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 option that best conveys the meaning of the underlined portion in the following sentence;
The two sprinters were running neck and neck
Options:Choose the word/expression which best completes each sentence :
During the inaugural address, the president _____ the activities of his government for the past four years
Options:It is said that experience is the best teacher, but to learn consciously through wisdom may even be a better and more convenient way. T learn by experience is to learn from mistakes. It means you have burnt our fingers and now your eyes are open'. This is a tough, costly and inconvenient way to learn. Rather than leaving our learning to experience, why do we not learn consciously going out way to acquire knowledge and wisdom rather than leave our learning to chance.
Surely, we can learn from mistakes but why wait till when we make mistakes before we lean? We should give more premium to learning by wisdom than by experience.
This will involve one making up ones mind to be decisive in learning. We must decide to learn consciously and not necessarily from negative experiences. The first step is to realize that life is simply the outcome and outplay of decisions. Our life now is the sum total of our decisions and our future will be determined by our decisions. Our life now is the sum total of our decisions and our future will be determined by our decisions of today. If we decide to learn today we are not likely to make mistakes and when we do not make mistakes, experience need not be our best teacher.
To avoid making experience our best teacher will take more than a decision. We must couple our decision with a complete and -wholehearted devotion. We must be resolved, resolute and resilient in our bid to learn by wisdom and not necessarily by experience. This is crucial because situations and circumstances will want us to make a detour and leave our learning and life to chance. We must therefore be disciplined to remain with our resolve to make a clean break with experience as our best teacher. Disciplined in this regard means learning something new everyday by wisdom rather than rather than experience. It
means consciously getting better by the day in your chosen field. Discipline will demand taking advantage of every learning opportunity that comes our way. It will mean we must pay the price for learning by wisdom -invest in books, magazines, seminars and other means by which we may become wiser.
It is much easier and cheaper to learn consciously by wisdom than to learn by experience. When we learn by experience , the deed is done and we are just picking up the pieces-learning in regret how to avoid such predicament next time. Consider the child who grapes a burning coal, he has learned the hard way through the painful experience, but his fingers will remain burnt. Thus the saying, that experience is the best teacher, may not be justifiable after all.
Adapted from Sunday Tribune , July 2007
The phrase a complete and wholehearted devotion, as used in the passage, means Options:Choose the most appropriate option opposite in meaning to the underlined words.
The greenhouse effect is beginning to abate in Europe?
Options:Choose the most appropriate option nearest in meaning to the underlined word.
Although the manager is busy right now, he will be with you presently?
Options:There is a joke in a country that the closest anyone will come to experiencing eternity is the country’s court system. The problem is a strange aversion to settling cases. Judges pass them along to somebody else and rarely dismiss lawsuits, no matter how frivolous. The country’s lower courts have a backlog of about 20 million civil and criminal cases. An additional 2.3 million cases are pending before the high courts, while the Supreme Court has about 20,000 old cases on the docket. Many of those cases will take far longer than 16 years to resolve.
But now, experts say, the country’s new Prime Minister is committed to fixing the problem. And the judiciary itself, long criticize as insular and resistant to change, seems finally to have concluded that changes are needed. The chief Justice of the Supreme Court has declared that soon the country will reduce its massive case backlog. After that, ‘there will be no place for any corruption or indolence in the system’. His choice of words was telling. Whatever moral imperative exists, the chief reason that the country is getting serious about streaming the legal system is economic. Dysfunctional courts increase the risk of foreign investors, tortuous rules slow the rise of new enterprises and murky laws regarding land ownership and other issues stifle the growth of industries like construction and retail. The country’s business is lobbying for change; its Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry, for instance, recently published a report that bemoaned the regulatory maze that confronts every commercial project, contributing to delays and cost overruns and providing one explanation why it receives only a tiny fraction of the foreign direct investment deposited in a neighbouring country. ‘Speedy judicial resolution will be one of the keys to making the country a competitive economy, conducive to growth and foreign investment,’ says an observer.
The reasons for the country’s judicial debacle are legion. For one thing, it has fewer judges per capital than almost any other country in the world. In 2007, it had fewer than three judges per 100, 00 people. And the state itself, which account for 60 per cent of court cases, is overly litigious.
we can infer that the neighbouring country has more foreign investments because it Options:The Save the Children Fund (SCF) was first started in London on 19th May, 1919 by an English woman named Miss Jebb. It is now a worldwide organization, dedicated to helping needy children everywhere. The SCF of Malawi was formed in 1953, under the patronage of His Excellency the Life President Ngawazi Dr. H. Kamuzi Banda. “Our job in Malawi is to give those unfortunate children the rights that are deprived of through no fault of theirs. These are internationally recognized as the ten rights of children and includes protection, care, food and accommodation, and relief, a spokesman for the Fund explained.
One of those who benefited from the help of the Fund is Samuel Mpetechula, a graduate of Chancellor. His sponsorship started in 1967. The SCF of Malawi found him sponsors. They were Mr. and Mrs. Sutton of Australia who paid is school fees and continued to help him financially throughout his University education. Mr. Mpetechula said, ‘They even built a house for me at home and looked after my family while I was a student. They were really helpful to me, and the thought that there were these sponsors caring, for me from thousands of kilometres away from here was an encouragement for me to work hard at college.
Another important function of the work of the SCF is in the field of nutrition. With the help of the Australian Government, the SCF established two nutrition rehabilitation centres for children; one at Mpemba and another in Mulanje’. The object of the Centre’s, explained Mr. Petre Chimbe, the Executive Secretary of the Fund, ‘is to combat malnutrition in children, by giving them the proper food’ .
The 'Save the Children Fund' in Malawi helps needy children by 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.
The boss Boeta Dick, can be described as being Options:In 1962, a team of scientists produced a special radio station that had a range of fifteen moles. Even though communication was being accomplished in space at a range of more than a million times this distance, the new radio station caused must excitement among scientists. The reason: its power supply was ‘battery ‘made of bacteria. For the first time, practical amounts of electricity were being produced by a form of life and put to use.
‘biocell’, the new power supply had a liquid fuel containing tiny forms of life that changed the fuel directly into electric energy. This was far more than an interesting experiment. The biocell is being developed as producer of electricity for radios, for signals to guide ships, for lighting and for other uses. Thought the working biocell is only a few years old, some scientists feel that it will one day produce power cheaply as is now being done by other methods, and that the biocell will use materials that would otherwise be considered a waste. Early biocells were powered with sugar, but a wide range of fuels can be used. Work is being done using sea water to feed the bacteria.
Electricity from living cells is no new idea. Man experienced the strange ‘shock ‘produced by some fish even before electricity was really discovered. Then in time, there were other discoveries. Benjamin Franklin found that lightning in the sky was electricity. Lulgi Galvani found some electricity in the muscles and nerves of animals. Bust the African catfish produces far more electricity than most other living creatures. And another fish, the electric eel, well named, for it has an even greater electric charge. Research works also discovered that even humns produce small amounts of electricity in their bodies. Our hearts produce a very small amount that can be measured, so do our brains. The biocell is completely new in the field of power production and, as yet, no mass-produced models have begun to replace the older types of batteries. It might be wondered, and then what the excitement is all about.
According to the passage, electricity was first discovered in Options: