Sunday, November 10, 2013

Can you answer it?

The Big Test, aka 수능, aka Suneung was last Thursday and this year I got to look at some of the English questions after the test was over.  Here is one that had me stumped.

An actual test question. No lie.

The directions are to choose the sentence that goes in the blank.  Remember, this is for a test for students who learn English as a second language.  High school students who learn English as a second language.  Not university professors.  And their first language, Korean, is wildly different from English.  Example.  In English we would say "She went to the store."  In Korean, the grammar structure is "Store to went."  (There really aren't "he" and "she" pronouns in Korean so you wouldn't use them, they're implied.  Korean also doesn't use articles like "a", "an", and "the".  They use particles to show if something is an object or subject, blah blah.)  So how are these students, with all of those disadvantages, supposed to answer a question like this.  I truthfully don't know.

For the record, I don't actually know what the answer is.  One co-teacher told me the answer was number 5 but I haven't seen anything official on that and he didn't seem positive either.  What do you think?  What's the answer?  Would you want to be a Korean high school student?  


4 comments:

  1. Good question! I pick "I don't know".
    David

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wtf?!? I by trade and title am a scientist and I don't even know the answer!!
    -Justine

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.