English: Writing and Following Literary Devices
Exam Sight Passage Practice
PART C: SIGHT PASSAGE (Approximately 25 minutes) (20 MARKS)
Read “Canada, My Canada” by Tomson Highway and answer the following questions in complete sentences and paragraph form.
1. State the thesis of Highway’s essay in your own words. (2 marks)
2. Explain why this essay would be classified as formal or informal. (2 marks)
3. List and explain two examples of CARES techniques that the author uses to support the essay’s main point. (4 marks)
4. Provide examples for the following literary devices and explain their importance to the author’s message: metaphor, parallelism and rhetorical question. (6 marks)
5. Tomson Highway considers himself to be an ambassador for our country. Explain how Atticus Finch is an ambassador of hope and good will to others. (6 marks)
Canada, My Canada (abridged) by Tomson Highway
THREE SUMMERS BACK, a friend and I were being hurtled by bus through the heart of Australia, the desert flashing pink and red before our disbelieving eyes. It never seemed to end, this desert, so flat, so dry. For days, we saw kangaroos hopping off into the distance across the parched earth. The landscape was very unlike ours – scrub growth with some exotic species of cactuses, no lakes, no rivers, just sand and rock and sand and rock forever. Beautiful in its own special way, haunting even – what the surface of the moon must look like, I thought to myself as I sat there in the dusk in that almost empty bus.
I turned my head to look out of the front of the bus and was suddenly taken completely by surprise. Screaming out at me in great black lettering were the words “Canada Number One Country in the World.” My eyes lit up, my heart gave a heave, and I felt a pang of homesickness so acute I actually almost hurt. I was so excited that it was all I could do to keep myself from leaping out of my seat and grabbing the newspaper from its owner.
As I learned within minutes (I did indeed beg to borrow the
PART C: SIGHT PASSAGE (Approximately 25 minutes) (20 MARKS)
Read “Canada, My Canada” by Tomson Highway and answer the following questions in complete sentences and paragraph form.
1. State the thesis of Highway’s essay in your own words. (2 marks)
2. Explain why this essay would be classified as formal or informal. (2 marks)
3. List and explain two examples of CARES techniques that the author uses to support the essay’s main point. (4 marks)
4. Provide examples for the following literary devices and explain their importance to the author’s message: metaphor, parallelism and rhetorical question. (6 marks)
5. Tomson Highway considers himself to be an ambassador for our country. Explain how Atticus Finch is an ambassador of hope and good will to others. (6 marks)
Canada, My Canada (abridged) by Tomson Highway
THREE SUMMERS BACK, a friend and I were being hurtled by bus through the heart of Australia, the desert flashing pink and red before our disbelieving eyes. It never seemed to end, this desert, so flat, so dry. For days, we saw kangaroos hopping off into the distance across the parched earth. The landscape was very unlike ours – scrub growth with some exotic species of cactuses, no lakes, no rivers, just sand and rock and sand and rock forever. Beautiful in its own special way, haunting even – what the surface of the moon must look like, I thought to myself as I sat there in the dusk in that almost empty bus.
I turned my head to look out of the front of the bus and was suddenly taken completely by surprise. Screaming out at me in great black lettering were the words “Canada Number One Country in the World.” My eyes lit up, my heart gave a heave, and I felt a pang of homesickness so acute I actually almost hurt. I was so excited that it was all I could do to keep myself from leaping out of my seat and grabbing the newspaper from its owner.
As I learned within minutes (I did indeed beg to borrow the