39 questions. Try each one, then open the answer to check yourself and read the explanation.
Brother Chume as a member of Jero's congregation is
Answer: D (a disgruntled and gullible follower.)
Chume is unhappy (he wants to beat his wife) and easily fooled by Jero's false prophecies.
Amope is dissatisfied with her husband's status as a
Answer: C (chief messenger)
Amope nags Chume because he is only a chief messenger and not a more important man.
Brother Jero displays an act of ingratitude to his master by
Answer: B (dispossessing him of his piece of land)
Jero tricked his old master out of his piece of the beach, so the old prophet cursed him.
The play is
Answer: D (a farce.)
The play makes us laugh with tricks, chases and absurd situations: it is a farce.
In the play, Soyinka's sympathies lie with the
Answer: A (exploited)
Soyinka mocks Jero and shows sympathy for the simple people he cheats, like Chume.
The play is built on
Answer: A (mistaken identities)
Marlow takes Hardcastle's house for an inn and Kate for a barmaid: the plot runs on mistaken identity.
'If my dear Hastings be but constant, I make no doubt to be too hard for her at last.' The lines above in the play are delivered by
Answer: D (Constance.)
Constance Neville hopes that, if Hastings stays true, she will outwit her aunt Mrs Hardcastle and get her jewels.
In 'Hurrah For Thunder', the poet uses the image of the jungle to comment on his country's lack of
Answer: D (leadership.)
Okigbo's jungle and the fallen "elephant" point to the failure of Nigeria's leaders.
Who are they that 'live that the earth may die' in Niyi Osundare's "They Too Are The Earth"?
Answer: C (People who fritter the forest and harry the hills)
Those who waste the forests and tear at the hills live off the earth while destroying it.
"They too are the earth Under snakeskin shoes and Mercedez tyres'. Niyi Osundare uses the lines above to describe the
Answer: D (oppression of the dispossessed.)
The poor are trodden under the shoes and cars of the rich, like the ground itself.
Dzogbesa Lisa in Kofi Awoonor's 'Songs of Sorrow' can be equated to
Answer: D (fate.)
Dzogbesa Lisa is the god of destiny who "has treated me thus": fate.
To say that Wole Soyinka's 'Telephone Conversation' is dramatic is to imply that
Answer: B (it has conversation and action)
The poem is a dialogue between two people with things happening, like a scene in a play.
In Okara's 'The Call of the River Nun', the river Nun compels the poet to think about
Answer: A (his life)
The river's flow to the sea makes the poet reflect on the course of his own life.
'O incomprehensible God! Shall my pilot be' These lines in Okara's 'The Call of the River Nun' reveal a religious undertone which also expresses the
Answer: D (inevitability of death.)
The poet will need God as his pilot when he makes the final journey, death, which no one escapes.
In Mtshali's 'The Washerwoman's Prayer', the condition of the woman is portrayed through
Answer: A (irony)
The woman toils and suffers yet keeps praying patiently: the poet presents her faith with irony.
What is the poet-persona's feeling for the reaper in Wordsworth's 'The Solitary Reaper'?
Answer: B (Admiration)
The poet is moved by the girl's beautiful song and carries it in his heart.
Browning's 'My Last Duchess' is
Answer: D (a lyric.)
It is a short poem spoken by one person (the Duke), a dramatic monologue, which belongs with the lyric rather than the long epic.
'I cannot rest from travel; I will drink life to the lees.' The lines above from Tennyson's 'Ulysses' reveal the persona as
Answer: A (adventurous)
Ulysses wants to keep travelling and live life to the full: he is adventurous.
Li's initial aspiration in the novel is to
Answer: A (escape from village life to the city)
Li dreams of leaving the strict village for an exciting life in the city.
By allowing Sule to return to the village in spite of his earlier vow, the author suggests the existence of
Answer: B (a bond between man and his roots)
Sule comes home despite swearing not to, showing the pull of one's roots.
The oath above is taken when
Answer: C (Henchard swears to stop taking strong liquors)
After selling his wife while drunk, Henchard swears in a church not to drink for twenty-one years.
The statement, 'Time the magician, had wrought much here' is made when
Answer: A (Susan Newson sees Henchard at Casterbridge)
Susan finds the drunken hay-trusser has become the Mayor: time has changed him greatly.
Mrs. Newson refuses to reward the furmity seller for disclosing the whereabout of Henchard because she
Answer: B (considers the trade in furmity unscrupulous)
Susan would have given the furmity woman something from her small means, but she remembers that it was this woman's rum-laced furmity that made Henchard drunk enough to sell her. She thinks the old woman's trade is unscrupulous, so she only thanks her.
By allowing Henchard to get drunk and sell off his wife, Hardy makes the point that
Answer: B (drinking is disastrous)
Drink leads Henchard to sell his wife, the act that later ruins him.
The three main unities in drama are those of
Answer: A (action, time and place)
Aristotle's unities are of action, time and place.
Poems that are not written in meter or regular line length are called
Answer: C (free verses)
Poetry without regular metre or line length is free verse.
An elegy is a poem that mourns for the
Answer: A (deceased)
An elegy laments someone who has died.
When two statements or comparisons are apparently contradictory, we have an example of
Answer: B (paradox)
An apparent contradiction is a paradox.
'If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?' Shelly, 'Ode to the West Wind'. The literary device used here is
Answer: D (a rhetoric.)
The question needs no answer; it is a rhetorical question.
A melodramatic play is based on
Answer: C (sensational plot and characters)
Melodrama piles on thrilling, exaggerated events and clear-cut heroes and villains.
Romantic poetry emphasizes
Answer: A (the beauty of nature)
Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Keats celebrate nature.
In drama, a conspicuous weakness in the character of the protagonist contributing to his downfall is referred to as
Answer: B (a tragic flaw)
That is the tragic flaw (hamartia).
'The woman whose breasts I sucked is gone to the worms'. Oculi, 'Orphan'. These lines illustrate the use of
Answer: D (euphemism.)
"Gone to the worms" is a softer way of saying his mother is dead and buried.
The figures of speech employed in the lines above are
Answer: C (metaphor and simile)
"Clean as a potato" is a simile; the sun called a red eye and the clouds a handkerchief are metaphors.
In the lines above, Shakespeare is thinking of the
Answer: A (passing of time and shortness of life)
Our minutes rush to their end as waves rush to the shore: life is short.
The passage above is an example of
Answer: C (understatement)
"Only seven thousand died" makes a huge loss sound small: understatement.
The writer suggests in the passage above that El-Hadji is
Answer: D (being manipulated.)
The "careful process of conditioning the man" shows the family is working on him.
The writer of the passage above arrests the interest of the reader by employing
Answer: A (a suspenseful opening)
"They came for him that Sunday" makes us want to know who came and why.
The tone of the lines above is
Answer: A (satiric)
The poet mocks the so-called "messiahs" who hound and gun down the people.