Hi,
For today’s blog, I
have prepared a practice IOC based on the following passage of Alice Munro’s
Family Furnishings (link at the bottom of the page):
Her dark hair was done up in rolls above her
face and at the
sides,
in the style of the time. Her skin was brownish-looking,
netted
with fine wrinkles, and her mouth wide, the lower lip
rather
thick, almost drooping, painted with a hearty lipstick that
left
a smear on the teacup and water tumbler. When her mouth
was
opened wide—as it nearly always was, talking or
laughing—you
could see that some of her teeth had been pulled
at
the back. Nobody could say that she was good-looking—any
woman
over twenty-five seemed to me to have pretty well passed
beyond
the possibility of being good-looking, anyway, to have
lost
the right to be so, and perhaps even the desire—but she was
fervent
and dashing. My father said thoughtfully that she had
zing.
Alfrida talked to my father about things that
were happening
in
the world, about politics. My father read the paper, he listened
to
the radio, he had opinions about these things but rarely got a
chance
to talk about them. The aunts’ husbands had opinions
too,
but theirs were brief and unvaried and expressed an
everlasting
distrust of all public figures and particularly all
foreigners,
so that most of the time all that could be gotten out of
them
were grunts of dismissal. My grandmother was deaf—
nobody
could tell how much she knew or what she thought
about
anything, and the aunts themselves seemed fairly proud of
how
much they didn’t know or didn’t have to pay attention to.
My
mother had been a schoolteacher, and she could readily have
pointed
out all the countries of Europe on the map, but she saw
everything
through a personal haze, with the British Empire and
the
royal family looming large and everything else diminished,
thrown
into a jumble-heap that was easy for her to disregard.
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