Q 01/05

In Cat's Cradle, ice-nine is first imagined as a cure for which battlefield nuisance facing soldiers?

A) Fog

B) Lice

C) Mud

D) Rust

Answer · why

C) Mud

Mud was the complaint: an officer was sick of troops wallowing in it, so Felix Hoenikker imagined a crystal that would turn it solid. The same crystal...

Q 02/05

Which rock band named its music publishing company after ice-nine, the doomsday substance in Cat's Cradle?

A) The Grateful Dead

B) Jefferson Airplane

C) The Doors

D) Pink Floyd

Answer · why

A) The Grateful Dead

The Grateful Dead called their publishing company Ice Nine. Jerry Garcia was fan enough to buy the film rights to another Vonnegut novel, The Sirens o...

Q 03/05

The University of Chicago accepted Cat's Cradle as Kurt Vonnegut's master's thesis in which academic field?

A) Philosophy

B) Biochemistry

C) Journalism

D) Anthropology

Answer · why

D) Anthropology

Anthropology was the degree, granted about 25 years after he left Chicago without it. The department had rejected his earlier thesis ideas, one of the...

Q 04/05

In Cat's Cradle, Bokononists perform the ritual of boko-maru by pressing together which parts of the body?

A) The palms of their hands

B) The soles of their feet

C) Their foreheads

D) Their fingertips

Answer · why

B) The soles of their feet

The soles of their feet meet, bare, in what the faith treats as its highest act of worship. Mona refuses to marry the narrator unless she may go on sh...

Q 05/05

The opening sentence of Cat's Cradle echoes the famous first line of which classic novel?

A) Rebecca

B) Anna Karenina

C) Moby-Dick

D) Pride and Prejudice

Answer · why

C) Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick begins with its narrator telling readers what to call him, and Vonnegut's narrator does the same. Both storytellers also live through a disa...