Language Arts: "Characters, Conflict, And Idioms In "Daughter Of Invention" By Julia Alvarez"

Read the excerpt from "Daughter of Invention". But now, Carlos was truly furious. It was bad enough that his daughter was rebelling, but here was his own wife joining forces with her. Soon he would be surrounded by a houseful of independent American women. He too leapt from the bed, throwing off his covers. The Spanish newspapers flew across the room. He snatched the speech out of Yoyo's hands, held it before the girl's wide eyes, a vengeful, mad look in his own, and then once, twice, three, four, countless times, he tore the speech into shreds. In this excerpt, Carlos is mostly in conflict with [ ]

Read the excerpt from "Daughter of Invention". Yoyo didn't need much encouragement. She put her nose to the fire, as her mother would have said, and read from start to finish without looking up. When she concluded, she was a little embarrassed at the pride she took in her own words. She pretended to quibble with a phrase or two, then looked questioningly to her mother. Laura's face was radiant. Yoyo turned to share her pride with her father. What does the underlined idiom tell the reader about Yoyo? She was cold as she wrote her speech, so she sat by the fire. She worked hard to finish her speech for the assembly. She was proud of the speech once she finished it. She finished the speech in a very short amount of time.

Read the excerpt from "Daughter of Invention". "What ees wrrrong with her eh-speech?" Carlos wagged his head at her. His anger was always more frightening in his broken English. As if he had mutilated the language in his fury—and now there was nothing to stand between them and his raw, dumb anger. "What is wrong? I will tell you what is wrong. It show no gratitude. It is boastful. I celebrate myself? The best student learns to destroy the teacher?" He mocked Yoyo's plagiarized words. "That is insubordinate. It is improper. It is disrespecting of her teachers—" In his anger he had forgotten his fear of lurking spies: each wrong he voiced was a decibel higher than the last outrage. Finally, he shouted at Yoyo, "As your father, I forbid you to make that eh-speech!" What does Carlos' language reveal about his character? His accent gets stronger when he is angry. His English vocabulary is somewhat limited. He doesn't understand what his daughter wrote. He has trouble speaking clearly in English.

Read the excerpt from "Daughter of Invention". Meanwhile, Yoyo was on her knees, weeping wildly, collecting all the little pieces of her speech, hoping that she could put it back together before the assembly tomorrow morning. But not even a sibyl could have made sense of those tiny scraps of paper. All hope was lost. "He broke it, he broke it," Yoyo moaned as she picked up a handful of pieces. What conflict does Yoyo face in this excerpt? Yoyo is frustrated by her inability to write a good speech for the assembly at her school. Yoyo is worried about insulting her teachers and peers with the speech she has written. Yoyo is saddened by her father's disapproval of the message in her speech for the assembly. Yoyo is reminded of the terrors her father faced under the dictatorship of the Dominican Republic.

Which excerpt from "Daughter of Invention" reveals Laura's Dominican origin through unique pronunciation? "You girls are going to drive me crazy!" she threatened, if they kept nagging. "When I end up in Bellevue, you'll be safely sorry!" "Remember that time we took the car to Bear Mountain, and we re-ah-lized that we had forgotten to pack an opener with our pick-a-nick?" "Maybe not. Maybe, just maybe, there's something they've missed that's important. With patience and calm, even a burro can climb a palm." "Ay, Cuco. Remember how I showed you that suitcase with little wheels so we should not have to carry those heavy bags when we traveled? Someone stole my idea and made a million!"

Which excerpt from "Daughter of Invention" contains language that best represents the preservation of Dominican values? If her husband insisted she speak in Spanish to the girls so they wouldn't forget their native tongue, she'd snap, "When in Rome, do unto the Romans." Yoyo and her sisters were forgetting a lot of their Spanish, and their father's formal, florid diction was hard to understand. "What is wrong? I will tell you what is wrong. It show no gratitude. It is boastful. I celebrate myself? The best student learns to destroy the teacher?" "This is America, Papi, America! You are not in a savage country anymore!"

Which excerpt from "Daughter of Invention" contains language that best reveals that Carlos is still tied to his Dominican origin? He sat bolt upright, reaching for his glasses which in his haste, he knocked across the room. "iQue pasa? iQue pasa?" "...It is boastful. I celebrate myself? The best student learns to destroy the teacher?" He mocked Yoyo's plagiarized words. "Have you gone mad?" He shook her away. "You were going to let her read that . . . that insult to her teachers?" He called down curses on her head, ordered her on his authority as her father to open that door!

Read the excerpt from "Daughter of Invention". But Laura's inventing days were over just as Yoyo's were starting up with her school-wide success. Rather than the rolling suitcase everyone else in the family remembers, Yoyo thinks of the speech her mother wrote as her last invention. It was as if, after that, her mother had passed on to Yoyo her pencil and pad and said, "Okay, Cuquita, here's the buck. You give it a shot." Which context clue provides the best hint for the meaning of the underlined idiom in this excerpt? But Laura's inventing days were over the rolling suitcase everyone else in the family remembers Yoyo thinks of the speech her mother wrote as her last invention after that, her mother had passed on to Yoyo her pencil and pad

Which of Laura's misquoted idioms from "Daughter of Invention" is intended to mean that it makes no difference to her? "green behind the ears," "When in Rome, do unto the Romans." "It's half of one or two dozen of another." "...one of these days my ship would pass me by in the night!"

Read the excerpt from "Daughter of Invention". "iYa, ya!" She waved them out of her room at last. "There is no use trying to drink spilt milk, that's for sure." What does Laura mean to express to her daughters? She wants her daughters to learn from her mistakes. She does not want to dwell on something that cannot be changed. She intends to invent many more useful things she can patent. She wishes that she had been the one to patent the suitcase with wheels.