“Advice to Youth” Mark Twain 1882

Answer all questions on a separate piece of paper and in complete sentences. Use the heading.

1. Define Satire.

2. Define didactic, beseechingly, superstition, offend, lark, temperate, elegance, diligence, eminence, tedious, peerless, sewn, anesthesia, slander, meddle, gatling gun, waterloo, inestimable, precepts. Do this on separate paper.

3. What are the six items Twain provides as advice to youth?

4. Why is obeying the best policy, in Twain’s opinion?

5. What superstition do parents have according to Twain?

6. How does Twain instruct the youth to avoid violence?

7. Why is lying bad?

8. How is lying a great art?

9. What is Twain’s advice to youth about lying?

10. Twain provides an anecdote about firearms. Why is it funny or not?

11. Why shouldn’t youth handle firearms, according to Twain?

12. What is his advice about reading?

13. What is the result of building one’s character, according to Twain?

14. Is this article a good example of satire? chamber looked such a bright little place to me as the sun shone in between the gay blue chintz window curtains, showing papered walls and a carpeted floor, so unlike the bare planks and stained plaster of Lowood, that my spirits rose at the view. Externals have a great effect on the young: I thought that fairer era of life was beginning for me, --one that was to have its flowers and pleasures, as well as its thorns and toils. My faculties, roused by the change of scene, the new field offered to hope, seemed all astir. I cannot precisely define what they expected, but it was something pleasant: not perhaps that day or that month, but at an indefinite future period.
I rose; I dressed myself with care: obliged to be plain –for I had no article of attire that was not made with extreme simplicity –I was still by nature solicitous to be neat. It was not