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.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the American Declaration of independence that ‘all men are created equal’, he was not seeking to describe men’s endowments, but their political and legal rights. He was not saying that men do not differ from one another in the powers and dimensions of their bodies, minds and characters. He was asserting that despite variations and differences, they all possessed the right to equal political and legal treatment. We must however, ask of what real values are political and legal equality to a man who has no bread to eat , no clothes to wear, no roof to shelter him, no chance to earn a livelihood? What we understand as a democratic society must provide for its citizen’s minimum status protection in his deprivation, losses and fears.
In our time, the nations of the democratic world have installed elaborate system of social security and welfare, ranging from compensation for industrial accidents to subsidize housing, unemployment insurance, old age pension, psychiatric care and national health services. It is encouraging that the democratic nations are making a serious effort to provide against the characteristic losses and disasters of human life.
The evolving status of the Negro in America is attracting the attention of the champions of equality. Much has been written on the wrongs, injustice and inequalities of the coloured citizen of the USA and much remains to be said because the history of this struggle for human rights is still unfolding.
One of the social services provided by democratic nations is Options:Select the wrongly spelt words.
Options:Fill the gap with the most appropriate option from the list following the gap.
My friend _____ me for many years when i met him last week?
Options:Choose the option that best completes the gap(s).
Uche has been in _____ with his pen pal for years.
Options:Choose the most appropriate option opposite in meaning of the underlined word.
We watch in wonder as she rattled away in that esoteric language?
Options:In each of this question choose the option opposite in meaning to the word or phrase underlined:
The war against malaria keeps waxing
Options:The earthly paradises of Bali and of the South Sea Islands, and the gentle, non-acquisitive civilization of Burma, have been aptly described and romanticized. One can add to then the Nicobar Islands, where a small population lived happily on a very low cultural level. But perhaps the most remarkable and the least known of these earthly paradise is the small kingdom of Hunza in the Himalayas, which was recently visited and enthusiastically described by the journalist, Noel Barber (Daily Mail, 5, 6, 8 June 1962). A fair-skinned population of 18,000, they lived in a fertile and almost inaccessible valley not far from the Sinking boarder, 8,000 feet up. A legend has it that they are the descendants of the three deserters from the army of Alexander the Great, who here with Persian wives which makes one inclined to believe that pacifism may be hereditary , because these people had no war in 2,000 years. They have no money, no crime and no diseases, they rarely die before ninety. Their psychosomatic control is almost unbelievable, childbirth is painless, and toothache, a joke; they keep their numbers stationary without contraceptives, and without abortion, but by sheer abstinence, though Noel; Barber saw the newborn son of a chuckling father aged eighty-nine. Their diet which consists of mostly apricot and raw vegetables may have something to do with their unshakable serenity. It makes one gasp with surprise that human nature can be like this. One is reminded of Huxley’s Island, but unlike the Palanese, the Hunza people have no art, only serenity!
To say that the Hunza people have serenity means they are Options:The emergence of a standard dialect produces the phenomenon known as ‘accent’ which is quite different from dialect. In the process of learning a foreign language, it is normal to transfer the patterns of an indigenous language to those of the foreign language. With time, however those of form and most of orthography and phonology gradually get eliminated. This is because these can easily be identified and corrected. They are easy to correct because they do not involve patterns of muscular movement. It is necessary to correct them because otherwise they could seriously impair intelligibility.
With phonetic patterns, on the other hand, there is a great deal of intelligibility tolerance because muscular patterns are involved thus making correction difficult when observed. Besides, phonetic patterns do not impair intelligibility much. Hence the transference of phonetic habits from one language to another is both easier to tolerate and more difficult to avoid than transference at the lexico-grammatical level. It follows that a speaker who is learning a second dialect does so with an accent since the muscles of his speech organs would have crystallized in response to the phonetics of his native language which he learnt first. The speaker therefore speaks the second dialect with the phonetic features of his native dialect. The learning of a standard language is simply the learning of a second dialect- that which has been standardized.
Members of a language community control at least two dialects and use both dialects in different situations. In the rural areas, the native dialect is used in most situations since there is less movement. Therefore, rural dwellers tend to be parochial and maintain the homogeneity of their dialect. In the urban community, on the other hand, there is more demand on the standard dialect than on the rural one. This is because people from different regions converge here. In order to ensure mutual intelligibility resulting from the pressure of communication, a great deal of demand is made on the standard dialect which now becomes the lingua frenca amongst them.