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150 multiple-choice questions and 45 flashcards, written to the AP English Literature blueprint. Every question carries a full rationale.
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AP English Literature, Common Core ELA 9-12 reading drama, IB English A: Literature
CoStudy's Medea (Euripides) bank holds 195 items. Every multiple-choice question carries a written rationale explaining why the correct answer is correct and why each distractor is tempting but wrong.
A sample of 12 multiple-choice questions from the bank, with the full rationale shown.
Dramatic irony pervades the scene where Jason agrees to send the children with gifts because:
Answer: B — The audience and Medea know the gifts will kill, while Jason does not
A/C/D) Wrong. B) Jason walks into the plan, and the audience watches him do it.
Another common misconception is that the play ends with:
Answer: D — Medea's untouched escape in a chariot of the Sun
A/B/C) Wrong. D) The unpunished ascent is exactly what unsettles spectators and critics.
The chorus's wavering is a Euripidean strategy that:
Answer: B — Lets the audience watch sympathy and judgment shift in real time
A/C/D) Wrong. B) Their moving response is the audience's moral mirror.
Medea endures as foundational because:
Answer: C — Earliest sustained dramatic voice of women's structural complaint + most-debated tragic ending + master class in passion vs. reason
A/C/D) Reductive. C) Correct — every later wronged-woman + revenge text works in some relation to it.
The Argonauts' quest for the Golden Fleece originally set sail from:
Answer: A — Iolcus, in Thessaly
B/C/D) Wrong. A) The Thessalian launch point belongs to the standard Argonaut tradition.
Aristotle nonetheless called Euripides:
Answer: A — 'The most tragic of the poets'
B/C/D) Wrong. A) Correct — Aristotle disliked Euripides's structural choices but recognized his power over suffering.
Creon's fatal mistake is:
Answer: D — Granting Medea one day's stay 'to make arrangements'
A/B/C) Wrong. D) Correct — the extra day is enough for revenge. Creon's pity is exploited.
Medea exposes Jason's argument by:
Answer: D — Listing what she did for him — betraying father, killing brother — and naming his rationalization as ingratitude
A/B/C) Wrong. D) She turns the prudence story into an accounting of debt owed.
In the final scene Medea denies Jason:
Answer: C — Even the right to bury his children
A/B/D) Wrong. C) Correct — the deepest possible Greek punishment + the deepest possible Greek insult.
In the play's structure, the long agon between Medea and Jason functions as:
Answer: B — A debate scene in which character is revealed through opposed rhetoric
A/C/D) Wrong. B) Agon scenes are typical of Euripides and crucial to characterization here.
A postcolonial reading treats Jason's appeal to Greek civilization as:
Answer: C — A self-flattering imperial story used to discount the woman who saved him
A/B/D) Wrong. C) The civilizational claim becomes evidence rather than excuse.
Medea's children are killed by:
Answer: A — Medea herself, inside the house
B/C/D) Wrong. A) Correct — the cries are heard offstage. Athenian decorum: violence offstage.
6 sample cards from the 45 in the bank.
Form?
Athenian tragedy. ~1400 lines. Single setting, real-time action, chorus of Corinthian women.
The killings?
Medea kills her children inside the house. Their cries are heard from offstage. The chorus is helpless. Athenian decorum: violence offstage.
Author + date?
Euripides (c. 480-406 BCE). First performed 431 BCE at the City Dionysia in Athens. Placed third (last) in the competition that year.
Who is the Tutor?
The boys' tutor. Brings them news + later helps Medea's plot.
Theme: limits of justice.
The play shows that even when wrong is real, response can exceed cause. Justice + revenge are not the same. Euripides refuses easy moral comfort.
Jason's first confrontation?
He defends his new marriage as politically necessary + claims he was helping Medea + the boys. She unmasks his rhetoric as self-serving betrayal.
These samples are a small slice. The full bank runs flashcards, multiple choice and timed mock exams with per-chapter progress tracking, on the web and in the iOS app.
The Medea (Euripides) bank holds 195 items: 150 multiple-choice questions, 45 flashcards. 18 of them are on this page to read free, with no signup.
Yes. Every multiple-choice item carries a written rationale that states the controlling principle behind the correct answer and then addresses each wrong option in turn — why it tempts and precisely where it fails. Knowing why the plausible answer was wrong is worth more than knowing which letter was right.
The samples on this page are free to read in full, rationales included, with no account. The complete 195-item bank, the timed mock exams and per-chapter progress tracking are part of CoStudy on the web and in the iOS app.
Last reviewed 2026-08-22. Banks are written against the certifying body's published exam outline and re-checked when that outline changes — exams get renumbered, retired and reweighted, and a bank written to a superseded outline teaches the wrong proportions. Figures that are re-indexed annually are deliberately not asserted as rules; the questions test the governing principle instead.