Contemporary Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” — Cumulative exam Answers

Read the procedural text.The procedure for making homemade lemonade is quite easy. First, combine one cup of sugar with one cup of water. To make a simple syrup, heat the mixture until the sugar has completely dissolved. Next, juice eight lemons. Then, combine the simple syrup, the lemon juice, and four cups of cold water in a pitcher. Enjoy your lemonade!Selma followed the process described in the text above. After tasting her lemonade, she decided it did not taste right.

Read the table of contents and sample page from a procedural text.

Read the passage from "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles."My spirit is too weak—mortalityWeighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,And each imagined pinnacle and steepOf godlike hardship, tells me I must dieLike a sick eagle looking at the sky.Now, read the passage from "Ode on Intimations of Morality," another poem from the Romantic period.The rainbow comes and goes,And lovely is the rose;The moon doth with delightLook round her when the heavens are bare;Waters on a starry nightAre beautiful and fair;The sunshine is a glorious birth;But yet I know, where'er I go,That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

Read the excerpt from "Politics and the English Language" by George Orwell.To begin with, it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting-up of a "standard-English” which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good prose style.” On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial.