Read the settings and answer the questions in your notebook
A)It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke
and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and
black … It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye,
and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a
trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked
monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy
madness.
1. What is the setting?
2. What are some of the words that create a visual description for the reader?
3. What are some of the words that create a sense of sound?
4. Identify the use of figurative language in this passage.
B) The public-houses, with gas-lights burning inside, were already open. By
degrees, other shops began to be unclosed, and a few scattered people were met
with. Then, came straggling groups of labourers going to their work; then, men
and women with fish-baskets on their heads; donkey-carts laden with vegetables;
chaise-carts filled with livestock or whole carcasses of meat; milk-women with
pails; an unbroken concourse of people trudging out with various supplies to the
eastern suburbs of the town. As they approached the City, the noise and traffic
gradually increased; when they threaded the streets between Shoreditch and
Smithfield, it had swelled into a roar of sound and bustle.
1. Where do you think the setting is at?
2. How does the writer convey the setting?
3. Are there any sensory words or phrases used by the writer?
4. What kind of a mood is created by the writer?
C) The wind hissed and sighed in the crevices of the cave, tore the fire into shreds
and spun the embers, spitting sparks, into the smoky dark. On a pile of glimmering
straw, buried in furs, a youth lay in troubled sleep. There was a movement
outside the cave; a sound of stone grating on stone, and blackness passed before
the cave’s mouth. Yellow eyes burned a moment in the firelight, and the shadow
passed.
1. is it day-time or night-time? How do we know that?
2. Is the youth sleeping peacefully? Give reasons for your answer
3 What do you think the story is going to be about?
D)One morning there was a different smell in the air, and the ship was moving oddly,
with a brisker rocking from side to side instead of the plunging and soaring. Lyra was
on deck a minute after she woke up, gazing greedily at the land: such a strange sight,
after all that water, for though they had only been at sea a few days, Lyra felt as if
they’d been on the ocean for months. Directly ahead of the ship a mountain rose,
green-flanked and snow-capped, and a little town and harbour lay below it: wooden
houses with steep roofs, an oratory spire, cranes in the harbour, and clouds of gulls
wheeling and crying. The smell was of fish, but mixed with it came land smells too:
pine-resin and earth and something animal and musky, and something else that was
cold and blank and wild: it might have been snow. It was the smell of the North.
Seals frisked around the ship, showing their clown-faces above the water before
sinking back without a splash. The wind that lifted spray off the white-capped waves
was monstrously cold, and searched out every gap in Lira’s wolfskin
Read the passage and Identify all the words and phrases that evoke
a) Sense of smell
b) Touch
c) Sight
d) Sound
e) Taste
E)
