3. Answer the questions giving evidence from the text to support your ideas.

1. What do you suppose was the age of the boy and the pupils in his class?

2. Did the boy's parents discuss everything openly in his presence?

3. What evidence is there in the story that this was not a normal schoolday for Miss Webster?

4. How far is it true to say that Miss Webster, whatever her feelings, still did her job as a teacher?

5. How did the boy show his longing to see the snowdrops?

4. Expand these statements using quotation and/or reference.

1. The image of the flowers was faint in the boy's mind.

2. It was an unusually cold day.

3. The Meredith boy wasn't a very skillful driver.

4. The boy thought Miss Webster was a strong-willed person.

5. The boy didn't quite like the way Miss Webster read a story to the class.

6. The children felt dismayed when Miss Webster started sobbing.

7. After watching the flowers for a few minutes the boy was able to see and admire the vitality and strength of the flowers.

II. Text Features and Language Focus

A. Expressive Means in Fiction

1. Expressiveness of a literary text can be achieved alongside with other means, by introducing unpredictable word-combinations in which the fixed semantic relations between the words are deliberately broken. Such 'unusual' combinations create a specific stylistic device, the purpose of which is to attract the reader's attention to a particular detail or event.

One of these devices is the so-called metaphoric (or displaced) epi­thet. It is a kind of epithet in which the syntactical links between the words do not coincide with their semantic relations. Therefore, a metaphoric epi­thet does not determine the word with which it is connected syntactically.

e.g. "He felt a slow, sad disappointment".

This actually means "disappointment came upon him slowly and he felt sad", where the epithets 'slow' and 'sad' are connected with the noun 'disappointment' syntactically, but are semantically related to the sub­ject of the sentence 'he', describing the emotional state of the boy. Such an epithet is expressive because it is not typically used in the language in these word-combinations, they are "invented" by the author.

1. Decide which of the adjectives in the following word-combinations express the author's attitude to the objects described.

greyish leaves little clump

fragile flower (tinged with) minute green

four-petalled heads sudden gust (of wind)

miraculous flower slow, sad disappointment

2. Note that adverbs are frequently used in combination with adjectives and verbs to intensify the quality of an object or person or to describe a certain action with more accuracy and precision.

e.g. bitterly frail; straighten gallantly.

2. Combine the adjectives/verbs on the left with adverbs on the right to reproduce the word-combinations from the text While doing this recall the contexts in which these word-combinations perform a marked expressive function.

Verb /Participle /Adjective		Adverb
sing		safely
hold		bitterly
carried		sharply
straighten		gently
locked		gallantly
frail		mournfully
3. A simile is an	expressive device frequently used in descriptive texts,
e.g. as hard	as nails; as white as a sheet.

3. Find 4 instances of similes introduced by 'as... as' or 'like' in the text

B. Reinforcing Vocabulary

1. Go over the text again and make a list of words and phrases which are used by the author.

a) to show how the boy perceived the material world around him on a cold day in March;

b) to describe snowdrops.

2. Among the most typical combinations in English are of-phrases like, e.g. a bunch of flowers, a herd of wolves. Find such phrases in the text and give their Russian equivalents.

3. Study the definitions of the adjectives fragile, frail and faint and note the differ­ence in their meaning.

fragile delicate, crisp; easily broken or damaged, not strong;

frail weak and very delicate as if easy to be broken (esp. of an old person or a baby);

faint not clear, blurred e g n faint

4. Use one of these words to fill the gaps in the sentences below.

1. The child's ... arms could barely hold the parcel.

2. The parcel was marked ..., – "Handle with care".

3. The sound of the car was getting ... in the distance.

4. There were a few ... pencil lines on the page.

5. His body was ... after a long illness.

6. Most people first see the island as a ... blur through the misty rain.

7. He was listening to me with a ... smile on his lips.

8. Mrs Harding herself was thin and ..., but her son was a sturdy sixteen-year-old.