English is the study of the English language. The goal is to improve communication skills by practicing listening, speaking, reading, writing, and understanding language rules like pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar.
Choose the most appropriate option nearest in meaning to the underlined word.
The delegates to the Constitutional Conference have mooted that funding of universities be transferred to states where they are located?
Options:In order to approach the problem of anxiety in play, let us consider the problem of anxiety in play, let us consider the activity of building and destroying a tower. Many a mother thinks that her little son is in a 'destructive stage' or even has a 'destructive personality' because after building a big, big tower, the boy cannot follow her advice to leave the tower for Daddy to see, but instead must kick it and make it collapse. The almost manic pleasure with which children watch the collapse in a second of the product of long play-labour has puzzled many, especially since the child does not appreciate it at all if his tower falls by accident or by a helpful uncle’s hand. He, the builder, must destroy it himself. This game, I should think, arises from the not so distant experience of sudden falls at the very time when standing upright on wobbly legs afforded a new and fascinating perspective on existence. The child who consequently learns to make a tower 'stand up' enjoys causing the same tower to waver and collapse; in addition to the active mastery over a previously passive event, it makes one feel stronger to know that there is somebody weaker ----and towers, unlike little sister, can't cry and call, 'Mummy!'
How does the author try to explain this ‘destructive stage'?
Options:choose the option that best answers the question from the options lettered A-D
He SLAPPED the teacher.
Options:Choose the option opposite in meaning to word underlined?
The man paid a large sum to redeem his mortgage property?
Options:For these questions, choose the option that best complete the gap(s):
He decided to wait for the bus because he had_______.
Options:In the question below choose the most appropriate option nearest in meaning to the word(s) or phrase(s) in underlined:
The teacher's face broke into an incredulous smile when he heard Adamu's reason for coming late
Options:Recent literary researches reveal that Nigerians hardly have time to read . In essence, the reading culture in Nigeria is now at a low ebb. It is disturbing, however, that few Nigerians that read concentrate more on foreign books than indigenous productions. Most Nigerian authors of novels,storybooks, fictions and non-fiction series have decried, on different, occasions, their woes. The were bitter at the way most owners of bookshops and publishers treat them. It was gathered to stock foreign books. when contacted by DAILY INDEPENDENT, the general manager of a popular bookstore on Lagos lsland declared that most of the bookshops preferred to stock foreign books because of higher demands for them. The question that bothers most Nigerian authors is , while their overseas counterparts are being rewarded with great international honours, why are Nigerians not according them such recognition in their own country?
Recently, "Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, won the 2007 Orange Prize Award, the literary world's top award for fiction in English written by women. The award carries a prize tag of $30,000 it was reported in Publishers Weekly, Half of a Yellow Sun, the book that earned her the award, was profoundly gripping. According to the reviewer, the book is a transcendent novel of many descriptive triumphs, most notably its diction of the impact of war brutalities on peasants and intellectuals alike. It is searing history in fictional form, intensely evocative and immensely absorbing. Chinua Achebe, 'Father of Modern African Literature, also won the second ever Man Booker International Prize of £60,000 with his first novel Things Fall Apart, published in 1958. When Professor Wole Syinka won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, the fame confirmed the relevance of Nigerians in the world of classical excellence. Ben Okri won the 1991 Booker Prize with his work, The Famished Road, and the world celebrated Nigeria as the giant of Africa.
It was also , gathered that most of the publishers hurriedly produce books and in the process marred their good contents. Most of the books are not properly edited and eventually become substandard when compared with foreign products. The extent to which book publishing standard has fallen in Nigeria alarming. Often Nigerian publishers have been blamed for this. It is instructive that none of the books mentioned had been published in Nigeria. It was discovered that most students in tertiary institution depend on dictations from their lectures and /or handouts. A science lecturer in one of the Nigeria universities, who had been a victim of handout sales scandal, told DAILY INDEPENDENT the reality of campus challenges in relation to books; I was forced to dictate notes slowly to students who hung on my every word in the absence of textbooks in a library that had, to all intent and purpose, stopped buying new books when the local currency was devalued. But what other alternative does one have?
Adapted from DAILY INDEPENDENT, Monday, 20 August, 2007
The expression...that earned her the award is profoundly gripping, as used in the passage, means that the book is
Options:We knew early in our life that the atmosphere in our home was different from that in many other homes, where husbands and wives quarrel and where was drunkenness, laziness or indifference – things we never saw in our family. We chafed and grumbled at the strictness of my father’s regime. We went to hide whenever we broke the rules too visibly. We knew, nevertheless, that our parents wanted good things for us. Some of these, such as the insistence on our going to school and never missing a day, we accepted readily enough, although, like most other children, we occasionally yielded to the temptation to play truant. However, in other cases such as their effort to keep us out of contact with the difficult life- the drinking and fighting and beer-brewing and gambling- their failure was inevitable. They could not keep us insulated. By the time we move about, we were already seeing things with eyes and judging things by the standards we had absorbed from them.
It was borne in on me and my brothers at a very early age that our father was an uncommon man. for one thing, in most African families, work around the home was women’s work. So we were vastly impressed by the fact that whenever my mother was away, my father could and did do all her jobs-cooking, cleaning and looking after us. We lived in this way in a community in which housework was regarded as being beneath male dignity. Even in families which, like ours, produced boy after boy-our sister came fifth-it simply meant that the mother carried a greater and greater burden of work. In our family, nevertheless; the boys did girls ‘work and my father did it with us.
One of the prime chores of life in the family was fetching water from the pump down the street, some two hundred metres from our door. Since the pump was not unlocked until six in the morning and there was always crowding, a system had developed whereby you got out before dawn, placed your twenty-litre tin in line, and then went home, returning latter to take your place. Often, of course, tins would be moved back in line, and others moved ahead. This could be corrected if none of these in front were too big a challenge.
When taps were substituted for the pumps, the first one installed was nearly a kilometre away from our house and we had to make the trek with the water tins balanced on our heads – an indignity because this was the way girls, not proud males, carried their derisive laughter. We did our jobs doggedly, that notwithstanding, because our father and mother expected it of us. Out of choice, our father did everything we did, including fetching water on occasion, and commanded us by sheer force of his example.