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?
Learning Queens's English is described using a metaphor which is :
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 3
The correct answer is Option (3) → scrubbing off the bright red varnish from your toenails
The passage opens: "Learning the Queen's English is like scrubbing off the bright red varnish from your toe nails, the morning after a dance." Learning a language is shown through a picture from daily life: it is slow, takes patient effort, and some trace of the old self always remains. (Because the comparison is made with "like", it is strictly a simile; the question uses "metaphor" in the wider sense of a figurative comparison.)
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: to learn to survive — Incorrect. Wrong focus: this is the narrator's reason for learning the language, stated plainly, not a figurative comparison.
Option 2: a stain of red along the greasing edges — Incorrect. Too narrow: the stain is only a detail of the same image (what is left of the varnish at the end); the comparison itself is the scrubbing off of the varnish. The passage also says "growing edges", not "greasing".
Option 4: learning comes slowly — Incorrect. Misread: this is a literal statement that the narrator draws from the image ("learning came slowly to me"), not the figure of speech.