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.
There are one or two things this country can teach others, one of them is the art of writing obituaries. One suspects that the reason why some of our newspapers still manage to break even is because of the great amount of revenue they derive from obituaries. It is not unusual for about one quarter of the volume of an average daily to be constituted of obituaries and in in memorial alone. One possible explanation for this, it has been argued, is that Nigerians value their dead greatly. And there is a saying amongst us that you do not say evil things against the dead. This is obviously the philosophy behind the large dose of encomiums with which our dead are bestowed. From evidences of these obituaries and in memorial, every dead Nigerian must have been something of a saint while alive. This would explain why the death of most Nigerians is attributed to the evil Machinations of the wicked. Only very few people in our country die natural death, and even when they do, the obituaries, etc always give the impression that such deaths constitute the saddest loss to befall the deceased family. And that is why writers of these obituaries and their allied advertisements are experts on ‘mortuary stylistics’. This ‘mortuary stylistics’ the study in the art of eulogizing the dead and making their loss sound so heart breaking, is one of the commodities we can export to other countries.
The tone of this passage is Options:The appearance of comparative peace which Max’s house presented to me that morning proved quite deceptive. Oh perhaps some of Chief Nanga’s ‘queen bee’ characteristics had rubbed off on me and transformed me into an independent little nucleus of activity which I brought with me into this new place. That first night I not only heard of the new political party about to be born but got myself enrolled as a foundation member. Max and some of his friends having watched with deepening disillusion the use to which our hard-won freedom was being put by corrupt, mediocre politicians had decided to come together and launch the Common People’s Convention.
There were eight young people in his room that evening. All but one were citizens of our country, mostly professional types. The only lady was a very beautiful lawyer who, I learnt afterwards, was engaged to Max whom she had first met at the London School of Economics. There was a trade-unionist, a doctor, another lawyer, a teacher and a newspaper columnist
Max introduced me without any previous consultation as a ‘trustworthy comrade who had only the other day had his girlfriend snatched from him by minister who shall remain nameless’. Naturally I did not care for that kind of image reputation. So I promptly intervened to point out that the woman in question was not strictly speaking my girlfriend but a casual acquaintance who both Chief Nanga and I knew.
‘So it was Chief Nanga, yes?’ said the European and everyone burst out laughing.
‘Who else could it be?’ said one of the others.
The Whiteman was apparently from one of the Eastern Bioc countries. He did not neglect to stress to me in an aside that he was there only as a friend of Max’s. He told me a lot of things quietly while the others were discussing some obscure details about the launching. I was as much interested in what he said as the way in which he said it. His English had an exotic quality occasionally – as when he said that it was good to see intellectuals like Max, myself and the rest coming out of their ‘tower or elephant tusk’ into active politics. And he often punctuated whatever he was saying with ‘yes’ spoken with the accent of a question.
The speaker _____ to Max's introduction of him Options:Choose the option nearest in meaning to the word underlined.
He is a prolific writer?
Options:Fill each gap with the most appropriate option from the list following the gap.
I hope I have not _____ too much on your time?
Options:Choose the word/expression which best completes each sentence :
Do you know if the new teacher _____ yet?
Options:Answer the following question below and select the option that best explains the information conveyed in the sentence.
Hardworking students must not have a finger in every pie at school.
Options:Choose the word/expression which best completes each sentence :
Biliaminu sent the expensive present to one Miss Sanda of the United African Organization and not to _____ of the Central Bank of Nigeria
Options:In the question below choose the word(s) or phrase(s) which best fills(s) the gap(s):
Asabe is overdue for retirement as she _____ in this college since 1954
Options:One of the interesting things to me about our spaceship is that it is a mechanical vehicle, just as is an automobile. If you own a car, you realize that you must put oil and gas into it and must put water in the radiator and take care of the car as a whole. You begin to develop quite a little thermodynamic sense. You know that you are either going to have to keep the machine in a good order or it is going to be in trouble and fail to function. We have not been seeing our spaceship earth as an integrally-designed machine which to be persistently successful, must be comprehended and serviced in total.
Now there is one outstanding important fact regarding Spaceship Earth and that is that no instrument book came with it. I think it is very significant that there is no instrument book for successfully operating our ship, in view of the infinite attention to all other details displayed by our ship. It must be taken as deliberate and purposeful that an instruction book was omitted. Lack of instruction has forced us to find out that there are two kinds of mangoes-unripe mangoes that will kill us and ripped mangoes which will nourish us. And we had to find out ways of telling which were-which mangoes before we ate it or otherwise we would die. So we were forced because of this to devise scientific experimental procedures and to interpret effectively the significance of the experimental findings. Thus, because the instruction manual was missing, we are learning how we can safely survive on the planet.
Quite clearly, all living beings are utterly helpless at the moment of birth. The human child stays helpless longer than the young of any species. Apparently, it is part of the “invention” that man is meant to be utterly helpless through certain anthropological phases. When he begins to be able to get on a little better, he is meant to discover some of the physical principals inherent in the universe as well as the many resources around him which will further multiply his knowledge. Designed into this Spaceship Earth’s total wealth was a big safety factor. This allowed man to be very ignorant for a long time until he had amassed enough experience from which to extract progressively the system of generalized principals governing increase of energy. The designed omission of the instruction book forced man to discover retrospectively just what his most important capabilities are. He learned to generalize fundamental principles of universe.
According to the writer, the exciting thing about spaceship Earth is that it Options:You would think that common cold should be easy enough to study, but it is not as easy as it looks. Colds often seem to spread from one person to another, so it is often assumed that the cold must be infectious but there are some puzzling observations which do not fit with this theory. An investigator in Holland examined some eight thousand volunteers from different areas and came to the conclusion that in each group the colds all appeared at the same time-transfer of infection from case to case not account for that. Yet at the common cold research unit in Salisbury the infection theory has been tested out, two series of about two hundred people each were inoculated, one with salt water and the other with secretion from known cold victims. Only one of the sail-water group got a cold compared with seventy-three in the other group.
In the British Medical Journal the other day, there was a report of a meeting. ‘The common cold-fact and fancy’, at which one of the speakers reported a study of colds made in Cirencester over the last five years. Three hundred and fifty volunteers had kept diary records of their colds and on an average each had seven every year with an annual morbidity of seventy days. So nearly one-fifth of our lives are spent in more or less misery, coughing and sneezing. Some widely held beliefs about the common cold have turned out to be true. It seems that old people are just as liable to cold as the young. Sailors in isolated weather ships have just as many colds while on board and not in contact with the outside world as when on shore. It is truism that common illnesses pose more problems than the rare. The rare disease is by comparison much easier to handle. There are not so many cases and all of them have been intensively studied. Someone has read up all the literature about the disease and published a digest of it. There will be more facts and fewer fancies.