Hatchet

Name: __________________________________________________________Date: _______________

SHORT ANSWER STUDY QUESTIONS Hatchet

Chapters 12-15

1. Describe the hunger that Brian felt.

2. Describe the incident with the plane, and how Brian felt after it.

3. On day 47 after the crash, Brian thought about the true and new things, and about tough hope.  What

    were the true and new things? What was tough hope?

4. Describe Brian's encounter with the skunk, and what he learned from it.

5. What was Brian's major breakthrough? How did he do it? Why was it important?

6. How did Brian begin to measure time? Which day was described in Chapter 16?

Part I: Using Prior Knowledge and Context Clues

Below are the sentences in which the vocabulary words 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 on the lines provided.

1. The small fish came closer and closer and he lunged time after time but was always too slow.

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2. He tried throwing it, jabbing it, everything but flailing with it, and it didn't work.

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3. Still not satisfied -- he could not imagine hitting one of the fish with a single point -- he carefully used

    the hatchet to split the point up the middle for eight or ten inches and jammed a piece of wood up into

    the split to make a two-prong spear with the points about two inches apart.

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4. It was crude, but it looked effective and seemed to have good balance when he stood outside the shelter

    and hefted the spear.

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5. It was crude, but it looked effective and seemed to have good balance when he stood outside the shelter

    and hefted the spear.

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6. A persistent whine, like the insects only more steady with an edge of a roar to it, was in his ears and he

   chopped and cut and was thinking of a bow, how he would make a bow, how it would be when he

   shaped it with the hatchet and still the sound did not cut through until the limb was nearly off the tree

   and the whine was inside his head and he knew it then.

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7. It was infuriating. He would pull the bow back, set the arrow just above the water, and when the fish

    was no more than an inch away release the arrow. Only to miss.

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8. The bow had given him this way and he exulted in it, in the bow, in the arrow, in the fish, in the

    hatchet, in the sky.

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Part II: Determining the Meaning Match the vocabulary words to their dictionary definitions.

___ 1. lunged                           A. lifted; heaved

___ 2. flailing                            B. aggravating; maddening

___ 3. prong                            C. enduring; persevering

___ 4. crude                             D. thin, pointed, projecting part

___ 5. hefted                            E. waving or swinging vigorously

___ 6. persistent                       F. rejoiced; delighted

___ 7. infuriating                       G. not carefully or completely made; rough

___ 8. exulted                          H. dashed; charged