Read the following passage and answer the question that follows:
Learning the Queen's English is like scrubbing off the bright red varnish from your toe nails, the morning after a dance. It takes a long time and there is always a little bit left at the end, a stain of red along the growing edges to remind you of the good time you had. So, you can see that learning came slowly to me. On the other hand, I had plenty of time. I learned your language in an immigration detention centre, in Essex, in the southeastern part of the United Kingdom. Two years, they locked me in there. Time was all I had.
But why did I go to all the trouble? It is because of what some of the older girls explained to me: to survive, you must look good or talk even better. The plain ones and the silent ones, it seems their paperwork in never in order. You say, they get repatriated. We say, sent home early.
The Other Hand is the story of a young woman who flees conflict in her home village in the oil-rich region of southern Nigeria. She makes her way to the UK as an illegal immigrant and is detained for a long period of time at an immigrant detention centre near London. When she finally gets out, she seeks out the only two people she knows in England, whom she met on a Nigerian beach during a life-changing event a few years before. Will she be able to find them, and if so will they help her? And if not, will she survive in her newly adopted country as an immigrant?
What is meant by 'Queen's English' in the text given:
(A) Good, formal English
(B) Fluent, vernacular English
(C) English as spoken in the UK
(D) Good formal American English
Choose the correct answer from the options given below :
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → (A) and (C) only
The Queen's English is standard, correct English as spoken and written in Britain. The narrator learned "your language" in a detention centre in Essex, in the United Kingdom, because the older girls told her that to survive she must "talk even better".
(A) Good, formal English — Correct.
- The phrase means correct, standard English, the kind used on formal occasions.
(B) Fluent, vernacular English — Incorrect.
- Wrong meaning: vernacular means the everyday language spoken by ordinary people of a region, often informal.
- It is the opposite of the standard form the phrase refers to.
- Example: The poet chose to write in the vernacular so that villagers could read his work.
(C) English as spoken in the UK — Correct.
- The phrase refers to British English, and the narrator learned it in the UK.
(D) Good formal American English — Incorrect.
- Wrong meaning: the Queen's English is British, not American.