Reading and Comprehension in the African Context: A Cognitive Enquiry

Appendix One: A Reading and Comprehension Exercise (Level One)

Appendix One A Reading and Comprehension Exercise (Level One) Introduction The following exercise passages are set from the simplest to the most complex. They will show the reader how students should be guided during testing. Reading and Comprehension (Time: 40 minutes) Read the following passage carefully and then answer the questions that follow it. Chumley was a full-grown chimpanzee, whose owner, a District Officer, was finding the ape’s large size rather awkward and he wanted to send him to London Zoo as a present so that he could visit the animal when he was back in England on leave. He wrote asking us if we would mind taking Chumley back with us when we left, and depositing him at his new home in London, and we replied that we would not mind at all. I don’t think that either John or myself had the least idea how big Chumley was: I know that I visualized an ape of about three years old, standing about three feet high. I got a rude shock when Chumley moved in. He arrived in the back of a small van, seated sedately in a huge crate. When the doors were opened and Chumley stepped out with all the ease and self-confidence of a film star, I was considerably shaken, 97 Reading and Comprehension: An African Perspective for standing on his bow legs in a normal slouching chimp position, he came up to my waist, and if he had straightened up, his head would have been on a level with my chest. Owing to bad tooth growth, both sides of his face were swollen out of all proportion, and this gave him a weird pugilistic look. His eyes were small, deep-set and intelligent, the top of his head was nearly bald, owing, I discovered later, to his habit of sitting and rubbing the palms of his hands backwards across his head, an exercise which seemed to afford him much pleasure and which he persisted in until the top of his skull was quite devoid of hair. This was no young chimp as I had expected, but a veteran of about eight or nine years old, fully mature, strong as a powerful man and to judge by his expression, with considerable experience of life. Although he was not exactly a nice chimp to look at (I had seen more handsome), he certainly had a terrific personality: it hit you as soon as you set eyes on him. His little eyes looked at you with great intelligence, and there seemed to be a glitter or ironic laughter in their depths that made one feel uncomfortable. He stood on the ground and surveyed his surroundings with a shrewd glance, and then he turned to me and held out one of his soft pink-palmed hands to be shaken, with exactly that bored expression that one sees on the faces of professional hand-shakers. Round his neck was a thick chain, and its length dropped over the tail-board of the lorry and disappeared into the depth of his crate. With an animal of less personality than Chumley this would have been a sign of subjugation, of his captivity. But Chumley wore the chain with the superb air of a Lord Mayor; after shaking my hand so professionally, he turned and proceeded to pull the chain, which measured some fifteen feet out of his crate. He gathered it carefully into the hut as if he owned it. Thus, in the first few minutes of arrival, Chumley made us feel inferior, and had moved in, not, we felt, because we wanted it, but because he did. I almost felt I ought to apologise for the mess on the table when he walked in. He seated himself in a chair, dropped his chain on the floor, and then looked hopefully at me. It was quite obvious that he expected some sort of refreshment after his tiring journey. I roared out to the kitchen for them to make a cup of tea. 98 Leaving him sitting in the chair and surveying our humble abode with ill-concealed disgust, I went out to his crate, and in it found a tin plate and a battered tin mug of colossal proportions. When I returned to the hut bearing these, Chumley brightened considerably and even went so far as to praise me for my intelligence. “Oooooo, ump!” he said...