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Question
Read: ‘The Open Window’ by H. H. Munro (Saki).
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Solution
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Summary of "The Open Window" The story is set in the English countryside and revolves around a nervous young man named Framton Nuttel, who has gone to the country to improve his health. He visits the home of a woman, Mrs. Sappleton, as arranged by his sister. Upon arriving, Framton is greeted by Mrs. Sappleton's niece, a clever and mischievous girl named Vera. Vera entertains Framton by telling him a tragic and eerie story about her aunt. She claims that Mrs. Sappleton's husband and two younger brothers went hunting through the open window three years ago and never returned. According to Vera, they were presumed dead, but Mrs. Sappleton keeps the window open, waiting for them to return, as she cannot accept their loss. When Mrs. Sappleton enters the room, she casually mentions that she expects her husband and brothers to come back soon. Suddenly, Framton sees three figures—just as Vera described—approaching the house through the open window. Terrified, he runs away in panic, convinced he has seen ghosts. In the end, the reader discovers that Vera made up the whole story as a prank, revealing her talent for storytelling and deception. |
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Read the text below and summarise it.
The Great Desert Where Hippos Once Wallowed
The Sahara sets a standard for dry land. It’s the world’s largest desert. Relative humidity can drop into the low single digits. There are places where it rains only about once a century. There are people who reach the end of their lives without ever seeing water come from the sky.
Yet beneath the Sahara are vast aquifers of fresh water, enough liquid to fill a small sea. It is fossil water, a treasure laid down in prehistoric times, some of it possibly a million years old. Just 6,000 years ago, the Sahara was a much different place.
It was green. Prehistoric rock art in the Sahara shows something surprising: hippopotamuses, which need year-round water.
“We don’t have much evidence of a tropical paradise out there, but we had something perfectly liveable,” says Jennifer Smith, a geologist at Washington University in St Louis.
The green Sahara was the product of the migration of the paleo-monsoon. In the same way that ice ages come and go, so too do monsoons migrate north and south. The dynamics of earth’s motion are responsible. The tilt of the earth’s axis varies in a regular cycle — sometimes the planet is more tilted towards the sun, sometimes less so. The axis also wobbles like a spinning top. The date of the earth’s perihelion — its closest approach to the sun — varies in cycle as well.
At times when the Northern Hemisphere tilts sharply towards the sun and the planet makes its closest approach, the increased blast of sunlight during the north’s summer months can cause the African monsoon (which currently occurs between the Equator and roughly 17°N latitude) to shift to the north as it did 10,000 years ago, inundating North Africa.
Around 5,000 years ago the monsoon shifted dramatically southward again. The prehistoric inhabitants of the Sahara discovered that their relatively green surroundings were undergoing something worse than a drought (and perhaps they migrated towards the Nile Valley, where Egyptian culture began to flourish at around the same time).
“We’re learning, and only in recent years, that some climate changes in the past have been as rapid as anything underway today,” says Robert Giegengack, a University of Pennsylvania geologist.
As the land dried out and vegetation decreased, the soil lost its ability to hold water when it did rain. Fewer clouds formed from evaporation. When it rained, the water washed away and evaporated quickly. There was a kind of runaway drying effect. By 4,000 years ago the Sahara had become what it is today.
No one knows how human-driven climate change may alter the Sahara in the future. It’s something scientists can ponder while sipping bottled fossil water pumped from underground.
“It’s the best water in Egypt,” Giegengack said — clean, refreshing mineral water. If you want to drink something good, try the ancient buried treasure of the Sahara.
Staff Writer, Washington Post
What, according to the poet, are human beings out of tune with?
Discuss with your partner and describe the atmosphere in the woods when Mrs. Adis didn’t hand over Peter Crouch to the keepers because -
- _________________
- _________________
- _________________
What are the games/play activities, entertainments that use a wheel?
Think and answer:
Does the last line make you happy or sad? Why?
Read the incidents. Work in small groups to role play the situations in which they showed their presence of mind. Each group should perform the skit for the rest of the class. Share similar situations in the class.
A tiny bird looked for a place to lay her eggs.
The land was wet and green.
Who is the guest?
The merchants sold things made of______.
