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.
In the question below choose the option nearest in meaning to the word or phrase underlined:
You are free to leave the hall
Options:I was on top of one of my palm trees yesterday, tapping the tree and collecting the wine for the morning when I saw two soldiers at the foot of the tree. They made signs at me, so I concluded that they wanted my palm wine. On descending from the tree I gave them the wine to sample, as is customary. Not only did they drain all the wine in the calabash, they said they had come to conscript me into the army. I ask them weather they wanted me or somebody else, and they said they had come for me. I asked them weather an enemy sent them or they came on their own. To cut it short, they said i was wasting their time s they had to catch twenty men that day. Only a foolish man willingly disobeys armed soldiers. I told them I had something very important to say.
‘Say it, then’ one of them cut in impatiently, looking at his watch. It was approaching midday, by which time it was considered unsafe to drive around in a car for fear of enemy planes which had learnt to strafe individual vehicles on the highway.
‘Yes, what I want to say is simple’ I said, ‘My first son, the boy who should have succeeded me when I died, joined the army voluntarily with my full backing. He was a brilliant boy, always first in his class. He was in his last year at school when the war began. He was killed. The two children who came after him are girls. The next boy is still in primary school. If he were old enough, I would have asked him to join the army not, minding that the fact that my first son’s head had already been sacrificed to the same war. For no person who breathes, will say that he has no part in this war.
‘But let me add this: - If this war has reached the stage when a man of my age is given a rifle by force and sent to the war fri9ont, then the time has come for you to blow the whistle and end the war. That is all I want to say!’.
The soldiers had come to Options:If our thoughts is to be clear and we are to succeed in communicating it to other people, we must have some method of fixing the meaning of the words we use. When we use a word whose meaning is not certain, we may well be asked to define it. There is a usual traditional device for doing this by indicating the class to which whatever is indicated by the term belongs and also other particular property which distinguishes it from all other members of the same class. Thus we may define a whale as a ‘marine animal that spouts’. ‘Marine animals’ in this definition indicates the general class to which the whale belongs and ‘spouts’ indicates the particular property that distinguishes whales from other such marine animals as fishes, seals, jellyfish and lobsters. In the same way, we can define an even number as a finite integer divisible by two or a democracy as a system of government in which the people themselves rule.
there are other ways, of course of indicating the meaning of words. We may for example, find it hard to make a suitable definition of the word ‘animal’, as we say that an animal is such a thing as a rabbit, dog fish or goat. Similarly, we may say that religion is such a system as Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism. This way of indicating the meaning of a term by enumerating examples of what it includes is obviously of limited usefulness. If we indicate our use of the word ‘animal’ as above, our hearers might for example be doubtful whether a sea-anemone or a slug was to be included in the class of animals. It is however, a useful way of supplementing a definition if the definition itself id definite without being easily understandable. Failure of an attempt at definition to serve its purpose may result from giving as distinguishing mark one which either does not belong to all the things the definition id intended to include, or does belong to some members of the same general class which the definition is intended to exclude.
From the list of words or group of wordslettered A to D, choose the one that is mostnearest opposite in meaning to the underlined word or group of words and that will, at the same time correctly fill in the gap in the sentence.
My uncle is a prosperous businessman, my aunt, unfortunately, is quite ________
Options:I began work at the smithy on the Monday morning. My wages were half a crown a week. My hours were from six in the morning till six in the night, with an hour break for launch. My boss, Boeta Dick, was a tall, bent, reedy consumptive. He has a parched yellow skin, brawn tight over his jutting bones. His cheeks were so sunken it was as though he were permanently sucking them in. his eyes were far back in his head. He coughed violently, and beside his seat was a bucket of sand into which he spat. Changing the sand daily was the only part of my job I hated.
The smithy was divided into two parts. At one end were the machines that cut, shaped, and put the tins together. The man who worked on the machines were on a regular weekly wage. At the other end, was a row of small furnaces, each with it own bellows and piles of fuel. Here, at each furnace a man sat soldering the seams of the tins as they came from machines. The solders were on piece work. To average two or three pounds a week they had to do a mountainous amount of soldering. Each solderer had a boy to cart the tins from the machines to him, then to smear the seams of each tin with sulphur powder so that the lead took easily and, after checking, to cart the tins of the yard where the Lorries collected them.
Boeta Dick spat in the bucket because Options:It is normal in Nigeria to use proficiency in the use of English language as a barometer for evaluating the height of any person's educational attainment. Today, many teachers resort quite often to the use of vernacular in the teaching of their subjects. One is often dismayed at the incompetence of many teachers, even graduates in the use of English language. Throughout the colonial period, up to 1960, Nigerian formal education was patterned after the English system. The "accent" was on English and an educated Nigerian was one who was only African in colour but English in thought and culture. The ability to speak English fluently and if possible with an Oxford accent was the hallmark ofexcellence even if the speaker was empty of thought and ideas. In those days it was a serious offence for a secondary school boy or girl to "laugh in the vernacular". But we now swung to the other extreme. Nigeria would say they are not English people, some would say they did not specialise in English in the university. But thecountry has adopted the English language as its official, the language of instruction at schools, parliamentary proceedings, conduct of official business and indeed the lingua franca. If the language is to continue to be used, then it is imperative that we all agree on the pattern of correctness in the language so that communication can be effective.
From the passage, it is evident that
Options:ADUKE: Listen my fellow women. The issue has little to do with being literate or not. It is true that most members of NAM (New Awareness Movement) are literate, but this does not make all of us enlightened. We must be able to draw a line between the two. You may be literate and yet possess a consciousness that is decadent and servile. On the other hand you may not have received formal education and yet may be the greatest exponent of progressive ideas.
HASANA: I agree with what our sister has said. Let us not allow ourselves to be divided by a greedy and an inflated notion of the certificates we possess. In this century, as we march towards the year 2000, our primary concern should be how best to improve the lot of womanhood in our society. Let us not forget that for each woman who is beaten up by her man for flimsy reasons are status of all of us here is downgraded. For each woman who is insulted for no reason than that of her sex, every one of us here is spat on in the face. For each woman who is denied opportunities in the society simply because she is a woman, the whole lot of us are dehumanized. Each widow in this society is an everywoman, and the lot of each of us should be viewed as collective. Each rotten egg that is thrown at anyone of us is an eternal splash of dirt on our faces. Each decayed tomato that is cast at her is a collective curse on our fecundity: each pebble thrown at her, a missile against our womanhood. This is an age of awareness, and it is the duty of NAM to collectively rise in defence of the right of women.
IME: We can no longer allow ourselves to be fried alive. We are going to squeeze ourselves into tight-fitting trousers, register into judo classes, and then file out into the street and punch the face of every man we behold.
Hasana believes that NAM should not be divided by Options:Choose the most appropriate option nearest in meaning to the underlined word.
I shuddered in revulsion as i watched the snake slowly swallow the struggling rat?
Options:Choose the option that best completes the gap(s).
Here is Mr. Odumusu who teaches English _____ in our school?
Options: