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 does the author suggest, would have happened if she hadn't learnt the Queen's English?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → She would have been repatriated.
To repatriate someone is to send him back to his own country. The narrator says that the plain ones and the silent ones never have their paperwork in order: "they get repatriated. We say, sent home early." Had she not learned to speak good English, she would have been one of the silent ones and been sent back to Nigeria.
Example: The stranded workers were repatriated by a special flight.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: She would have survived in England. — Incorrect. Contradicted: to survive "you must look good or talk even better".
Option 3: She would have stayed longer in detention. — Incorrect. Wrong link: the passage links poor English with being sent home, not with a longer stay in the centre.
Option 4: She couldn't have gone back home easily. — Incorrect. Contradicted: without good English she would have been sent back home, "sent home early".