Silly Answers To English Test Questions by Ken Smith

My Mother, Theo Smith, loved the English language and all of its grammatical rules, regulations, definitions, and nuances. For those of you that knew her or had her as teacher, were acutely aware that she would have hated the following responses to questions submitted on English tests; however, she would have loved sharing them each and every one with others. Even though these answers are foolish, she would have once again garnered it as one more opportunity to inject as with a hypodermic needle directly into their brain of an unsuspecting student just one more morsel of information that was to be remembered about the English language.

Following are some answers to test questions. These exams were probably run off on some mimeograph machine. Each and every one had been prepared by some English teacher. All were done in the privacy of some old dark closet located somewhere in some old high school, probably just like our old high school in the dingy old dark closet in the near the library at Rockingham High School . Each one of the test were especially prepared by the individual teacher. Teachers that we can all remember like Smith, Mulkey, Howell, Covington (Roberts), and Crosland. I’m sure most prepared their on masters, and if by some happenstance they could not type they would ask one of their co-workers to assist. I can vividly remember Mom making these stenciled exam masters on her old Underwood Manual Typewriter. The process went something like this:

There had to be an image transfer medium called a stencil prepared. It was made from waxed mulberry paper, and it was backed by a flexible waxed sheet made of stiff card stock, with the sheets bound at the top.
Once prepared, the stencil is wrapped around the ink-filled drum of the rotary machine. When a blank sheet of paper is drawn between the rotating drum and a pressure roller, ink is forced through the holes on the stencil onto the paper.

To get a printed copy, you first had to prepare a stencil assemblage. First a printed copy is placed in a typewriter. The typewriter ribbon had to be disabled so that the bare, sharp type element strikes the stencil directly. The impact of the type element would displace the wax, thus making the tissue paper permeable to the oil-based ink. This process was called "cutting a stencil. A variety of specialized styluses were used on the stencil to render lettering, illustrations, or other artistic features by hand against a textured plastic backing plate.

Corrections were made by brushing them out with a high smelling, specially-formulated correction fluid by the name of “Obliterine”.

These stencils carefully prepared by teachers you may remember with names like Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Mulkey, Miss Howell, Mrs. Covington (Roberts) and Miss Crosland. We were sure they prepared these exams very carefully simply to torture us and give us a bad grade. No we praise all of these fine educators for instilling this knowledge within us and willingness to learn in us all.

I can only speak for Mom for sure, but I can with 100% certainty assure you that she would surely have been chuckling at these answers under her breath, all the while thumping them someone, like me, in the head and in the same breath giving them the correct answer.

Question: Define the first person
Answer: Adam.

Question: What are the parts of speech
Answer: Lungs and air.

Question: What is a verb
Answer: Something to eat.

Define the following:

Punctuate: Punctuate means to make a hole in the tire of a bicycle.

Metaphor: Metaphor is a thing you shout through.

Adverb: The horses run fastly. This is an adverb.

Abstract Noun: An abstract noun is something you can’t see when you are looking at it.

Abstract Noun: An abstract noun is also the name of something which has no existence, as goodness.

Abstract Noun: Another meaning for abstract noun is something we can think of but cannot feel, like a red-hot poker.

Give Example Of:

A Collective Noun: A flock of cattle.

A Collective Noun: A garbage can.

A Conjunction: The place where 2 railway lines meet.

The Imperfect Tense: Used in France to express a future action in past time which does not take place at all.

A Simile: A picturesque way of saying what you really mean, such as calling your mother an old trout.

The Feminine of Bull: A. Mrs Bull.

Students Statement: All sentences are either simple or confound.

Passive voice: Question: Correct the following sentence:
“It was me that has broken the window”
Answer: “It wasn’t me that has broken the window”.

In Spelling (an English teacher’s comment on a student’s essay):
"A dictionery would solve your spelling problems."

My personal favorite was the answer to a couple of questions Mom posed on one of her mimeographed English Grammar test she gave her students while I was away at college.

The question was:

Give the three principal parts of “Freeze” and “To Do”.

The Student’s Answers Were:

“Freeze - Froze - Frezzen”

&

“Do - Did - Done Did”

That earned the infamous “THEO DOUBLE THUMP!”