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

[wimble.livejournal.com]

The quiz is http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8081043.stm

The impossible question is number 4.

More precisely, it's impossible to solve, unless you assume it's soluble, and that the missing information is therefore assumable.

Actually, even that may be incorrect. It's impossible to work out the definitively correct answer. It may be possible to eliminate two of the three answers as utterly impossible, leaving the third answer as being the only viable one of the the three. That still doesn't mean it must be right. Just that it's the only one which could be.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

And the solution, as given, is gibberish. The statements given may be correct (assuming the unstated assumption), but they don't actually follow (use of the word "again", with out any previous reference, and the derivation (use of the word "So") doesn't lead to the answer. It assumes the answer, and then uses this to lead to a theorem. It doesn't test the other two cases to eliminate them, or work toward the answer (as one would normally expect).

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

I agree that as written it's impossible. But I think that your second suggestion is right. If you assume that the missing information is that the middle angle is at the centre of the circle (and thus the writer of the quiz is an idiot for not realising you need to know this), then it is easily solvable.