A Passage to Africa Flashcards
1
Q
‘I saw a thousand, hungry, lean, scared and betrayed faces… but there is one I will never forget’
A
- Hyperbolic list and personal pronoun
- Shows the enormity of the extreme images he has seen, which juxtaposes the following sentence which focuses on a specific person, creating a level of intrigue from the reader for what was special about the face
2
Q
‘a village in the back of beyond’
A
- Alliteration
- Emphasises how remote this village is to show that he is venturing far from comfort such as aid agencies
3
Q
‘Take the Badale Road for a few kilometres till the end of the tarmac, turn right onto a dirt track, stay on it for about forty-five minutes’
A
- Asyndeton
- Further emphasises how remote this place is, building tension for what is going on in this place
4
Q
‘like a ghost village’
A
- Similie
- Evokes pathos as it shows the derelict and empty nature of the village
5
Q
‘ghoulish’, ‘hunt’, and ‘tramped’
A
- Predatory language
- Highlights how apathetic the journalists are in their search for shocking content
6
Q
‘like the craving of a drug’
A
- Similie
- Makes us realise how jaded he is with these sorts of things, as well as making us feel slightly contemptuous
7
Q
‘same old stuff’
A
- Sibilance and colloquial language
- Shows how he is not affected by seeing things most of us would find shocking due to his overexposure
8
Q
‘wild, edible roots’
A
- Predmodifiers
- Emphasises the indigent nature of these people by the scavenger like nature of their meals
9
Q
‘Habiba had died’
A
- Simple sentence
- Makes us realise how commonplace this is as she was alive moments ago
10
Q
‘No rage, no whimpering’
A
- Parallel sentence structure (anaphora)
- Further highlights how commonplace death is by the lack of reaction
11
Q
‘Simple, frictionless, motionless deliverance’
A
- Tricolon and asyndeton
- Emphasises how death is commonplace in this region
12
Q
‘decaying flesh’, ‘festering wound the size of my hand’, ‘sick yellow eyes’, ‘putrid air’
A
- Dysphemisms (delibrately harsh words) and semantic field of repulsive, noisome vocabulary
- Makes it very impactful and surreal to the reader to learn just how awful the conditions are here
13
Q
‘gentle V-shape of a boomerang’
A
- Domestic, simple language
- Allows us to understand the true extent to which they are suffering by using everyday language and examples we would understand
14
Q
‘And then there was the face I will never forget’
A
- Volta and declarative sentence
- Grips the reader and builds even more intrigue, being indicative of a change of tone and content
15
Q
‘twin evils of hunger and disease’
A
- Cliche metaphor
- Shows the simplicity of their desperation and their suffering, but also highlights how profound it is
