Functional English (FENG102)
Faculty of Arts (FA)
Semester: Second Semester
Level: 200
Year: 2016
THE UNIVERSITY OF BAMEIMDA
FACULTY OF ARTS
END-OF-SEMESTER EXAMINATIONS
TIME ALLOWED: 2HOURS COURSE CODE: FENG102
COURSE TITLE: FUNCTIONAL ENGLISH DEPARTMENTS: ENG, HIST, GEQP, LING, PVA
INSTRUCTIONS: ANSWER TWO QUESTIONS CHOOSING ONE FROM SECTION A AND ONE FROM SECTION B
SECTION A:
Write a composition of not more than 500 words on one of the following topics:
1.
Describe a scene in a busy village market.
2.
Give an account of your first day at the University of Bamenda.
3.
Should a dressing code be introduced in Cameroon?
SECTION B:
Answer only one question from this section
QUESTION 1. Make a summary of the passage below in not more than 150 words.
Take care to link up your ideas correctly using your own words as much as possible. The following
hints can guide you; - The two traditional reasons for education - possible changes that might occur in
the future - things that might make it difficult for us to adjust to any changes - hope for success in
adjusting.
AN EDUCATION FOR LIFE
There is a problem that will touch us all - men, women, children - in the not too distant future.
A problem that resolves into a question; what is education for? At the moment most of us can answer
that fairly practically without much soul-searching. On the lowest level education is for enabling us to
cope in an adult world where money must be added up, tax forms filled in, numbers looked up in
telephone directories, maps read, curtains measured and street signs understood. On the next level, it
is for getting some kind of job that will pay a living wage.
But we are already peering into a future so difficult from anything we would now recognize
as familiar that the last of these two educational aims may become as obsolete as a dodo. Basic skills
(reading, writing and arithmetic) will continue to be necessary but these, after all can be taught to
children from one to two years during their childhood, but education with view to working for a living
at least in the sense of earning daily bread may well be on its way out right now for the majority of us.
Then the question "what is education for?" becomes much more complex. Because what the future
proclaims is an education.
In other words, our grandchildren may well spend their lives learning as today we spend our
lives working. This does not simply involve a straightforward substitution of activity but a complete
transformation of motive. We work for things basically unconnected with that work - usually money,
prestige and security. We will learn for learning's sake alone; a rose is a rose because it is and not what
we can get out of it.
Education for proficiency- aduit education classes are overcrowded - one friend of mine
teaching French literature says she could have had 100 pupils for every one class. Though a few of
these students (plumbers, bus conductors, housewives) may have had some earning outcome in mind,
most do not and are perfectly happy to study seriously.
Nevertheless, we still live in a very competitive society and most of us will need to reshuffle the
furniture of our minds in order to gear our children towards a future in which outer rewards become
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less relevant than inner and more individual spurs. The existence of competition has always meant
doing things because they win us some essentially unconnected advantage but the aim of the future
must be to integrate the doing with its own reward like virtue, in the New World, there are already
organizations set up to examine ways in which competitiveness can be replaced by other directed
forms of rewards and pleasures. Take one interesting example; in a Foundation whose aim is to
transform competitive sport. A tug-of-war, as we all know, consists of one team pitting its strength
against another team. The aim is to tug the opposing team over a line and by doing so, win.
In the brand new non-competitive version, things are different. There are still two teams on
either end of a rope but now the aim is not to win but to maintain the struggle. As the two teams tug,
any individual on either team who senses a coming victory must let go the winning end of the rope
and rush over to lend his weight to the other side thus redressing the balance and keeping the tug-of-
war going for as long as possible. If you actually imagine doing this, the startling fact that emerges is
that the new game offers more possibilities of individual judgment and skill just because victory is not
the aim and the tug-of-war is ended only by the defeat of those judgments and skills. What's more, I
think most people would get more pleasure out of the new tug than the old winners-take-all concept.
So could it be for learning; most of us at some time or another have glimpsed one of the real
inner pleasures of education - a sort of one-person chase after an elusive goal that pits you only
against you or at the most, against the discoveries of the greatest minds of our generations. On a more
humble level, most of us have already got some pleasurable hobby that we enjoy for its own sake and
become expert in it for that enjoyment. In my own stumbling efforts since last year to learn the piano,
I have seen the future and it works.
From an article in The Guardian by Jill Tweedie
QUESTION 2. Write a report on the following topic;
Your department recently took a field trip to any location of your choice. Write the report you will
submit on return from the trip.
QUESTION 3A
Write out a dialogue of four exchanges between a man and a woman who meet in an office where
language serves only the purpose of socialising with no meaningful exchange of information
between them.
QUESTION 3B
You are the President of your Students Association and you have an upcoming cultural week and
you want to invite your friends to the event. Write out a telephone conversation of six exchanges
inviting a friend who declines the invitation.
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