On, on, on cried the leaders at the back

[venta]

Can someone with a better knowledge of English literature[*] help me out here ?

I've been doing the BBC magazine's mini quizzes of multiple-guess GCSE questions. I did better than expected at my GCSE PE quiz, and got extremely cross with one of the questions in the GCSE maths quiz which I consdered to be impossible to answer.

Today it's English literature. I did pretty badly on it, mostly because I don't significantly remember Jane Eyre, haven't read To Kill A Mockingbird and apparently have inadvertently expunged all knowledge of Shakespeare from my brain. However, I take issue with this question:

In his poem The Charge of the Light Brigade, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, writes: "Volleyed and thunder'd; Storm'd at with shot and shell." Why does he use such violent verbs?

The answers you're offered are:

1. To reinforce the danger faced by soldiers.
2. To reinforce the anger of the soldiers.
3. To reinforce the noise of battle.

I've read, but not studied, The Charge of the Light Brigade. I reckoned on 3 being the most plausible answer.

Says the BBC:

WRONG! He uses the verbs to reinforce the danger faced by the soldiers.

I can understand how you could argue for that, but I also think you could make a reasonable case for my answer (and probably even the remaining other answer). Either way, I simply don't understand how you can make a question like that have an such an absolute answer. Unless, of course, dear Alfred left copious notes indicating exactly what had been behind his choice of verbs.

Am I missing something ? Is there a good reason why answer 1 is the only correct answer ? Or is it just further evidence that multiple-guess questions are a ridiculous testing mechanism for some subjects ?

[*] I mean "the subject of Eng. lit. as taught in schools", rather than just "the body of literature in the English language". That these are so distinct may be telling.

Comments

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

It definitely put me off - this idea that you could decide what one goal the writer was trying to achieve, when they were dead and what they said was the poem and not the critical analysis, so how could this random teacher be able to read the mind of a dead bloke under a stone in Westminster Abbey and decide you'd got the wrong answer? I thought for years that couldn't be the point of Eng. Lit. because it was such a stupid thing to do. The biggest example was when we were studying Arthur Miller's A View From The Bridge, and I said what if Eddie was gay? which was dismissed completely as entirely wrong and irrelevant to the exercise, but as far as I can tell from everything I've heard or seen about it as an adult, was the point of the whole play.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I know someone who was once thrown out of a highschool Eng. lit. class for making ridiculous and inappropriate suggestions.

She'd suggested that Sherlock Holmes had a drug habit.

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

She'd suggested that Sherlock Holmes had a drug habit.

How dare she! A prediliction for opiates is the sign of an intellectual, and does not correlate to a drug habit at all!

[venta.livejournal.com]

... and that's what I told the arresting officer...