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The Hunger Games — Chapter 4

Study guide for 7th – 9th Grade

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Copywork

About This Passage

Selected for rhetorical sophistication (chiastic reversal: kind / fighting / kill), thematic weight (the moral logic of the arena collapses kindness and threat into the same person), and syntactic compression (three short declarative sentences building to the chapter's devastating final clause).

He hasn't accepted his death. He is already fighting hard to stay alive. Which also means that kind Peeta Mellark, the boy who gave me the bread, is fighting hard to kill me.

Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.

Discussion Questions

Narration Prompt

Summarize this chapter, then explain what you think the author most wanted the reader to notice or feel. What techniques did the author use?

Discussion Questions

  1. Collins interrupts the present-day train scene to deliver a long flashback about the dandelion, foraging, and Katniss's mother. Why does she place this memory specifically here, between Peeta's kindness and Katniss's decision to throw the cookies away? What does the flashback's location accomplish that simply telling us Katniss's history earlier could not?
  2. Katniss claims her wall against her mother is justified self-protection. Yet in Chapter 1 she also confessed loving her mother and now regrets shouting at her at the Justice Building. Has Katniss's analysis of her own emotions become so practiced that she no longer notices when she is wrong about herself? Where in this chapter does the gap between her self-narration and her actual feelings show?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide

Vocabulary Builder

Item 1

Speaking or thinking in a disconnected way, so that meaning cannot be assembled out of the parts

Item 2

Total unconsciousness or forgetting; here, the merciful absence of memory

Item 3

To regard with deep, settled contempt — stronger and more deliberate than ordinary dislike

+ 5 more vocabulary words in the complete study guide

Critical Thinking

+ 6 more questions in the complete study guide

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More chapters of The Hunger Games

Chapter 1 (10th – 12th)Chapter 1 (7th – 9th)Chapter 1 (1st – 3rd)Chapter 1 (Adult)Chapter 1 (4th – 6th)Chapter 2 (10th – 12th)View all chapters

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