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 opposite in meaning to the underlined word.
In the course of the debate, the speakers were advised to summarize their points?
Options:In the question below choose the option nearest in meaning to the underlined word or phrase:
To be above board is to be
Options:Choose the option that best conveys the meaning of the underlined portion in the following sentence;
Being an optimist, our professor always sees the bright side of most things
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.
Choose the most appropriate option for each group for questionsAlice, a small fragile-looking Ugandan mother, is dying of AIDS. She lives with her son and daughter in a tin-roofed shack on the .....1... of Kampala. When her husband died of AIDS in 1987, Alice discovered she was HIV positive. Frequent ...2..... of sickness forced her to give up her embroidery job. She was so depressed that she just wanted to eat. ....3.... by a neighbour, the mobile care unit from Nsambya hospital went to her home. They convinced her to start taking proper ..4....... After three months of ....5.... treatment, she regained her will to live. The AIDS time bomb .....6... on relentlessly. The World Health Organization ....7.... that 1.8 million Ugandans are HIV positive, nearly one in eight of the total population. The Ugandan AIDS Commission set up by President Museveni ..8...... the spread of the disease. However, under-porting and the lack of post-mortem and ...9..... makes it impossible to establish exact figures. No one ....10.... that it is a disaster far worse than the years of civil war.
After three months of ....5.... treatment, she regained her will to live.
Options:Choose the option nearest in meaning to the word underlined.
The plan has gone awry?
Options:In the question below choose the word(s) or phrase which best fills the gap:
My wife and i met _____ on a ship going to Liberia.
Options:Read each passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.
Obi: Let’s go to the Sport Club Cafeteria. One naira
per meal is a privilege in this country.
And God knows that I am too broke to afford
anything More
Olu: Got a membership identity card? Don’t forget
the place is for bona fide members
only.
Obi: Forget it. There are other types of
identity cards, remember. Just flash
something before the eyes of those men at the
gate, provided it looks like an identity card.
Olu: Ee…eh, I see. That is why the place is
always congested. I don’t think it
is even worth the trouble. I can’t stand a
queue.
Obi: That shouldn’t bother you. You don’t have to
join the queue. Just walk
straight to the serving point without fear
and be sure you shout your
order.
Olu: But only V.I.Ps have the right to break
queues.
Obi: Sure, but V.I Ps don’t wear badges on their
faces. Post man, pose. After
all this is Nigeria
Olu: You mean there are many impostors here?
Obi: Certainly, and many people with privileges
too. If you want to get
along, you must pose, and to get along
means getting what you want
if you choose to term it ‘privileges, it
suits me. It is all a question of
semantics.