ENG1DIAtmosphere Worksheet

Instructions:

  • Read each excerpt.
  • Decide what the atmosphere is (humourous, sad, lonely, suspenseful, threatening).
  • Underline 5 words that create that atmosphere.

Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness - a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.
Excerpt #1

The atmosphere of Excerpt #1 is ______

The agent came for me during a geography lesson. She entered the room and nodded at my fifth-grade teacher, who stood frowning at a map of Europe. What would needle me later was the realization that this had all been prearranged. My capture had been scheduled to go down at exactly 2:30 on a Thursday afternoon. The agent would be wearing a dung-colored blazer over a red knit turtleneck, her heels sensibly low in case the suspect should attempt a quick getaway.
"David," the teacher said, "this is Miss Samson, and she'd like you to go with her now."
No one else had been called, so why me? I ran down a list of recent crimes, looking for a conviction that might stick. Setting fire to a reportedly flameproof Halloween costume, stealing a set of barbecue tongs from an unguarded patio, altering the word hit on a list of rules posted on the gymnasium door; never did it occur to me that I might be innocent.
Excerpt #2

The atmosphere of Excerpt #2 is ______

When I was six or seven, I learned something about my father I'd never known. One day I asked
him, "Daddy, why are you so old?" He hoisted up his eyebrows at this, so that they formed little
sagging umbrellas over his eyes. And he let out a long breath, and shook his head and said, "I don't
know." When I turned to my mother, she gave me a look meaning she would answer the question
for me another time. The following day without saying a word, she walked me down the hill toward
the village and turned at a path into a graveyard in the woods. She led me to three graves in the
corner, with three white marker posts much taller than I was. They had stern-looking black
characters written top to bottom on them, but I hadn't attended the school in our little village long
enough to know where one ended and the next began. …It took me a while to
understand that my father had been married before, a long time ago, and that his whole family had
died. I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a
very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves
were pulling me down toward them.
Excerpt #3

The atmosphere of Excerpt #3 is ______

I hurdle over a burning log. Not high enough. The tail end of my jacket catches on fire and I have to stop to rip it from my body and stamp out the flames. But I don’t dare leave the jacket, scorched and smoldering as it is, I take the risk of shoving it in my sleeping bag, hoping the lack of air will quell what I haven’t extinguished. This is all I have, what I carry on my back, and it’s little enough to survive with.
Excerpt #4

The atmosphere of Excerpt #4 is ______

Block by block, rancid orange streetlights began to flicker on all across the city of Vancouver. By seven o’clock it was full dark. A hard rain fell heavy as lead. Churlish gusts of wind whipped up the outer harbor, tore small chunks of cloud from the greater mass and hurled them venomously across the bloated sky.
All over the city, the naked skeletons of murdered umbrellas rattled along the wind-swept pavement. Branches were violently pruned from the trees that lined the sidewalks and boulevards, and were flung heavily down upon passing cars and unwary pedestrians. Gutters and storm drains overflowed. Here and there eighty pound manhole covers stood on pedestals of frothy white water.

The atmosphere of Excerpt #5 is ______