What unusual qualities and appliances does the house have in There Will Come Soft Rains List 3 functions that the house performs?

The house—an artificially intelligent, automated machine—is the main character of the story. Despite being inhuman, it has a complex personality. The house’s character traits are embodied by the different machines inside it (some of which feature so prominently that they can be considered characters in their own right, such as the clock, the robot mice, and the voice reading poetry). At first the house demonstrates more docile features of its personality. It seems affectionate, since it misses the family. It also appears to be industrious when it goes through the motions of getting everyone ready. From the description of how the house shoos away animals, the reader even gets the sense that the house is prudish. When the dog appears, the reader sees a new, darker side of the house. It handles the dog brusquely and seems more concerned with cleaning the mud it tracks in than with tending to the dog’s needs. When the dog dies, the house callously sweeps its remains into an incinerator. From the way voices direct the family’s every step, the reader begins to suspect that the house has some kind of obsession with control and order. When a tree branch finally falls on the house, causing a fire, the house frantically tries to ward it off, throwing all of its systems into overdrive to fight the fire to no avail. The house demonstrates so many of the worst traits that technology brings out in people, becoming a moral warning against blindly following the next new tech craze. Its death at the hands of nature is meant to remind the reader that nature is permanent, while technology is temporary.

“There Will Come Soft Rains” Reading Comprehension QuestionsL. 1. What unusual qualities and appliances does the house have? List 3 functions the house performs.

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1. What unusual qualities and appliances does the house have? List 3 functions the house performs. 2. What does the description of the house tell you about the family and their relationship to nature? 3. What do you learn about this society as a whole based on the home’s many automated features? 4. Why is the dog very thin and covered in sores? What happens to the dog’s remains? 5. What can you infer the family usually does at 2:35? What did the children usually do at 4:30? 6. Provide two quotes below that capture vivid imagery throughout the story. 7. Based on the story’s details about the city, what do you think happened? Why was the west face of the house black? How did the silhouettes get there? 8. Find two examples of personification in this story. Why does the author personify certain characteristics of the house? 9. What is the significance of the poem, and therefore the title þf the short story? What is this poem saying that directly ties into the theme of the story?

10. What happens to the house at the end of the story? What is the lesson that Bradbury is trying to teach?

1- The house can recognize someone and open the door. “The front door recognized the dog and opened the door.” The house could cook. “The stove was making pankakes.” It could turn on the chimney. “It turned on the chimney.”

2- The automated house of Bradbury’s story presents itself as the perfect environment for human beings—a space that readily caters to nearly every imaginable need. To do so, however, it relies a great deal on the natural world, both for inspiration (many of its automated functions, such as the robot mice, are based on animals) and for the raw materials to keep running. By having the house ultimately succumb to a fire and be destroyed by the natural world, Bradbury suggests that nature is more powerful than whatever man can create.

Bradbury physically establishes the animosity between the house—a symbol of technology—and the natural world. The house protects its residents from the forces of nature: its walls close out harsh weather, its kitchen machines spare humans from hunting and foraging in the wilderness, and the cleaning mice ward off the chaos of the outdoors, cleaning up the mud, dust, and hair that accumulate in a natural environment. This house even seems to take its responsibility to battle nature a bit too far. It shuts itself whenever “lonely foxes and whining cats” get too close. Comically, the narrator describes the stern response of the house to a sparrow brushing up against the window: “No, not even a bird must touch the house!” This protective impulse turns sinister when the house dispassionately disposes of the family dog’s carcass, treating the pet as nothing more than some smelly bio-matter.

When nature threatens to destroy it, technology is able to put up a comprehensive defense. For instance, when a fallen tree causes a house fire, machines come out in full force to battle the hostile foe. Mechanical doors shut against fire in an act of self-defense. “Blind robot faces” spray green fire repellent. And when fire-fighting fails, voices cry out in warning, as a lookout might upon spotting enemy troops. Yet even as technology tries to subdue nature, it can’t help but rely on it. This technology is created in nature’s image and fueled by natural resources. Machines in the house are often likened to animals, suggesting that nature has already created perfect “machines” that humanity simply is attempting to copy for its own ends. Furthermore, technology cannot exist without the raw materials that nature provides: the house has been built out of oak, wired with metal tubes, and it’s powered by the natural force of electricity. The house ultimately fails because its water reserves are depleted, meaning that it can’t put out the fire that consumes it.

Despite presenting an alternative to the natural order, technology ultimately looks weak compared with nature. After a day of fussing over the artificial environment that the house has created, the home settles in for the night. While the house is sleeping, nature launches its attack by letting a tree fall on the home, causing the fire. Though the house attempts to defend itself, the fire is described as “clever” and ultimately overpowers the upstart domicile. Bradbury seems to suggest that the victory is justified—that the arrogance of technology is finally being subdued. The eventual ease with which technology is outdone by nature suggests that it was arrogant and foolish to attempt to challenge the natural order in the first place.

In the end, nature can persist without technology, but the reverse is not true. The poem by Sara Teasdale paints a picture of nature persisting even when everything men ever created has died away. Since nature is vast and self-sustaining, it cannot brake or run out of fuel the way machines do. And even in the face of the overwhelming and devastating effects of technology—the atom bomb, which has reduced the natural world to a radioactive wasteland of “rubble” and “ashes”—Bradbury suggests that nature will prevail. There are still trees, birds, foxes, cats, and dogs at the end of the story, implying that nature may, in time, thrive once again. Meanwhile, people and their technology have been wiped from the face of the Earth, showing that nature is the ultimate winner of this struggle.

3- I can learn that the society takes advantage of technology, and that they use technology for things that are not so important. They spent a lot of money on things that they don’t really need. Instead, they could spend their money on the world, because we have only one, and we have to take care of it.

4- The dog is dirty and thin because the family domesticated him, and then left him alone. As the dog got used to be feed and don’t take care of himself, when the family left him alone for some days, he didn’t know how to eat or take care of himself. The dog was also hurt because he tried to get in the rooms of the owners, and as he couldn’t, he got hurt by scratching and hitting the doors. The house threw out the dog’s remains.

5- At 2:35 the family used to play cards and eat a snack. “ Playing cards fluttered onto pads”. At 4:30 all the house turned it’s walls into animals and the sound of rain appeared. Everything turned as if it was prepared for a baby. “Animals took shape.” “They looked upon color and fantasy.”

6- “ Fire, fire, fire” with this quotation i can feel and hear the sound of the house burning and the alarms ringing. I can also feel the destruction. “The wind blew.” It is an auditory image. I can hear the sound of wind blowing, and it was so hard, that a tree fell down.

7- I think that a bomb exploded. The west part of the house was covered because the bomb exploded that side. The silhouettes got there because the people were doing things before the bomb exploded and they got stuck there. “Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn.”

8- “The house was silent” the house can’t be silent because it never make noises. “At 10 o’clock the house began to die.” The house can’t die because it is not alive and it is not a person.

9- This poem says that although human dies the cicle of nature will continue and nature would never care about the existence of human. «No one will know of the war, not one will care at last when it is done. No one would mind, either bird nor tree if mankind perished utterly»

10- At the end of the story the house dies. Bradbury tries to warn us of humans. Human cost the disappearance of s lot of animals, is cost the natural disasters, it cost air pollution, global warming and lots of others thing. Human is guilty for his own bad ending, and nor nature or technology will care about us.