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The City of Ember · Garden Heights
Part 7
for The City of Ember · Part 7 · Chapters 16–17
8 Parts40 min
What Happens in Part 7
Chapter 16 catches Lina at the worst moment: city guards take hold of her and march her to the Gathering Hall, where Mayor Cole tells her that asking questions about the storerooms is dangerous and disloyal, and that the Prison Room is where she is going. She does not apologize. Before the guards can move, Ember’s lamps fail — and in the confusion Lina escapes not through the door the guards are watching but upward, onto the roof, where she hears the city below begin the Singing: the songs of the city, of the river, and of the darkness. Chapter 17 crosses to Doon, waiting alone at the Pipeworks with a candle, sick with not knowing. He writes a note for his father saying only that the way out has been found, that it lies below the city, and that everyone will know tomorrow. Then Lina appears out of the dark with Poppy in her arms, and Doon is far too relieved to say anything about the extra weight. With the reconstructed instructions in hand, the three of them start down toward the hidden way beyond Ember.
What We Will Learn
Section
What you will practice
Vocabulary
Code and departure words: decipher, fragment, reconstruct, defiance, provisions…
Literary Elements
Alternating chapters, the Singing as ironic counterpoint, and a blackout that both traps and frees
Cross-Curricular
Codes and ciphers — rebuilding a message from fragments
Chapter Summary
Ch.
What happens
16
The Singing — guards seize Lina and march her to the Gathering Hall, where Mayor Cole calls her questions dangerous and disloyal and threatens the Prison Room; the city’s lights fail, she slips away upward to the roof, and from there hears Ember sing its old songs about the city, the river, and the dark.
17
Away — Doon waits alone at the Pipeworks with a candle, leaves a note telling his father the way out lies below the city, and is too relieved to argue when Lina appears carrying Poppy; following the reconstructed instructions step by step, the three go down toward the hidden way beyond Ember.
Part 1
Vocabulary
Study 10 key words from Chapters 16–17, then answer each question.
📚Knowledge Bank · Words for Broken Messages
Linguistics · The Vocabulary of CodesEvery field that studies damaged writing has built a precise vocabulary, and those words name real steps in the work. A fragment is what survives when a document is torn, burned, or chewed: letters without the sentence that once held them. Scholars call a missing stretch of text a lacuna, from the Latin word for a gap or pool, and they print brackets around it so that no later reader mistakes a guess for evidence. To decipher is to convert a message written in a system you do not yet understand into one you do, while to translate is to carry meaning between two languages already known; the two tasks are constantly confused. A proposed reading of a ruined passage is a conjecture, and keeping it in a footnote rather than in the main line of text protects the record. When independent evidence later supports that reading, editors say it has been confirmed. These terms teach the lesson Lina and Doon learn over a chewed page: naming exactly what you do not know is the first real act of recovery.
decipherv.Ch.17
To work out the meaning of coded or damaged writing
“It took two children weeks to decipher one short page.”
fragmentn.Ch.17
A small broken piece of a larger whole
“The instructions survived only as a chewed fragment.”
reconstructv.Ch.17
To build something back from the parts that remain
“They had to reconstruct the words a rodent had eaten.”
disloyaladj.Ch.16
Failing to support the group or leader one belongs to
“The mayor called every honest question disloyal.”
accusationn.Ch.16
A statement that someone has done something wrong
“The accusation came before anyone examined the evidence.”
defiancen.Ch.16
Open refusal to obey someone in power
“Lina answered the mayor with quiet defiance.”
provisionsn.Ch.17
Supplies of food and other necessities for a journey
“They gathered provisions in a hurry and told no one.”
slingn.Ch.17
A loop of cloth used to carry something against the body
“A sweater knotted into a sling held Poppy safely.”
descendv.Ch.17
To move down to a lower place
“They would descend farther than any worker was allowed.”
currentn.Ch.17
The steady flow of water in one direction
“The current pulled steadily somewhere out of sight.”
ⓘ The vocabulary words in this list are selected to help you understand and complete this workbook. Some may not appear verbatim in the original novel.
1To work out the meaning of coded or damaged writing is to ___.Ch.17
2‘Disloyal’ means faithful and obedient to a leader.Ch.16
3A small broken piece of a larger whole is a ___.Ch.17
4A statement that someone has done something wrong is an ___.Ch.16
5Fill in each blank with the correct word.Ch.16–17
Word choices:defianceprovisionscurrentsling- some words will not be used
Lina answered the mayor with quiet .
They gathered in a hurry and told no one.
6To move down to a lower place is to ___.Ch.17
7To ‘reconstruct’ a document is to build its missing parts back from clues.Ch.17
8The steady flow of water in one direction is a ___.Ch.17
9A ‘sling’ is a heavy metal tool used for cutting pipe.Ch.17
10Fill in each blank with the correct word.Ch.17
Word choices:reconstructfragmentdescendaccusation- some words will not be used
Doon and Lina had to the words a rodent had eaten.
The instructions survived only as a chewed .
Part 2
Comprehension
Show you understood what happens in Chapters 16–17.
📋Knowledge Bank · How a Cipher Is Broken
Cryptography · Frequency and PatternBreaking a code rarely begins with inspiration; it begins with counting. In English the letter e appears far more often than any other, and short words such as the and of repeat in almost every line, so an analyst tallies each symbol in a message and builds a frequency table. The most common symbol becomes the first candidate for e, and the lengths and spacing of words suggest where the small common words must sit. Codebreakers also hunt for a crib, a phrase they can reasonably expect the message to contain, such as a routine weather report or a formal greeting; analysts at Bletchley Park worked against German machine ciphers exactly this way. Every guess then faces one test. A reading is kept only if it makes the rest of the text behave sensibly, because a wrong assignment produces nonsense a few words later. That test is the discipline of the entire method, and the cycle of guessing, checking, and revising is called iteration.
1How does Chapter 16 open for Lina?Ch.16
2What does Mayor Cole call Lina’s behavior?Ch.16
3The mayor threatens to shut Lina in the Prison Room.Ch.16
4What lets Lina get away from the Gathering Hall?Ch.16
5Write the numbers 1–5 in the boxes to show the correct order of events in Chapters 16–17. Number 1 = what happens first.Ch.16–17
Lina reaches Doon at the Pipeworks with Poppy.
Mayor Cole threatens her with the Prison Room.
A blackout drops the hall into darkness.
From the roof she hears the city begin the Singing.
Guards seize Lina and march her to the Gathering Hall.
6Which direction does Lina take to escape the guards?Ch.16
7The Singing is an event in which the whole city sings together.Ch.16
8Why does Doon leave a note for his father in Chapter 17?Ch.17
9Doon sends Lina back home because she has brought Poppy along.Ch.17
10How do the three of them make their way through the dark Pipeworks?Ch.17
Part 3
Literary Elements
Understanding HOW and WHY Jeanne DuPrau tells the story across Chapters 16–17.
🧠Knowledge Bank · Songs Against the Dark
Literary Craft · Irony and Alternating ChaptersDuPrau builds these two chapters out of two structural choices. The first is alternation: Chapter 16 stays inside the Gathering Hall with Lina while Chapter 17 waits at the Pipeworks with Doon, so a reader holds two dangers at once and knows more than either child does. Holding information a character lacks is dramatic irony, and here it turns Doon’s lonely waiting into suspense rather than delay. The second choice is counterpoint, the setting of one line of meaning against another. Ember sings its oldest songs about the city and the river on the very night two children prepare to abandon both, so the words mean something to us that the singers cannot hear. Notice too that light works here as structure and not decoration: a single failure of the lamps traps a whole city and frees one prisoner in the same instant. Two settings, one rising line of pressure, and a quiet departure made to feel like danger.
Alternating chapters
Chapter 16 stays with Lina, Chapter 17 with Doon — two dangers running at the same hour.
Ironic counterpoint
Ember sings about its city and its river on the night two children leave both behind.
Turning point
The plan to announce becomes a plan to go: investigation ends and departure begins.
1Splitting these events into one Lina chapter and one Doon chapter creates ___.Ch.16–17
2Fill in each blank with the correct literary term.Ch.16–17
Word choices:counterpointturningrhymesequel- some words will not be used
The Singing works as ironic to the escape.
Chapter 17 is the novel’s point.
3The city’s song about the river matters most because ___.Ch.16–17
4The blackout in Chapter 16 works as both plot device and symbol.Ch.16
5Placing the mayor’s threat just before the Singing lets DuPrau contrast ___.Ch.16
6Doon’s note to his father chiefly works to ___.Ch.17
7Chapter 17 ends the novel’s investigation and begins its journey.Ch.17
8Fill in the blank with the correct literary term.Ch.16–17
Word choices:viewpointsettingrhymeallusion- some words will not be used
DuPrau alternates between Lina and Doon.
9The chapter title ‘Away’ is chosen only to describe the weather.Ch.17
10Together, Chapters 16–17 mainly work to ___.Ch.16–17
Part 4
Think Deeper
Four deeper challenges — no single-word recall. Read, weigh the evidence, and reason it out.
💡Knowledge Bank · Acting Before You Are Certain
Ethics · Decisions Under UncertaintyLina and Doon leave Ember on the strength of a page with holes in it. That situation is ordinary outside novels: doctors, engineers, and rescue teams routinely decide with partial information, and treating delay as safety is often an illusion, since waiting has costs of its own. Careful thinkers therefore separate two questions when facing uncertainty. First, how strong is the evidence for this reading? Second, what happens if the reading turns out to be wrong? A guess that can be tested cheaply and undone deserves less caution than one that cannot, and weighing that second question is called assessing the stakes. Because the children carry Poppy, who can neither climb nor give consent, part of the risk falls on someone who did not choose it, and the ethics grow harder there. Fair judgment also compares their choice with the alternative in front of them: a city whose lamps fail more often and whose officials punish questions. Weigh what a person knew at the time, not what the ending reveals—a discipline called avoiding hindsight.
Think back over these chapters. A girl is held by the arms in the Gathering Hall while a large, calm man explains that her questions are a danger to the city and that a locked room is waiting for her. Then every lamp in Ember dies at once, and in the noise and shuffling she goes up instead of out, up a stairway to a roof, where the lights come back and the whole city below her begins to sing the songs it sings every year. Somewhere across the dark, a boy sits alone by a tunnel entrance with a candle and a repaired page, writing a note to his father because he cannot say goodbye out loud. He does not know whether she is free. When she comes, she is carrying her sister.
Original passage written for Garden Heights — not a quotation from the novel.
1Claim: “Chapters 16–17 argue that Ember’s rulers punish questions instead of answering them.” — choose the two details that best prove it.Claim & Evidence
2What the instructions supplied, or What the children had to supply? Tap each detail to send it left or right.Sort into two
◄ What the instructions suppliedWhat the children had to supply ►
3Match each cause to its result. For each cause, pick its result.Cause & Effect
City guards catch Lina in the street→
The lamps of Ember fail in the middle of a threat→
Doon waits alone at the entrance to the Pipeworks→
Lina arrives with Poppy in her arms→
4Fill both blanks to complete the reasoning.Build the Argument
DuPrau sets Ember’s yearly Singing on the same night as the escape because , which shows that .
Part 5
Standardized Test
Reading passage · Reading What Is Left of a Message · Words in Context & Central Ideas · SAT & TOEFL-style practice
🎯 You already have the skills from the sections above — this is just a fun way to meet real SAT & TOEFL-style questions. Read the passage (the highlighted words are tested below), then answer the questions below. Tap an answer to select it, then tap it again to confirm — you can change your choice until you confirm.
Messages do not always arrive whole. Anyone who studies the past spends most of their working life reading evidence that is fragmentary — broken into pieces, with gaps exactly where the important words should be. Such texts can often be recovered, and not by inspiration. The method rests on a plain truth about language: writing repeats itself, so certain letters appear far more often than others and place names sit in predictable positions. A gap is never quite empty, because the surviving text around it limits what could ever have stood inside it.
The clearest example is Linear B, a script from Crete unread for half a century. In the early 1950s the English architect Michael Ventris counted symbols, sorted them by where they appeared, and noticed that certain words shifted their endings in regular ways, as though the language bent its nouns. He also had a crib — a guess he could reasonably expect to be true. Several long words appeared only on tablets from one site each, so they were probably place names like Knossos. Feeding those guesses into his grid produced sound values, and the sound values produced a startling hypothesis: the language was an early form of Greek.
A hypothesis, however, is not yet a decipherment. Ventris tested his readings on tablets he had never used to build them, and ordinary words came out sensibly in Greek. When a newly excavated tablet listing three-legged vessels matched his sound values, scholars agreed that fresh material had begun to corroborate the guess, supporting it from a direction he had not chosen. That last step separates a solution from a story: check a guess against everything you did not use to make it, and keep the reading only while it works.
Original passage written for Garden Heights — not a quotation from the novel.
1What is the main idea of the passage?SAT · Central Ideas
2According to the passage, why is a gap in a text never quite empty?TOEFL · Factual Information
3What did Ventris notice about certain words on the tablets?TOEFL · Factual Information
4In the passage, fragmentary means ___.SAT · Words in Context
5In the passage, a hypothesis is ___.TOEFL · Vocabulary
6What served as Ventris’s crib?TOEFL · Factual Information
7In the passage, corroborate means ___.SAT · Words in Context
8Why did the newly excavated tablet matter so much?TOEFL · Factual Information
9The passage suggests that a reading should be abandoned when ___.SAT · Inference
10Which Part 7 situation does this passage BEST explain?SAT · Inference
Part 6 · Optional
Creative Writing
A bonus challenge to practice your English. Take your time and have fun with it.
About This Section
This writing task is optional and is not part of your auto-graded score. The feedback below checks only the basics — length, spelling, and grammar — not whether your ideas are right or wrong. It is meant for classroom discussion and creative practice, so feel free to use your imagination!
Writing Task — Part 7 “Half a Map”
Lina and Doon act on a page with words missing. Write about a time you had to decide or act with incomplete information — unfinished instructions, half a story, advice that stopped short. What did you actually know, what did you guess, and how did you check the guess? 6–10 sentences. End with what you would want to know before deciding that way again.
You can start with: “I did not have the whole picture, but waiting was not free either...”
0 / 40 words minimum
🗣 Teach It · Just for Fun (optional)
No right or wrong — tell someone nearby what happened in this part. Can’t find anyone? Tell yourself out loud. The moment you teach it, you truly understand it.
Part 7 Complete!
You finished Chapters 16–17 of The City of Ember.
Here are your auto-graded results:
-
points out of 100
Your Writing
Your writing was checked automatically for length, spelling, grammar, and whether you included the key parts of the scene. Scroll back to Part 5 anytime to read your feedback and improve your work.
Independent study guide by Garden Heights. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Jeanne DuPrau. Contains original analysis only; no text from the novel is reproduced. Reference text: This workbook follows Jeanne DuPrau’s classic text (the standard Puffin edition sold worldwide). Revised 2023 UK editions change some wording and may not match the vocabulary studied here.
