Read the paragraphs below and answer the questions.
On Saturdays we get into the car with our father and drive down to the place where he works. It is actually the Zoology Building, but we don't call it that. It is just the building.
The building is enormous. Whenever we're there it's almost empty, because it's Saturday; this makes it seem even larger. It's of dark-brown weathered brick, and gives the impression of having turrets, although it has none. Ivy grows on it, leafless now in winter, covering it with skeletal veining. Inside it there are long hallways with hardwood floors, stained and worn from generations of students in slushy winter boots, but still kept polished.
1. Why does the building feel even larger on Saturdays?
2. The mention of castle-like ‘turrets’ (imagined, not real) mainly creates what effect?
3. In this context, what is the best meaning of 'weathered'?
4. What do the details about ivy and polished floors mainly help the reader to understand?
In one room is a cement pool filled with thick-looking greenish water in which large turtles sit and blink or clamber ponderously up onto the rocks provided for them, hissing if we get too close.
We don’t find any of the things in the building repulsive. The general arrangements, though not the details, are familiar to us, though we've never seen so many mice in one place before and are awed by their numbers and stench.
1. What most likely causes the turtles to hiss when the children lean in?
2. Which option best expresses 'clamber ponderously'?
3. What do the children's reactions to the jars and specimens show about them?
4. In context, the word 'stench' is closest in meaning to…
Some of the upstairs rooms are labs. The labs have vast ceilings and blackboards across the front. They contain rows and rows of large dark desks, more like tables than desks, with high stools to sit on. Each desk has two lamps with green glass shades, and two microscopes, old microscopes, with heavy thin tubing and brass fittings.
We've seen microscopes before, but not at such length; we can spend a lot of time with them before getting tired of them. Sometimes we're given slides to look at: butterfly wings, cross-sections of earthworms, flatworms stained with pink and purple dyes so you can see the different parts. Or we pull hairs out of our heads to look at them, hard and shiny like the bristles that grow out of the hard skins of insects, with the hair roots at the end like tiny onion bulbs.
We look at earwax, or snot, or dirt from our toes, checking first to see that there's no one around: we know without asking that such things would not be approved of. Our curiosity is supposed to have limits, though these have never been defined exactly.
1. What mood is created by the description of lamps and brass microscopes?
2. Why do the children check that no one is around before looking at earwax or toe fluff?
3. What is the main purpose of listing different slides (wing scales, worm slices, stained parts)?
4. The idea that their 'curiosity' has limits mainly suggests…
It's from the building that we watch our first Santa Claus Parade. We've never seen a parade before.
From there we watch as people dressed like snowflakes, like elves, like rabbits, like sugar plum fairies, march past us, strangely truncated because we're looking down on them. There are bands of bagpipers in kilts, and things like big cakes, with people on them waving, that slide past on wheels. It's begun to drizzle. Everyone down there looks cold.
Santa Claus is at the end, smaller than expected. His voice and his loudspeaker jinglebells are muted by the dusty glass; he rocks back and forth behind his mechanical reindeer, looking soggy, blowing kisses to the crowd.
I know he isn't the real Santa Claus, just someone dressed up like him. Still, my idea of Santa Claus has altered, has acquired a new dimension. After this it becomes hard for me to think of him without thinking also of the snakes and the turtles and the pickled eyes, and the lizards floating in their yellow jars, and of the vast, echoing, spicy, ancient and forlorn but also comforting smell of old wood, furniture polish, formaldehyde and distant mice.
1. How does viewing the parade from a high window change the experience?
2. In context, the best synonym for 'muted' is…
3. What does it mean that the narrator's idea of Santa has 'acquired a new dimension'?
4. What do the long list of smells and preserved creatures mainly do for the story?