Heather Villalta

Period 3
1/20/2009

How Much Land Does A Man Need?

Vocabulary
1) Piqued – adjective – provoked; resentful
2) Disparaged – verb – belittled; spoke negatively of
3) Aggrieved – adjective – offended
4) Arable – adjective – fit to be farmed or cultivated
5) Haggled – verb – argued about a price
6) Prostrate – adjective – lying flat

Literary Focus
1) Allegory – a story in which the characters, setting, and events stand
for abstract ideas or moral concepts
2) Parable – a short, simple tale that is based on ordinary events and
presents a moral lesson

Make the Connection/Quickwrite

I really wanted an iPod for quite a while. In November, I finally bought
one. I remember being really excited to get it and thinking it was the best
thing in the world. Now that I have had it for a while, I still like it, but it
doesn’t seem as great and I’m thinking about getting a bigger one.

Reading Check
1) Pahom wants more land and he needs to get money to get it.
2) He raises the money by selling some things and borrowing the rest.
3) He quarrels with neighboring peasants because their animals
accidentally wander into his land.
4) Pahom is told that wherever he walks in a day is the land he gets
and he ends up dying from exhaustion at the end.
5) The resolution is Pahom’s death.
6) According to Tolstoy, the only land someone needs is the land he is
buried in.

Interpretations
7) The theme is that men are never satisfied with what they have.
They must always need more.
8) The younger sister said that loss and gain are brothers. Pahom’s
gain ended up costing him his life.
 9) The chief doesn’t really care about the extra land because he has
enough to live on. Pahom wants more, even when he has
enough.
10) Pahom’s want of land is like anyone else’s want of wealth. They will
go to any extremes, even risking death, to get it.
11) Our culture is all about gaining more and more, no matter the cost.
This parable shows the consequences of such actions.
12) I think he paid too high a price with his life. He wasn’t harming
anyone else and he was going about totally legal ways of
getting his land, so he shouldn’t have had to pay such a
high price.