SCHOOL OF LAW

L102 ENGLISH LANGUAGE

FINAL EXAMINATION PAPER

TUESDAY, 12 DECEMBER, 2023

09:00 HOURS – 12:00 HOURS

TIME ALLOWED: 3 HOURS PLUS 5 MINUTES READING TIME

INSTRUCTIONS TO CANDIDATES

1. Check that you have the correct examination paper in front of you.

2. The paper consists of FOUR (4) questions. ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS.

3. All answers must be written in the answer booklets provided only.

4. Write down the number of questions attempted on the cover page.

5. Begin answering each question on a new page.

6. Candidates are NOT permitted to bring into the examination room any
statute(s).

7. There shall be no communication among students during the examination. Any

attempt to make such communication will lead to disqualification.

DO NOT TURN THIS PAGE UNTIL TOLD TO DO SO BY THE

INVIGILATOR

Page 1 of 8
QUESTION ONE
Fill in the blanks with the correct answer.
1. Which tense is used to describe an action that will be completed in the future
before another action takes place?
A. Present continuous
B. Past perfect
C. Future perfect
D. Future progressive
[2 Mark]
2. If you __________ hard, you would not have failed in the exam.
A. have work
B. have worked
C. had work
D. had worked
[2 Mark]

3. What is the antecedent in the sentence: "The dog wagged its tail"?
A. The
B. Dog
C. Tail
D. Wagged
[2 Mark]

4. Statement I: Some essays are poems

Statement II: Some poems are directors
Statement III: All directors are singers
Conclusion I: Some directors are poems
Conclusion II: Some singers are essays
Conclusion III: Some singers are poems
A. Only conclusion I follows
B. Only conclusion II and III follow
C. Only conclusion I and II follow
D. Only conclusion I and III follow
[2 Mark]

5. Choose the correct sentence with proper punctuation:

A. He said, "Let's go."
B. He said, "Let's go".
C. He said "Let's go."
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 D. All of the above
[2 Mark]

6. ‘Tell me more about yourself?’ is an example of a _____________.

A. Closed question
B. Open question
C. Leading question
D. Funnelling question
[2 Mark]
7. Statement I: All eggs are hens.
Statement II: All hens are birds.
Statement III: All birds are crows.
Conclusion I: All eggs are crows.
Conclusion II: All hens are crows.
Conclusion III: Some crows are birds.
A. Only conclusions II and III follow
B. Only conclusion I and II follow
C. All conclusion I, II, and III follow
D. Only conclusion I follows
[2 Mark]
8. She is going to quit her job ________ they give her a pay rise.
A. or
B. until
C. unless
D. providing
[2 Mark]

9. Nuclear energy is __________ dangerous to be used widely.

A. so
B. such
C. too
D. that [2 Mark]
10. If I have money, I __________ it tomorrow.
A. will purchase
B. would purchase
C. have purchase
D. have purchased
[2 Mark]
[Total Marks: 20]

Page 3 of 8
QUESTION TWO
Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow.
“What Your Closet Reveals about You” ~ by Amy Tan
Preview
Amy Tan is a well-known author who was born in California to Chinese immigrants.
Much of her work focuses on the Chinese immigrant experience, American-Chinese
culture, and mother-daughter relationships. She has written numerous books that
include The Joy Luck Club, The Bonesetter's Daughter, and Saving Fish from
Drowning. She has also won an Emmy for her animated series, Sagwa. This article,
in which Tan discusses what clothes reveal about a person, first appeared in Harper's
Bazaar in 2006.
A few months back I attended a benefit luncheon at the home of a venture capitalist in
Silicon Valley whose art collection adorned nearly every vertical surface of her
Bauhaus house. While freshening up, I was amused to see she had artwork even in
her bathroom and, as I then saw, her vault-size closet. I stepped in, ostensibly to
examine the painting, and there I experienced a life-changing revelation.
At first glance the interior of the closet and its cabinetry of bird's-eye maple were
merely impressive. An Eames bench sat in the centre, where one might sit as if resting
among exhibits at a costume museum. Cashmere sweaters and scarves, arranged by
tonality, were aligned on sliding trays. Segregated sections contained jackets, black-
tie gowns, cocktail party dresses, business suits, and golfing attire-phalanxes of
fashion organized by function, colour, and texture, all of it hanging on the erect
shoulders of identical mahogany hangers, a precision team at the ready for any
occasion.
And then there was this: four banks of shelves housing four dozen shoe boxes, which
had been wrapped in rough hemp mesh and coated with a thin layer of gouache.
Affixed to the front of each was a small stainless-steel nameplate, on which appeared
the names of the various conceptual artists: Giorgio Armani, Manolo Blahnik, and
Jimmy Choo. In smaller type were notes with numbers and letters; those, I discerned
through similar coding found in other parts of her closet, referred to the black-tie,
cocktail, and business attire that coordinated with the shoes. This was the temple into
which the woman entered to consider the existential question we all face each day: I
am what I wear, I wear what I am. Who am I today?
You don't have to be a psychiatrist to recognize that the matching hangers and labelled
shoe boxes were clinical signs of a mental-health disorder. Obsessive-compulsive
sprang to mind. Although she was only in her 30s, I knew she would never marry. This
was clearly someone who was so inflexible she allowed no wrinkles in her life, certainly
no man with uncoded shoe boxes.

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 As I made this smug assessment, I had a sudden and terrible realization that my own
closet had served for others as an amusing window into my psyche. I could picture it:
the overflowing drawers of socks and stockings, long dresses mingling with old
blouses and skirts, winter clothes with summer, many of the outfits dangling by one
shoulder off skewed plastic and wire hangers. My rack of clothes was far from looking
like a precision team; it was the unruly line-up of people waiting to deplane after a red-
eye flight. Under the clothes rack and pushed against the wall were various bags from
my latest round of travels, half packed with clean and dirty clothes as well as items I
had thought were necessities and turned out not to be. Clearly, anyone would
conclude that my life was a mess, that I had no concept of boundaries and often did
not know if I was coming or going. My closet was a repository of foibles (weakness)
and fetishes, an archive of my personality and life history.
It occurred to me that closet analysis should be part of any psychotherapy sessions
with a Freudian. The ego: That would be the clothes representing the private side—
say, the comfort clothes a woman wears when she is alone and sick at home with the
flu, when she is her essential miserable self. In my case, that would be the oversize
fleece wear and the baby doll dress I bought a dozen years ago that reminded me of
the baby doll dress I wore when I was fourteen and questioned almost nothing told to
me. Among the comfort clothes I wear—and I know this will sound sick—are the pink
pyjamas my mother wore the last week of her life. In that vein, there are also the wool
Bavarian slipper socks that were a Christmas present from a friend who died too
young, the nightgown I wore the night after my father died, and the six sweaters my
mother knitted the following year and gave me when I gladly escaped her clutches and
started college a year early. Those were the sweaters I never wore again until my
thirties, when I found them stuffed in a cardboard box of old clothes.
As for the superego, those are the clean clothes a person wears in public as an
adaptation to a social setting, situation, or purpose—the fashions that make a woman
look sexy to a suitor, younger at a reunion, or sensibly boring to a future mother-in-
law. They are the suits that have already proven their worth during successful
interviews and speeches, the clingy top that led to a pleasantly consummated
dalliance, the pants that fit after six months of exercise. Often those outfits are
advanced front and centre. But they are always subject to demotion; once they fail at
their intended purpose, they're shoved to the back, along with impulse items never
worn, whose price tags had once made them irresistible and now remind us how little
we value our intelligence. To throw them away only magnifies the stupidity. At the
farthest reaches of the closet—the corners of the topmost shelves, squeezed behind
uncoded shoe boxes, crammed at the back of drawers, or hidden under a pile of flip-
flops and unused running shoes—resides the id. This is the underwear you will have
on when you wake up in the ambulance, the permanently stained clothing, and other
ghastly things you would disclose only under hypnosis.
I tried to rationalize the untidy personality within my closet as complex and not twisted
like the wire hangers I got for free from the dry cleaner's.

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If my personality lies in my closet, I further justified, then it is disorganized because I
find it impossible to live an orderly life when it is chaos and confusion that serve me
best as a writer. Messiness is the impetus, the disarray is the wellspring, even the
shameful parts—especially those. I dredge them up and salvage them over and over
again. I cannot discard clothes if they were gifts, no matter how hideous. To do so
would make me feel ungrateful for friendship. The clutter within a closet is fond
memories, hard-learned mistakes, and comfort for future cold nights. That was my
excuse, anyway. Until recently.
Today, if you were to open my closet door, you would see blouses hung in one section,
jackets in another. Long skirts are partitioned from long dresses. One shelf is labelled
“long-sleeved tops,” another “short-sleeved tops,” and a third “no sleeves.” The shoes
are in shoe caddies or on wire racks, and they are separated by season and function.
The drawers contain socks and underwear, even the old ones, folded as nicely as
those in fine lingerie stores. The nightgowns are placed in two drawers according to
fabric weight.
How did I come to see the light? It was really quite simple and unexpected. My old
housekeeper retired and recommended a new one, a woman with common sense and
a way to apply it to the interior life of other people. When I returned from one of my
travels, I saw that my closet had been transformed. When she presented me with the
receipts for storage containers and other equipment, I was amazed to see how little
matching hangers cost. For so little money, a girl can have a precision team at her
beck and call.
Through such objective orderliness, I saw some of my foibles exposed: six skirts that
were almost identical in fabric, colour, and length. Why do I buy the same thing over
and over again? What ingrained insecurity or needless pattern does that signify? I
began to pare down and wound up with a dozen bagfuls—the useless jean jackets of
my youth, the meaningless impulse buys, the excess of unused baseball caps and T-
shirts emblazoned with the names of bookstores, book festivals, writers' conferences,
annual events, cities visited, and tour attractions toured. My housekeeper gladly took
those clothes, and for this, I too was grateful.
In reducing the chaos, I found what I had misplaced and buried. Among them were my
mother's wedding jacket, a favourite blouse that I wrongfully assumed a girl at a party
had stolen, the velveteen vest that was the first expensive present my then boyfriend
and now husband gave me more than thirty years ago. And that, I realized, is also the
kind of discovery I make when writing stories. In wading through the mess, I gradually
put aside what is no longer meaningful, what is overused, what is overly sentimental.
And what is left is the essentials: both a sense of who I am and memories of what
helped me become that way. (Langan, 2014)
Required:
1. Which of the following titles best describe the passage? Explain why. [5 Marks]
A. By looking at your own closet, you can learn a lot about yourself.

Page 6 of 8
 B. By visiting other people’s closets, you can learn a lot about those people.
C. When a person decides to organize a closet, it is important to hire a
professional to help.
D. Although it seems like organizing a closet would be expensive, it really can
be done inexpensively.
2. Identify the thesis statement of the passage. Please provide a short description
why you think it is the thesis statement. [5 Marks]
3. Identify the topic sentence of paragraph 1, 3, 4, 7 and 11 [5 Marks]
4. In the passage there are some words that are highlighted. Provide brief
explanation of the general meaning of the following underlined words:
a. Venture
b. Suitor
c. Sprang
d. Smug
e. Wading [10 Marks]
5. What is the general idea of the passage? Please provide a short description of
approximately 200 words. [20 Marks]

[Total Marks: 45]

QUESTION THREE
Intersex is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born
with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of
female or male. For example, a person might be born appearing to be female on the
outside, but having mostly male-typical anatomy on the inside. Or a person may be
born with genitals that seem to be in-between the usual male and female types. In
2017 the high court of Zambia made a ruling to allow intersex identifying persons to
legally change their names and gender marker in their legal documents, and this was
done as a consideration that the individuals need to be allowed to assign themselves
their gender identity.
Required:
Parents should decide the gender of their intersex children. Discuss. (In not more than
300 words) [20 Marks]

QUESTION FOUR
A. Explain the following logical teams and provide at least one example:
i. Deduction [2 Marks]
ii. Pathos [2 Marks]
iii. Syllogism [2 Marks]
iv. False dilemma [2 Marks]

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 v. Sunk cost [2 Marks]

B. Distinguish between a complex sentence and a compound sentence. [4 Marks]

C. What is logic? [1 Mark]

[Total Marks: 15]

END OF EXAMINATION PAPER

Page 8 of 8