A School to Remember: "The Austere Academy" Quiz

Answer: A school where children live and sleep in term time

Boarding schools can be very expensive although some may offer partial or full scholarships (so that parents may not have to pay the full price if some requirements are met). Boarding schools have a "duty of care" and act "in loco parentis", terms which here mean that they have to look after their pupils very well, as if the teachers are their parents.

Answer: False

Although it is not the actual name of the school, it would be an excellent one, since austere here refers to both how strict the school is as well as the way it makes decisions to save lots of money rather than thinking about how they will help the children. The school is actually called Prufrock Preparatory School.

Answer: Acts as Vice Principal Nero's secretary

One of the money-saving austerity methods that the school employs is using a baby as the secretary! It turns out that biting is a good transferable skill for doing secretary work, but Vice Principal gives her tough jobs and does not seem to care that she is just a baby.

Answer: Coach Genghis

Count Olaf's most distinguishing features, a phrase that here means "features that always lead to him being recognised" are covered this time by both a turban on his head and running shoes covering up his recognisable tattoo on his ankle. His plan in this book seems to involve trying to get the Baudelaires kicked out of the school so that he can look after them again and steal their fortune.

Answer: True

The Baudelaires end up living in a horrible little place on their own that actually gets called The Orphan Shack. Coach Genghis also starts up "Special Orphan Running Exercises", a scheme specifically to pick on the Baudelaires and exhaust them, a phrase which here means "make them really tired so that they perform poorly in school and at being a secretary".

Answer: They think their brother has died but don't want to leave him out

Isadora and Duncan inform the Baudelaires that their brother, Quigley, has died in a fire. However, they feel that doesn't suddenly make them into twins: they were born triplets, therefore they remain triplets, even if he is not currently here.

Answer: Kitchen

It is this deception - a word which here means "attempt to trick Count Olaf" - that gets them found out, since he does not treat Sunny very well and ends up damaging the bag of flour in this process. There are other rooms in a house that could also plausibly contain a bag of flour (like a larder), but out of the ones listed only one is particularly likely.

Answer: Rhyming couplets

Isadora is very vocal - meaning she talks a lot - about her love of rhyming couplets and shares some of them with the Baudelaires. It is her special interest in the same way that Violet's is inventing, Klaus' is reading, and Sunny's is biting.

Answer: Not allowed a knife/fork/spoon etc

Sunny being punished for this seems very hypocritical, a word which here means "it is unfair to give somebody conflicting sets of instructions and then punish them for not being able to follow both of them". Fortunately her siblings are able to help with eating.

Answer: Crabs

They are very crabby about sharing their space, a term that here means "the crabs are very cross about having to share their home and are going to make this known by nipping people". However, it turns out that they may actually be a bit of a blessing in disguise, a phrase used here to mean that "their pincers can actually be quite useful for inventing and building things".