On, on, on cried the leaders at the back
Jun. 24th, 2009 01:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaCan 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2009-06-24 02:35 pm (UTC)The latest interwebnet fad these days is to state that about pretty much any stats graph/table (correlation or not) and declare the research invalid. Assuming the writer disagrees with the conclusions anyway :-)
I may drift into stats related despair.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-25 08:33 am (UTC)Heh. I have the opposite reaction to that. If people are finally waking up to the interactions between causation and statistics, I think that's great!
(Plus I just wanted to add another comment to see if we can push
no subject
Date: 2009-06-30 10:18 am (UTC)I don't think they are! I think they've just discovered a phrase which is somehow a get-out-of-jail card which means you can ignore all statistical data :)