Anthology IGCSE Anthology IGCSE- covers a wide range of topics from English to grammar., Summaries of English Language

Download Anthology IGCSE Anthology IGCSE- covers a wide range of topics from English to grammar. and more Summaries English Language in PDF only on Docsity! From The Danger of a Single Story, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Adichie, a successful novelist, delivered this speech at a TED conference. She speaks about the power of storytelling and the danger of a single view. I'm a storyteller (the write uses Simple sentence which suggest s the background and her journey of this prolific writer). And I would like to tell you (the use of pronoun ‘you’ really includes us-the reader through the direct address) a few personal (usage of adjective really places us in her confidence) stories about what I like to call “the danger of the single story.” I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria (she then uses declarative sentence which suggest s us the strong idea of her background ). My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So (uses intensifier to give the reader conversational tone ) I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children's books (usage of proper noun suggest the reader , the strong westernized background of the writer, though she is born and brought up Nigeria). I was also an early writer, and when I began to write ( she uses repetition to show how important is writing for her and idea of being a writer) , at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother ( she uses adjective to add a sense of humour , and shows us how normal was she as a child and started writing early forcing her mother to read the story for her) was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: all my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow ( she uses reference to European western ideals , suggest that her early writing were inspired by British and American stories which used to read, because in Nigeria she has never white and blued eye people and never played with snow) they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how 10 lovely it was that the sun had come out. Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria (she uses humour , suggest that she lives in a hot country which lightens the mood the audience). I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather (she uses repetition of pronoun ‘we’ in order to portray how difficult it was to live and also how this idea is different from British and American novel), because there was no need to. … What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable (she uses adjectives to suggest the victimization and the power of story and how this victimization can affect the entire continent of Africa). we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, (she uses Volta, the turning point , suggest that what really inspired her to become a writer, after reading African books) things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books. But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the colour of chocolate (she uses Alliteration which suggest us that how was she obsessed with her skin color, being a young girl in Africa), whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized. Now, I loved those American and British books I read (she uses declarative sentence , suggest that as westerns, she also loves to read only American and British books, she is demystifying the perceptions that African people can read and write). They stirred my imagination (she uses personification to personify the power of the stories). They opened up new worlds for me (she uses hyperbole which means how a story can really open up a new world for her, which suggest that how story can form one’s identity). But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are. I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrato r (she uses simple sentences to show how a middle class family look like and also giving the background information for father and then mother). And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say, “Finish your food! (she uses imperative sentence , suggest that she wanted to let know the audience about the importance of food and not everyone can afford it). Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing.” So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family. Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket (uses Adjective- African material jargon to show how skillful African village people are) made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually (she uses word actually which shows the narrow minded view) make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them. Years later ( temporal shift ) , I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19 ( simple sentence ). My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she (repetition of pronoun ‘she’ suggest alienation and separation) called my “tribal music” (uses adjective tribal suggest that roommate must From A Passage to Africa, George Alagiah From A Passage to Africa, George Alagiah Alagiah writes about his experiences as a television reporter during the war in Somalia, Africa in the 1990s. He won a special award for his report on the incidents described in this passage. I saw a thousand hungry, lean, scared and betrayed faces as I criss-crossed Somalia between the end of 1991 and December 1992, but there is one I will never forget.I was in a little hamlet just outside Gufgaduud, a village in the back of beyond, a place the aid agencies had yet to reach. In my notebook I had jotted down instructions on how to get there. ‘Take the Badale Road for a few kilometres till the end of the tarmac, turn right on to a dirt track, stay on it for about forty-five minutes — Gufgaduud. Go another fifteen minutes approx. — like a ghost village.’ … In the ghoulish manner of journalists on the hunt for the most striking pictures, my cameraman … and I tramped from one hut to another. What might have appalled us when we'd started our trip just a few days before no longer impressed us much. The search for the shocking is like the craving for a drug: you require heavier and more frequent doses the longer you're at it. Pictures that stun the editors one day are written off as the same old stuff the next. This sounds callous, but it is just a fact of life. It's how we collect and compile the images that so move people in the comfort of their sitting rooms back home. There was Amina Abdirahman, who had gone out that morning in search of wild, edible roots, leaving her two young girls lying on the dirt floor of their hut. They had been sick for days, and were reaching the final, enervating stages of terminal hunger. Habiba was ten years old and her sister, Ayaan, was nine. By the time Amina returned, she had only one daughter. Habiba had died. No rage, no whimpering, just a passing away — that simple, frictionless, motionless deliverance from a state of half-life to death itself. It was, as I said at the time in my dispatch, a vision of ‘famine away from the headlines, a famine of quiet suffering and lonely death’. There was the old woman who lay in her hut, abandoned by relations who were too weak to carry her on their journey to find food. It was the smell that drew me to her doorway: the smell of decaying flesh. Where her shinbone should have been there was a festering wound the size of my hand. She’d been shot in the leg as the retreating army of the deposed dictator … took revenge on whoever it found in its way. The shattered leg had fused into the gentle V-shape of a boomerang. It was rotting; she was rotting. You could see it in her sick, yellow eyes and smell it in the putrid air she recycled with every struggling breath she took. And then there was the face I will never forget. My reaction to everyone else I met that day was a mixture of pity and revulsion. Yes, revulsion. The degeneration of the human body, sucked of its natural vitality by the twin evils of hunger and disease, is a disgusting thing. We never say so in our TV reports. It’s a taboo that has yet to be breached. To be in a feeding center is to hear and smell the excretion of fluids by people who are beyond controlling their bodily functions. To be in a feeding center is surreptitiously to wipe your hands on the back of your trousers after you’ve held the clammy palm of a mother who has just cleaned vomit from her child’s mouth. There’s pity, too, because even in this state of utter despair they aspire to a dignity that is almost impossible to achieve. An old woman will cover her shrivelled body with a soiled cloth as your gaze turns