In The Hunger Games book 1, what key skills keep Katniss alive?
In The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, Katniss must learn quickly what she needs to know and do to survive. Let's explore some of the skills that she needs to develop.
Katniss first must learn how to discern when to fight and when to run. She also has to develop her endurance and her ability to recognize danger and get away from it. Katniss must learn whom she can trust and whom she cannot. She has to forage for food and water, to recognize what is good and what is not, and to be aware of the tricks designed to defeat her. As the novel continues, Katniss hones her self-defense skills and even learns to kill another person to save herself.
Without these skills, it is unlikely that Katniss would have lived through her ordeal. As it is, she is still in danger when the novel closes, for she...
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has become too clever, and this is a threat to the government. We have a sense that Katniss's challenges are far from over.
What characteristics and skills help Katniss survive in chapters 10-13 of The Hunger Games?
The skills and characteristics that help ensure the survival of Katniss in this section are as follows. Firstly, it is her inability to control her emotions that allows the shock of Peeta declaring his love for her to win the hearts of the Capitol. Her very ingenuity about this is key in this sense. Secondly, the speed in which she is able to run and the ease with which she can climb trees is vital to ensure her safety as the games begin. Thirdly, her ability to set snares is something that guarantees her food. Finally in this section, the knowledge that her mother taught her about looking after burns is something that she is able to use to treat her own burns after she runs away from the fire that threatens to envelop her. This is of course coupled with her knowledge of the games and the way in which she remembers that traps in the arena are often only rigged for specific areas.
Above all, however, what ensures the survival of Katniss more than anything else is her brute determination to survive and the way in which she is so insistent that she will make it through. Remember her promise to Prim about how she would do her best. These chapters present us with a Katniss who is determined to do the best she can to keep that promise.