LANGUAGE ANALYSIS

The British zoologist Gerald Durrell grew up on the Greek island of Corfu in the 1930s. The passage below is taken from his book Birds, Beasts and Relatives, in which he describes his childhood on the island.

In the first paragraph, he describes the geography of Corfu. In the second paragraph, he describes the wildlife he encountered in the garden of his family's villa on the island.

Select FIVE powerful words or phrases from EACH paragraph (in other words, TEN words or phrases in total). Your choices should include imagery. Explain how each word or phrase selected is used effectively in the context.

The island lies off the Albanian and Greek coast-lines like a long rust-eroded scimitar. The hilt of the scimitar is the mountain region of the island, for the most part barren and stony, with towering rock cliffs haunted by blue rock-thrushes and peregrine falcons. In the valleys in this mountain region, however, where water gushes plentifully from the red and-gold rocks, you get forests of almond and walnut trees, casting shade as cool as a well, thick battalions of spear-like cypress and silver-trunked fig trees with leaves as big as large as a salver. The blade of the scimitar is made up of rolling greeny-silver eiderdowns of giant olive trees, some reputedly over five-hundred years old and each one unique in its hunched, arthritic shape, its trunk pitted with a hundred holes like pumice stone. Towards the tip of the blade you have Lefkimi, with its twinkling, eye-aching sand dunes and great salt marshes, decorated with acres of bamboos that creak and rustle and whisper to each other surreptitiously. The island is called Corfu.

The garden, for long untended, was an overgrown riot of uninhibited flowers and weeds in which whirled, squeaked, rustled and jumped a multi-coloured merry-go-round of insect life, and so it was the garden that held my immediate attention. However luxurious our various gardens had been in England, they had never provided me with such an assortment of living creatures. I found myself prey to the most curious sensation of unreality. It was rather like being born for the first time. In that brilliant, brittle light I could appreciate the true huntsman's-red of a lady-bird's wing case, the magnificent chocolate and amber of an earwig, and the deep shining agate of the ants. Then I could feast my eyes on a bewildering number of creatures unfamiliar to me: the great furry carpenter- bees, which prowled like electric-blue teddy-bears, humming to themselves, from flower to flower; the sulphur-yellow, black-striped swallow-tailed butterflies, with their elegant cut-away coats, that pirouetted up and down the fuchsia hedge doing complicated minuets with each other; and the humming-bird hawk-moths that hung, stationary, suspended by a blur of wings, in front of the flowers, while they probed each bloom with their long, delicate proboscises.

LANGUAGE ANALYSIS The British zoologist Gerald Durrell grew up o...