How does the list in 'where a child first sees a neighbour's face turn kind, where news is exchanged over counters, where a town learns what it is' help the argument?
On a wet Tuesday in March, the main street of my home town looks like a mouth with missing teeth. The baker closed in January; the shoe shop has been papered over since Christmas. Only the charity shops, the vape shops and a single stubborn butcher keep their lights on. We are told this is progress: that people now buy everything online and the street has simply been outgrown. But a street is more than a place to buy things. It is where a child first sees a neighbour's face turn kind, where news is exchanged over counters, where a town learns what it is. When we lose it we lose, quietly, the habit of being a community, and no delivery van can bring that back to our doors.
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. The repeated 'where' builds up examples of the human value a street holds
- Step 1: Notice the repetition of 'where' at the start of each clause.
- Step 2: The repeated structure piles up examples and builds towards the claim that a street makes a community.
Answer
The repeated 'where' builds up examples of the human value a street holds.
Why not the others: It shows that the writer remembers childhood events in great detail: the examples are about community, not the writer's memory alone. It lists the reasons that the shops closed last winter: the closures are described earlier, not in this list. It shows that a street is no longer used by anyone in the town: the list describes uses a street has, not its absence.
Practise more Reading for Understanding, Analysis and Evaluation.
Free questions with an explanation for every one, and full timed National 5 (Scotland) mock tests.
More Reading for Understanding, Analysis and Evaluation questions
- What does the writer suggest by the line 'Nobody chooses the 11.40 night bus; it chooses you'?
- Which technique is used in 'It crawls out of the depot like a tired animal'?
- What does 'a kind of democracy' suggest about the people on the bus?
- 'Nobody is in a hurry, because the bus itself refuses to be.' What is the effect of this sentence?
- The writer calls the bus 'a lit room moving through a dark city'. How does this image support the idea of the bus as a refuge?
- How does the final sentence of the passage develop the writer's ideas?