how to extract characters of a language?

English - Identifying language features and persuasive devices. Purpose and effect?

• What language features and persuasive devices have been used in the extract and what is the purpose and effect of this? - Do you believe the emotive wods employed would produce the desired emotion in the reader? - Which ones are particularly effective? - Are they overdone or balanced with factual information? - Are opinions stated as facts? - Are the rhetorical questions effective? - Consider the use of generalisations and over-simplification. - Is there effective use of sentence structure such as short sentences and fragments? Gifts Rapped - Anthony Horowitz It’s easy to tell when Christmas is over. Dead fir trees, dumped overnight, pile up in local parks and on common land. Huge hoardings go up advertising Creme Eggs. And all those toys, wrapped with such optimism and torn open with such fervour, are finally abandoned, broken and unwanted, at the back of the bedroom cupboard. Some don’t even make it to the end of January. Is it my imagination, or are toys much less fun than they used to be? Toy is a small word for an industry worth £2 billion that covers everything from dolls and jigsaws to board games and building bricks. Stand in any modern toy shop and you will quickly see that most of them boil down to pretty much the same three or four ingredients: cardboard, paper and brightly coloured plastic with the occasional elastic band thrown in for added excitement. Their nasty, mass-produced nature needs little investigation. Made in Taiwan, China, Thailand ...all the usual suspects are there, raising the spectre of children slaving away on one side of the world for the pleasure of their better-off counterparts on the other. Disappointment starts with the toy shops themselves. We may have fond memories of ‘a shop window full of alluring objects, magic balls, magic hens, wonderful cones, ventriloquist dolls...’ and the slightly unworldly shop man: ‘a curious, sallow, dark man, with one ear larger than the other and a chin like the toe-cap of a boot.’ But we will have to search hard to find H.G. Wells’s Magic Shop today. The high-street stores are nearly all chains, and lurking round the corner is that scowling giant, Toys‘R’Us, with 1,600 stores worldwide and 9,000 different products on the shelves. Parents will know that shopping in their vast, neon-lit warehouses, with toys packed from floor to ceiling and few staff around apart from the bored, low-paid checkout girls, is an experience utterly devoid of magic. Of course, nobody now buys toys for their aesthetic qualities. It’s the ideas that count. But the ideas are frequently feeble, not helped by the fact that many toy-makers go in for massive over-claiming on the boxes. Take one random example, a mountaineering game called Extreme Rock Climbing that promises ‘heart-pounding, nail-biting, free-climbing thrills’ — on sale at £19.99. The contents turn out to be a plastic cliff, two small dolls and two magnets that fit over your finger. The aim is to use the magnets to drag the dolls up the plastic. Will little Jimmy really imagine himself hanging by his fingertips from Kilimanjaro as he plays this? I rather doubt it. The best games are generally the oldest. Monopoly, still the world bestseller, was invented in 1934. Barbie (currently engaged in a fight-to-the-death with a more delinquent gang of Bratz) can be described quite literally as a little old lady. She first appeared in 1959. Then there’s Lego (1934), Cluedo (1947), Scrabble (1948), Risk (1959) and Uno (1971). Even Trivial Pursuit, arguably the last great board game, celebrates its quarter-centenary this year. There’s still Etch A Sketch (invented 1960) scratching away at aluminium powder and glass beads and leaving behind traces of old pictures the more it is used. And dozens of games still rely on a device invented in 700 bc: a pair of dice. Refurbishment often seems to mean simply taking the old format and adapting it to the current craze. You enjoyed Lord of the Rings? Well now you can play it with special versions of Trivial Pursuit, Risk and Monopoly. There are also jigsaws, trading cards and a range of specially designed board games. Nothing wrong with that if children want to find new ways to immerse themselves in Tolkien’s world, but inevitably the whiff of exploitation fills the air. Another random example from my local high street, Junior Scrabble, is on the shelf for £14.99. But next to it you can find Disney Scrabble (‘Play the world’s most popular word game as you immerse yourself in the wonderful world of Disney’) for an amazing £29.99. True, it has special Mickey Mouse-shaped tiles and ‘pixie-dusted racks’ but can this really justify the price hike? And to add insult to injury, the cover shows various words being formed: alice, ariel and tink. Even the first of these wouldn’t be accepted under Scrabble rules, but of course they’re Disney characters. Was fun or indoctrination uppermost in the creators’ minds? Thank youu!

• Answer:

  You need to do your own homework