48 questions. Try each one, then open the answer to check yourself and read the explanation.
Femi Osofisan's Morountodun: Titubi's experience at the peasants' camp is narrated through a dramatic technique called
Answer: D (flashback)
Titubi's time in the peasants' camp is acted out as scenes from the past while she tells her story, which is the flashback technique.
Femi Osofisan's Morountodun: The language of the play is
Answer: B (condemnatory)
The play uses its language to attack the injustice done to the peasants by the rich and the state, so its language is condemnatory.
Femi Osofisan's Morountodun: The images depicted are those of
Answer: D (suffering and brutality)
Lack of electricity, drinking stream water and children in jail show suffering, while police raids that burn houses show brutality.
Femi Osofisan's Morountodun: The speech is made by
Answer: A (Titubi role-playing Moremi)
The book's key gives Titubi, speaking in her role as the legendary Moremi, as the speaker of this complaint about the peasants' plight.
William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: The dialogue above takes place
Answer: C (by the sea-coast of Illyria)
This is Act 1 Scene 2: Viola, just saved from the shipwreck, talks with the Captain on the sea-coast of Illyria.
William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: The author successfully conveys his message through
Answer: D (comedy of errors)
The play's humour and meaning come from mistaken identities (Viola disguised as Cesario, confused with Sebastian), which is a comedy of errors.
William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: The imagery above describes
Answer: D (Olivia's intense grief over the death of her brother)
Valentine reports that Olivia will stay veiled like a nun and weep daily for seven years to mourn her dead brother.
William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: The play is about love,
Answer: D (commitment and marriage)
The confusions of love in the play end in commitment and three marriages (Orsino and Viola, Olivia and Sebastian, Toby and Maria).
William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: Two major elements of the diction in the play are the
Answer: C (gender and class of the speakers)
How characters speak depends on their class (nobles in verse, servants and revellers in prose) and on gender, made central by Viola's disguise as a man.
Camara Laye's The African Child: The success of the novel lies in the author's
Answer: D (use of traditional elements for colour)
The novel's charm comes from its rich picture of Malinke traditions such as the totem snake, gold-smelting, harvest and initiation rites.
Camara Laye's The African Child: The most important objects in the hut are the
Answer: D (pots containing the magic charms)
Laye describes his father's hut and says the most important things in it were the pots holding the magic potions and charms.
Camara Laye's The African Child: The friendship between Laye and Marie lasted because
Answer: B (they had mutual respect for each other)
Laye and Marie's quiet, chaste friendship rested on deep respect for each other rather than on looks or family approval.
Buchi Emecheta's Second Class Citizen: For her act of child neglect, Adah's mother was forced by the police to
Answer: C (drink a bowl of garri)
When little Adah went to school on her own, the police held her mother responsible for neglecting her; the key gives the punishment as drinking a bowl of garri.
Buchi Emecheta's Second Class Citizen: Adah's sojourn in London reveals that
Answer: D (the plight of the black woman does not change)
In London Adah still suffers from her husband's oppression and from racism, so moving abroad does not change the black woman's plight.
Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea: The old man's experience is a lesson in
Answer: A (endurance and hardwork)
Santiago fishes for 84 days without a catch and then fights the marlin and the sharks for days, a lesson in endurance and hard work.
Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea: 'The old man was dreaming about the lions' suggests that he is
Answer: B (still determined and hopeful)
The lions on the African beach stand for youth and strength; dreaming of them shows Santiago's spirit is still strong and hopeful.
Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea: The novel is set in the
Answer: B (fishing coast of Havana)
Santiago lives in a small fishing village near Havana in Cuba and fishes in the Gulf Stream off that coast.
Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea: The skeleton of the fish is brought by the shore to
Answer: B (show the old man's fruitless effort)
Only the bare skeleton reaches the shore: the sharks ate the flesh, so it stands for the old man's great but fruitless effort.
Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea: The author's thematic concern is
Answer: D (the ability to rise above defeat)
Santiago says 'a man can be destroyed but not defeated': he loses the fish but keeps his dignity and spirit.
'Hurrah for Thunder' by Christopher Okigbo could be regarded as a call to
Answer: D (be conscious and vigilant of man's abuse of power)
The fallen elephant and the thunder stand for powerful leaders; the poem warns people to watch how men use and abuse power.
The extract above from Wole Soyinka's 'Telephone Conversation' shows the friction between
Answer: C (landlady and tenant)
The poem is a phone call between an African man looking for a room and a white landlady who is shocked to learn he is black.
In Wole Soyinka's Telephone Conversation, the dominant literary technique deployed is
Answer: A (alliteration)
Soyinka keeps repeating initial consonant sounds (for example 'Button B. Button A.' and the run of 'red booth, red pillar-box') to give the poem its sharp, mocking sound.
David Rubadiri's 'Stanley meets Mutesa' symbolically describes the meeting between
Answer: C (the West and Africa)
Stanley stands for the European explorers and Mutesa for African rulers, so their meeting symbolises the first contact of the West with Africa.
The pervasive mood of the speaker in Mtshali's 'Nightfall in Soweto' is that of
Answer: B (terror and insecurity)
The speaker fears the night in Soweto when thugs and police attack; he feels terror and has no safety even at home.
The stanza form of Mapanje's 'When this Carnival Finally Closes' is
Answer: D (a free verse)
The poem has no fixed metre or rhyme scheme, so it is written in free verse.
The dominant images in Niyi Osundare's 'They Too are the Earth' are
Answer: C (poverty, suffering and the downtrodden)
Osundare writes about the poor and forgotten people who build society yet live in want, so the images are of poverty and suffering.
In these lines from Ojaide's The Owl Wakes Us, the mood is that of a
Answer: C (vicious cycle of oppression)
Waking 'from one nightmare to another' shows that one bad time simply follows another: a never-ending cycle of oppression.
In Browning's 'My Last Duchess', the poet-persona's attitude to the Duchess is that of
Answer: D (scorn)
The Duke looks down on his late wife for smiling at everyone and for valuing his gift no higher than a bough of cherries: his tone is scornful.
In 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', John Keats is concerned with
Answer: D (everlasting beauty of art)
Keats contrasts passing human life with the urn's frozen scenes, which stay beautiful forever: art's beauty is everlasting.
The term for the moral flaw or weakness that leads to the downfall of a major character in drama is
Answer: B (hamartia)
Hamartia is Aristotle's word for the tragic flaw or error that brings about the hero's fall.
The figure of speech in which a character makes a statement that has or would have deep and serious implication in the play is
Answer: C (dramatic irony)
In dramatic irony a character's words carry a deeper, often serious meaning for the rest of the play that the character is unaware of.
A character who does not develop or experience change in the course of his or her existence in a novel is a
Answer: B (flat character)
A flat character stays the same throughout the story; a round character changes and develops.
A panegyric poem is composed to
Answer: D (praise)
A panegyric is a speech or poem written in high praise of someone.
The narrator in a prose work who is also a character is
Answer: D (participatory narrator)
When the storyteller is one of the characters, usually speaking as 'I', he or she is a participant or participatory narrator.
A primary ballad is associated with
Answer: D (rural folk)
Primary (folk) ballads were made up and passed on by word of mouth among ordinary country people.
A trilogy is the
Answer: A (sequence of three plays written by the same author)
A trilogy is a group of three related works, such as three plays, by the same author.
A novel which focuses on the adventures of a rogue who does not change much in the course of the story is
Answer: C (picaresque)
A picaresque novel follows the episodic adventures of a likeable rogue (picaro) who changes little.
The term given to a type of incident or device which recurs frequently in Literature is
Answer: A (motif)
A motif is an idea, image or type of incident that keeps recurring in literature.
Using the name of one thing for something else with which it is closely associated is an instance of
Answer: D (metonymy)
Metonymy names something by a thing linked to it, e.g. 'the Crown' for the monarch.
Mock-heroic poetry elevates
Answer: B (trivial subject-matter by using the style of the classical epic)
Mock-heroic poetry, like Pope's The Rape of the Lock, treats a trivial subject in the grand style of epic, for comic effect.
Lineation refers to
Answer: C (the arrangement of lines in verse form)
Lineation is how a poem is divided into lines: where each line begins and ends.
Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter: The man's reactions to the presence of the dying child show that he is
Answer: B (compassionate)
He feels the child's suffering so deeply that he offers his own peace to God in exchange for hers, which shows compassion.
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman: Linda's words above express a feeling of
Answer: C (fear and anxiety)
Linda calls 'with some trepidation' and asks anxiously what happened, showing fear and worry about Willy.
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman: Willy's first words show that his coming back is
Answer: C (not expected)
Willy has to reassure Linda ('It's all right. I came back'), which shows she did not expect him home.
Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God: The lines above illustrate the use of
Answer: A (traditional parable)
The key takes this saying about Umuaro custom, used to explain why Ezeulu sends his son, as a traditional parable drawn from village wisdom.
Kofi Anyidoho, 'Blood Harvest': The stanza above succinctly presents the
Answer: D (repercussion of violence)
Those who live by guns and death will see their own children's blood spilt: violence comes back on those who cause it.
Dennis Brutus, 'A Troubadour I Traverse': In the lines above, the poet-persona expresses
Answer: A (defiance)
Though cast off by his land, the persona carries on like a knight-errant, ready for pressure and the captor's hand: a defiant stance.
David Diop, 'Africa': In the lines above, Diop uses
Answer: A (personification)
The poet speaks to Africa as a person whose blood flows in his veins and irrigates the fields, giving the continent human qualities.