LPaolini- EXERCISES AT PAGES 291-293-(COKETOWN)

Ex.1

From the two pictures the observer can see the enviroment pollution and the bad condition of poor people in the slums.

Ex.3

As you can read in the extract of Charles Dickens' Hard Times , Coketown is an industrial city that embodies the idea of the capitalism, therefore everything concerning the town is concrete and has a materialistic nature, as you can see from the words “Coketown...was a triumph of fact”.

“It was a town of red brick , or of brick that would be red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it , it also contained machinery and tall chimneys and a black canal”, from this description comes to light the pollution of the city.

Ex.4

There's no difference between the list of the public buildings quoted in the text : “the jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction”.

Ex.5

1.The native organisation of Coketown wanted to be heard of in the house of Commons every session.
2.The Teetotal Society show in tabular statements that people get drunk.
3.Chemists and druggist showed that the inhabitants took opium with other tabular statements.
4.The aim of the jail chaplain was to outdoing all the previous tabular statements and show that the same people would resort to low haunts.
5.Mr Gradgrind and Mr Bounderby wanted to furnish more tabular statements derived from their own personal experience to prove that these same people were a bad lot altogether.

Ex.6

In the extract there is a third person ominiscient and intrusive narrator ( the narrator steps into the text, he knows everything). Dickens uses the technique of telling and all the reader knows is influenced by the narrator .

Ex.7

I think that “fact” is the keyword of the passage , because evokes the idea of materialism on which this text is built up .

Ex.8

Similes:“a town of an unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage”; “the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness”.

Metaphors:“a town of machinery and chimneys”; “serpents of smoke” .

Ex.9

1) 3 Red (lines 4-5);2 Brick (line 4,27);2 Jail (lines 31-32);10 Fact (lines 1,33,35,36,40);

5 statements(lines 53,55,57,59,70); 4 Gentlemen (lines 70,72,73,74); 2 Black (lines 5,8);

2 Religious (lines 25,26); 2 Infirmary (line 31); 2 Get drunk (lines 53,55). Monotony and Alienation.

Ex.10

In this passage Dickens emphasises the development of factories, the pollution of towns and the bad conditions of poor people. The narrator also describes the monotony kind of life of the Victorians .