6.16 Self-test on adjectivals and adverbials

Read the passage printed below and answer the questions that follow.

It was a beautiful garden.  The poinsettias grew round the plinth of the house, huge scarlet-fingered flowers with milk sap in their stems.  The house was large, square, of grey stucco, with verandahs along its double floors and tiers of great green shuttered windows.  It had a flat roof, with a parapet where the children played, and the parapet was carved with huge stone daisies.  Can a house, a serious house, be carved with daisies?  This was.

Below the poinsettias was the plumbago; it made hedges of nursery pale blue and the flowerbeds it bordered would later be full of the pansies and verbena and mignonette that were now in seed pans in a seed-table made of bamboo. Along the paths were ranged pots of violets that held the dew.  Other pots of chrysanthemums were on the verandah and in a double phalanx down the steps.  These chrysanthemums had mammoth heads of flowers that were white and yellow and bronze and pink; some of them were larger than the children’s heads.  Later, in their place, there would be potted petunias.
(Godden, R. The River, pp.29-30)

1. The following phrases from paragraphs one and two, ‘round the plinth of the house’, ‘below the poinsettias’, ‘along the paths’, ‘on the verandah and in a double phalanx down the steps’ are:
(a) adjectival phrases
(b) adverbial phrases
(c) a mixture of both types

2. The following phrases from paragraphs one and two, ‘with milk sap in their stems’, of grey stucco’, ‘with verandahs along its double floors and tiers of great green shuttered windows’, ‘with a parapet’, ‘of nursery pale blue’, ‘full of the pansies and verbena and mignonette’, ‘made of bamboo’ are:
(a) adjectival phrases
(b) adverbial phrases
(c) a mixture of both types

3. What are the clauses in heavy type: ‘It had a flat roof with a parapet where the children played’, and ‘the flowerbeds it bordered would later be full of the pansies verbena and mignonette that were now in seed pans’.
(a) adverbial clauses
(b) adjectival clauses

4. The adjectivals, whether phrases or clauses give an added dimension to:
(a) the verbs
(b) the nouns

5. In descriptive writing the author makes careful use of adverbials to give directives to the verbs and adjectivals to give accurate pictures of what nouns look like.
(a) true
(b) false

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