fire, fire!” …
The house gave ground as the fire in ten billion angry sparks moved with flaming
ease from room to room and then up the stairs.

a. the conflict the house feels about whether or not to save itself from fire
b. the conflict between nature, the fire, and the human-made solvent
c. the conflict between the panicked house and the furious fire
d. the conflict the fire feels about destroying the house

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 GRADE 9 • UNIT 6 • SELECTION TEST

“THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” BY RAY BRADBURY

Name: Date:

CLOSE READ: Analyze Craft and Structure

Identify the choice that best answers the question.

13. Which sentence from “There Will Come Soft Rains” is an example of
personification?
a. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft
morning air with scatterings of brightness.
b. The dog ran upstairs, hysterically yelping to each door, at last realizing,
as the house realized, that only silence was here.
c. At four o’clock the tables folded like great butterflies back through the
paneled walls.
d. The wind blew. A falling tree bough crashed through the kitchen
window. Cleaning solvent, bottled, shattered over the stove.

14. The following question has two parts. Answer Part A first, and then Part B.

Part A In “There Will Come Soft Rains,” the house starts out cheerful and
efficient and changes as the story progresses. Which description best explains
how the house is personified during the fire?
a. It becomes uncaring and stops trying to work.
b. It becomes frantic and works at an insane pace.
c. It becomes more cheerful and denies any problem.
d. It becomes detached and works even more efficiently.

Part B What detail from the story best supports the answer to Part A?
a. The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picassos and Matisses in the
upper halls, like delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping
the canvasses into black shavings.
b. The attic brain which directed the pumps was shattered into bronze
shrapnel on the beams. The fire rushed back into every closet and felt of
the clothes that hung there.
c. The fire burst the house and let it slam flat down, puffing out skirts of
spark and smoke.
d. [T]he stove could be seen making breakfast at a psychopathic rate, ten
dozen eggs, six loaves of toast, twenty dozen bacon strips, which, eaten
by fire, started the stove working again, hysterically hissing!

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 GRADE 9 • UNIT 6 • SELECTION TEST

“THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” BY RAY BRADBURY

Name: Date:

15. Read this passage from “There Will Come Soft Rains.”
The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat,
its wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins
and capillaries quiver in the scalded air.

How does the personification in this passage most likely affect the reader?
a. It disturbs the reader by using the language of human anatomy to
describe the house’s death.
b. It informs the reader by comparing the inner workings of the house to
the way a human body works.
c. It astonishes the reader by revealing that the house actually has the skin,
bones, and blood of a human.
d. It angers the reader by showing how the house is like a doctor
performing surgery without anesthesia.

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT: Word Study

Identify the choice that best answers the question.

16. What does the Latin root -man- mean?

a. hand
b. name
c. person
d. month

17. The word bimanual contains the prefix bi-, which means “two.” Use this
information as well as your knowledge of the root -man- to choose the correct
definition of bimanual.
a. having two names
b. involving two people
c. happening every two months
d. requiring the use of two hands

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 GRADE 9 • UNIT 6 • SELECTION TEST

“THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” BY RAY BRADBURY

Name: Date:

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT: Author’s Style

Identify the choice that best answers the question.

18. What type of parallel element can be found in the following sentence?
The house’s exterior resembled a nineteenth-century farmhouse, with majestic
black columns, a wooden porch swing, and a large black door.

a. parallel adverbs
b. parallel verb phrases
c. parallel adverb phrases
d. parallel adjective phrases

19. What words in this passage are an example of parallel adverbs?

Nearly everything about the house is automated, including robot maids, electric
toothbrushes, and self-making beds. And yet, its owners seem perpetually busy and
move through their lives hurriedly, frantically.

a. is; seem
b. robot; electric
c. automated; house
d. hurriedly; frantically

20. Which sentence correctly uses parallel verb phrases?

a. An electronic maid had cooked dinner, had cleaned the dishes, and then
was put away for the night by the house’s owner.
b. The dust was swept up by the electronic vacuum, and the floors were
cleaned by an automated mop.
c. The garage door has opened automatically, and the car is driven away by
a robot chauffeur.
d. Tiny lawn mowers have been circling the lawn, and each blade of grass is
carefully clipped.

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