English Language & Usage Asked by Human being on November 27, 2020
This Question was asked to me by my teacher. The sentence above is from the story " A Holiday task". Here I was asked to give the answer contextualizing the whole paragraph. The paragraph-"I tried that. I skimmed through the list of the House of Lords in ‘Whitaker,’ but a mere printed string of names conveys awfully little to one, you know. If you were an army officer and had lost your identity you might pore over the Army List for months without finding out who your were. I’m going on another tack; I’m trying to find out by various little tests who I am not — that will narrow the range of uncertainty down a bit. You may have noticed, for instance, that I’m lunching principally off lobster Newburg."
The answer I had chosen was find but I was told the correct answer is removed.The reasoning that I was given was that she was eliminating names from the list while going through it. However I do not think that is the case. Remove (when you are using it as a synonym of skim) can only be used in the context that you are removing a substance from a liquid.
Skim: remove (a substance) from the surface of a liquid.
Skim:an act of reading something quickly or superficially.
Therefore remove can’t be used as given in the reasoning. Find should be more appropriate as it fits the context better.
I did bring up these points however my classmates and teacher kept insisting on it being remove. I have gotten a bit confused so I would appreciate if you could help me.
The question you were posed is more suited to a ‘make your case’ short answer than to a multiple-choice selection.
The key term in the question is “contextualizing”, and the main idea in the text is that the character was unable to find something (who they were) by a positive match, so tried a process of elimination.
The “remove” answer picks up this idea of elimination whereas “find” could work either way. On one level, it picks up the overall intent (finding their identity) but on another, it fails to address the failed positive-match approach.
Nevertheless, both terms (all four, for that matter) miss the point. The skimming isn’t explained by any of the choices. Skimming is related to the failed approach, so it definitely isn’t elimination. It didn’t result in finding anything, so that’s out. One could argue that he tried, but that’s too vague to serve as the required passage summary, and sort has nothing to do with the passage except in the sense of sorting out their identity.
You might get closer to the intent of the passage with something like “first attempt” as a description of the relevance of skim in the context you supplied.
Correct answer by Lawrence on November 27, 2020
None of the choices is right.
Here skim means to read, or sort-of-read, quickly.
If you replace "skim" in the sentence with any of the four words, you get nonsense.
Answered by David S on November 27, 2020
Either the answers don't match the question well or this isn't a good question for these answers.
The best answer is probably "try" because it is describing how the speaker tried and failed to read something. A better substitution would be to replace "skimmed through" with "tried and failed to read carefully". In that sense, the second sentence of your quote is repeating and elaborating on the first sentence of your quote.
The question is asking for a one-word answer, but none of those answers are that word.
Answered by Valkor on November 27, 2020
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