"Roger Mills" wrote in message
...
On 25/08/2016 08:09, Tim Lamb wrote:
I'm a clever rabbit!


Well done!

I got 6/7 - having misunderstood the French question!

I got 6/7 because I know nothing about Greek and Latin literature (the
language (*) and the culture bores me rigid) so I had to guess about the
queen in the Aeniad. That was one of those "you either know it or you don't"
questions, whereas all/of the others could be worked out by applying a
little knowledge and extending it or by using a technique that you have
learned rather that dredging up a fact that you have learned.

The French one was sneaky because the correct answer was inferred from what
was said whereas one of the incorrect ones was more or less an exact
translation of part of the French wording but with the crucial word
("reduce" instead of "increase") changed to reverse the sense.


(*) I think one of the main reasons that I found Latin so hard was because I
couldn't distinguish nouns from adjectives from verbs in Latin. And that's
because Latin has no redundancy - no little helper words like articles (the,
a), no pronouns (he, they) and no defined word order. And in the languages
I've learned (French and German) you rely on these - anything followed by a
pronoun or person's name is likely to be a verb; anything immediately before
or after a noun is going to be the adjective that's associated with it;
anything following an article is a noun (and German even helpfully
capitalises these!). And you usually get all the words for one clause next
to each other, whereas I remember my Latin teacher going into raptures about
some weird "chi-rhoic form" in which the words from one clause are
deliberately mixed up with those from another (so "the red cat sat on the
blue mat" might put "blue" next to "cat" and "red" next to "mat", with only
the adjectival agreement - assuming it's not ambiguous - allowing you to
untangle the sentence.