Brave New World: Chapter Questions and Answers

Chapter 1 Questions

What is the World State’s motto?
Why is the Director leading the students through the Hatchery?
What is the year? When would this be, using our present dating system?
How are people classified?
What is the Bokanovsky Process?
How are the bottled embryos moved during their gestation periods?
Why are some females allowed a normal, sexual development? What percentage?
What had happened when the maturation process had been shortened?
How does the introduction of Henry Foster give a businesslike feeling to the Hatchery procedure?
What does Lenina’s reaction to the Director’s familiarity show about their relationship?

The motto is “Community, Identity, Stability.”
The Director always personally takes new students through the Hatchery because he is very proud of his position.
The year is A.F. 632; by using the date that Henry Ford opened the Highland Park, Michigan factory, the date is 2546 A.D.
People are classified using the first five letters of the Greek alphabet: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. Alpha is the highest class.
The Bokanovsky Process causes the budding of one fertilized egg. Up to 96 identical humans can be produced. Only the lower classes receive the Process.
The bottled humans are moved eight meters a day for 267 days on an assembly line.
The Hatchery needs a supply of female ova (eggs) for the fertilization process. Thirty percent of the female embryos are thus allowed to mature.
When the maturation process was shortened, the individual was mentally and socially stuck at a childlike level, unable to perform simple adult tasks.
Henry Foster is like an accountant. He deals with facts and figures, rather than emotions.
Lenina does not seem bothered by the Director’s advances. However, she does blush, and her smile is referred to as deferential, which may mean submissive rather than agreeable.

What is the age and social group of the infants being conditioned?
What is the first conditioning mechanism used? The second?
Why must the lower groups be conditioned to go to the country?
What words have become “dirty words”?
How is Reuben Rabinovitch able to repeat the G. B. Shaw lecture?
Why were early sleep−teaching experiments abandoned?
When was hypnopaedia first used successfully?
How often is each hypnopaedic lesson repeated to be successful?
The Director says that wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale. What reasons does he give for this?
Whose suggestions are incorporated into the children’s minds?

The infants are eight−month−old, identical Delta Bokanovsky Group babies.
When the babies first touch the roses and books, alarm bells, sirens, and horrible noises scare them. Then the floor under them is electrified.
The lower groups are the larger percentage of the population and must be conditioned to go to the country to consume transportation and sports equipment.
Words like mother, father, born, parents, and any intimate family relationship words have become the “dirty words” in this New World.
A radio was accidentally left on in Reuben’s room while he slept. The next morning, he was able to repeat Shaw’s speech word for word.
Sleep−teaching was abandoned because children could memorize facts that way but could not relate them as knowledge. They could only repeat by rote memory.
Hypnopaedia was first used successfully in A.F. 214, or about 2130 in contemporary time.
Each lesson is repeated 120 times, three times a week, for 30 months.
The Director says that wordless conditioning cannot make finer distinctions or instill complex behavior.