THOUGHT FOR TODAY

Study Success

Dear Student, Welcome dear friend. Self-testing is basic to earning top grades at examinations.Test yourself for various purposes. Trycreating those brilliant and

June 25, 2023 important packs of keyword revision cards for lesson-revision or independent homework tasks. Try also the pocket-sized revision cards to jog memory. Tailor them to suit your study-style. Wherever possible, learn about topics in logical whole units, with natural beaks in between, or break units down into logical sub-topics. Do avoid stress and anxiety. Be wise.

Love you.

IMPROVING YOUR READING

A word about developing your reading skills.

Reading is an art form. The text comes alive in the way you handle it with your eyes and ears, students; the way you work along with the author. We now urge you again to try mastering the many reading skills so very important in your English Language examinations.

Do try to improve your rapid reading and comprehension skills. It is necessary that you want to read extensively. It is necessary also that you learn to adjust totechniques for comprehending whatever is being read. Every reading event has a purpose which dictates the kind of reading that is done. Practice is essential if your reading speed and comprehension of texts are to be improved.

There is also proofreading. A special kind of reading is involved here. In it, you need to be able to transfer your reading skills to proofreading. Proofread everything you write; it involves looking for certain types of errors. A great deal of practice and continuity is necessary to master your proofreading skill, students. Be determined.

The Passage

Comprehending a passage

Read the following carefully and then answer all the questions that follow.

In the living room were remnants of old, rotting furniture, and faded pictures. Everything smelt damp and mouldy. There were three or four stained heavy armchairs, a huge old desk covered with books and papers. A bookcase stood against one wall, half-empty and very dusty. Jimmy found a bird’s nest on one shelf. The floor was littered with dead leaves, papers, and bird droppings.

The next room was not much better. It was a dining room, and contained a tall, carved cupboard with blue and white china on open shelves. In the drawers of the sideboard, we found tarnished knives and forks in boxes, old-fashioned carving knives, spoons of all sizes, and some mildewed table napkins rolled and stuck into silver rings. Jimmy drew a grinning face in the middle of the dining table and wrote “J.S.W.” under it.

Across the little passage with more shelves was the kitchen, and on the other side of the passage a staircase led up to the rooms above. A single glance was enough to show us that no food of any kind remained in that kitchen. There were some dishes in the sink, piled untidily as though left in a hurry.

(From Jean D’Costa’s “Escape to Last Man Peak”)

1. Children entered the deserted house. How does the writer make you feel you are in the house with the children? What sort of details does she give?

2. List some salient words and phrases that tell you that the house was empty for a long time.

3. How do you feel about the house? Is it a bit scary, friendly? What made you come to that conclusion?

4. What evidence makes you think that other persons were there before the children came?

5. What age children was the novel written for from which this passage came? How can you know it from the author’s written expression? Describe her expression.

The Poem

Analysing and interpreting the poem Read the following poem carefully and then answer all the questions that follow. Without Title

1. It’s hard you know without the buffalo, the shaman, the arrow, but my father went out each day to hunt as though he had them.

5. He worked in the stockyards. All his life he brought us meat. No one marked his first kill, no one sang his buffalo song. Without a vision he had migrated to the city 10. and went to work in the packing house. When he brought home his horns and hides my mother said get rid of them.

I remember the animal tracks of his car 15. out the drive in snow and mud, the aerial on his old car waving like a bow string.

I remember the silence of his lost power, the red buffalo painted on his chest. 20. Oh, I couldn’t see it but it was there, and in the night I heard his buffalo grunts like a snore.

1. Why do you think the speaker’s father “migrated to the city” (line 9)?

2. What does the phrase “Without a vision” suggest?

3. Through whose eyes are you seeing the poem? How are you sure?

4. What do you think is meant in line 18 by the “lost power”? Whose power was lost and through whose eyes?

5. Is this merely an untitled poem or is the poem suggesting some other meaning?

6. Give the meaning of each word and phrase listed here: shaman, stockyards, first kill, packing house

7. Explain lines 20-22 in the poem.