Literature in English JAMB, WAEC, NECO AND NABTEB Official Past Questions

‘O Julius Caesar!art mighty yet!
Thy spirit walks abroad and turns our swords.
In our own proper entrails’.
These lines were spoken by

Marcus Antonius roused the public to mutiny in his funeral speech in Julius Ceasar partly because he succeeded in discrediting Brutus ans Cassius by calling them ‘honorable men’, when in fact he consciously organized his speech to prove that they were dishonorable. This device is known as

Kenneth Kaunda fought a much bigger boy from another school after a football match because he

The other team was composed of much bigger boys than any we had in Galike and they chose the biggest of them all, sending him out like Goliath from the Philistines to challenge one of our team.
In this passage Kenneth Kaunda makes his account of the fight more vivid through the use of

When Di says of Eliza, ‘That girl is tragedy already’ she means

As non-fiction, V.S Naipaul’s The Middle Passage belongs more properly to the genre of

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.
Close bosom-friend of the mating sun:
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the
thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples and moss’d cottage tress
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the ground, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er brimm’d their clammy cells.

The dominant images in the above passage are

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.
Close bosom-friend of the mating sun:
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the
thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples and moss’d cottage tress
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the ground, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er brimm’d their clammy cells.

The above passage derives its theme from

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.
Close bosom-friend of the mating sun:
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the
thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples and moss’d cottage tress
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the ground, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er brimm’d their clammy cells.

The most important figure of speech in the above passage is

Kaunda’s reminiscences of his boyhood in Lubwa were

”London”

I wander thro” each charter”d street

Near where the charter”d Thames does flow,

And mark in every face i meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe

In every cry of every Man

In every infant”s cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forged manacles i hear.

How the chimney-sweeper”s cry

Every black”ning Church appalls;

And the hapless Soldier”s sigh

Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro” midnight streets i hear

How the youthful Harlot”s curse

Blasts the new born infant”s tear,

And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.

The stanza form in ”London” is referred to as

‘Local colour’in a novel or play is feature which

In Mine Boy, the dominant shebeen queen who is described as ‘tall and big, with the smooth yellowness of the Basuto women…’is

In Zambia Shall Be Free Kaunda’s ‘wandering day’s resulted from his

Science, that simple saint, cannot be bothered Figuring what anything is far;

Enough for her devotions that things are And can be contemplated soon as gathered

She knows how every living thing was fathered,
She calculates the climate of each star,
She counts the fish at sea, but cannot care
Why any one of them exists, fish, fire or feathered

The poet suggests that science

Science, that simple saint, cannot be bothered Figuring what anything is far;

Enough for her devotions that things are And can be contemplated soon as gathered

She knows how every living thing was fathered,
She calculates the climate of each star,
She counts the fish at sea, but cannot care
Why any one of them exists, fish, fire or feathered

The dominant rhetorical device used in the poem is

‘And now the bells are chiming
A year is born
‘And my heart bell is ringing
in a dawn’
The writer of these words is in a state of

He would like some good Fufu, but without a lot of meat, street Fufu is miserable food, and with meat the cost will crucify a man completely.
The man in this passage is obviously

‘But it has been from the first her great mistake to meet him, marry him, to love him as she so bitterly had. Looking at his face, it sometimes came to her that all women had been cursed from the cradle: all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men’.
The sentiment expressed here about the curse on women is

‘Cheers!’ said koomson. he looked ready to add something as he raised his glass, but the high voice of his wife cut the air to pieces.
‘This local beer,’she was saying, ‘does agree with my constitution.’
‘And what sort of constitution is it that you have?’asked the man from his isolated place.

What the writer feels for or toward the woman in his passage is

‘Was it so hard, Achilles,
So very hard to die?
Thou knowest and i know not-
So much the happier am i’
This verse is taken from a poem written by a soldier at the battle-front. He clearly sees dying in battle as