WAEC SSCE WASSCE 1994 Comprehension passages
COMPREHENSION PASSAGE I
Read the passage below carefully and answer the questions on it.
An unfortunate legacy of Ghana’s colonial past is that our youth have conjured up fanciful visions of the western world not merely flowing with milk and honey, but also studded with diamonds, rubies and solid gold. Most youngsters pester their parents with threats that if they are not sent abroad, they will do themselves harm.
No one can dissuade the Western-struct teenager from his conviction that within a single year of his arrival in Britain or America, he would make tons and tons of money to enable him to build skyscrapers, to ride in the latest car models and to eat the choicest of delicacies every day of his remaining life. Such a youngster may hunch his shoulders and swagger along like the Cowboys of the westerns; or he may affect a nasal swank that he thinks is the hallmark of American accent, or he may wear his blue jeans so tattered and frayed that he will put even the delinquents of the slums to shame.
One boy, whose parents were called Abaka, registered as Randy Sheraton in the secondary school without warning his parents. When on one visiting day, his mother was told that there was no student called Ekow Abaka, the poor woman nearly fainted. Delegations of priests besought Mr. Abaka on bended knees to continue paying his son’s school fees quoting again and again they need forgive him for he (the child) knew not what he was doing.
Throughout the pleading, the child was adamant, he is still called Randy Sheraton. When this craze to migrate west takes hold of a youngster, it possesses him like a fetish and sets him off smoking, drinking and engaging in all those goings on that he presumes “good life” western style life is made of. Eventually he becomes absolutely insufferable. To help parents out of this fix, the government should plead with the British and American consulates to supply easy visas to any youngster who is desperate to go abroad and who is driving his parents up to the wall in the process.
When this young fortune seeker goes and see sees for himself how intense the struggle for survival is over there and how black PhD holders wash dishes in damp and dank restaurants for their daily bread, when he sees how the homeless black sleep at bus stops at night with all their earthly goods tucked away in filthy knapsacks, when his erstwhile genial Ghanaian host throws him out his flat because he has overstayed his welcome... No one will tell our young dreamer to return to the relative comfort of this old country.
A trip abroad may well be the best medicine to cure the youngster of his delusion that the grass is always greener on the other side. After the cure he would then be in the frame of mind, to make something of his life.
Questions
a) For each of the following words underlined in the passage, give another word or phrase that means the same and which can replace it in the passage:
(i) Pester
(ii) delicacies
(iii) besought
(iv) intense
(v) filthy
b) (i) When do young Ghanaians feel that life abroad is very glamorous?
(ii) Quote from the passage the phrase from which you derived your answer.
c) Using your own words, as far as possible, list three goals that the Ghanaian teenager hopes to attain when he goes abroad.
d) State four ways in which the Ghanaian teenager may act to stress his desire to go abroad.
e) When his erstwhile genial Ghanaian host throws him out of his flat
i) What is the grammatical name given to this construction?
ii) What specific type is it?
f) What is the writer's attitude to the teenager’s general behaviour?
COMPREHENSION PASSAGE II
Read the passage below carefully and answer the questions on it.
Like everything else in life, proverbs evoke variety of reactions in people. The most credulous members of our society proclaim that proverbs are the sum total of the knowledge and wisdom of our ancestors and that all proverbs are, therefore, tried and true. Such folks deliberately sprinkle their speeches with so many proverbs that they leave the rest of us quite at sea as to the exact meaning of their orations. In order for us not to appear too ignorant of our own language and culture, we nod like lizards and feign admiration. If the purpose of speech is to communicate, and if the proverb-packed speeches of fanatical traditionalist fail the test of clarity and easy comprehensibility, can we sincerely grade them as A quality?
At the opposite intellectual extreme are those very westernized sophisticates of formal education who attach no earthly importance to proverbs, partly because they do not know any, and, as we all know, what one does not know one does not miss. Scholars claim that since proverbs are so elusive that they frustrate critical analysis, they had better be left alone …. rather like the weather, which, Mark Twain, with his refreshing wit, observed that everybody talks of, but nobody does anything about. Hence, we may all talk of proverbs, but we should do nothing about them. In between the two extreme schools of thought come we, middle-of-the-roaders. We, the masses, know virtually no proverbs and have no desire to either talk of, or do anything about them. We are, in fact, too neutral to even attempt to defend our lukewarm attitude. And why should we bother?
The few proverbs that are flung at us are like tongue-twisters to our peace-loving brains. Take, for instance, the Akan proverb that translates into ‘It is because the female coconut tree kept all its problems to itself that it grew that unsightly hump in his trunk’. Obviously, this is traditional wisdom cautioning us that if excessive private nursing of problems and gross self-pity do not quite kill us, they will play havoc with our bodies leaving us with unspeakable deformities. This sounds quite sensible until we realize that continual complaining and obsession with our personal miseries are the best ways of driving away all our friends and leaving us to wallow in abject loneliness. Counter to this runs another Akan proverb that says: ‘The noblest spirit bears all its adversities in silence.’ This reminds us of the English adage “Silence is golden” and of the Swiss inscription that translates into “Speech is time, silence is eternity”.
With proverbs tearing at each other throats, it surely is safer for the bulk of us to keep on the fence, hoping against hope that the fence of proverbs will not give way from under us and force us into one or the other of the contending camps.
Questions
a) For each of the following words, find another word or phrase that means the same in which can replace it in the passage:
(i) evoke
(ii) orations
(iii) elusive
(iv) lukewarm
(v) unsightly
b) Give two reasons why, according to the passage formally educated people do not like to use proverbs.
c) State two ways in which the last group described as middle of the roaders react to proverbs.
d) Abject
(i) What part of speech is this word?
(ii) what is its function in its context?
e) And why should we bother?
What is the full grammatical name given to this construction?
f) “With proverbs tearing at each other's throats”
What figure of speech is used here?
g) Give an example of antithesis in the passage.
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