Read the paragraphs below and answer the questions.
This is the opening of 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' by James Joyce. A young boy called Stephen watches the other boys play football.
The wide playgrounds were swarming with boys. All were shouting and the prefects urged them on with strong cries. The evening air was pale and chilly and after every charge and thud of the footballers the greasy leather ball flew like a heavy bird through the grey light. He kept on the fringe of his line, out of sight of his prefect, out of the reach of the rude feet, pretending to run now and then. He felt his body small and weak amid the throng of the players and his eyes were weak and watery.
Rody Kickham was not like that: he would be captain of the third line all the fellows said.
Rody Kickham was a decent fellow but Nasty Roche was a stink. Nasty Roche had big hands. And one day he had asked:
—What is your name?
Stephen had answered: Stephen Dedalus.
Then Nasty Roche had said:
—What kind of a name is that?
1. How does the writer show Stephen is an outsider?
2. What does the simile 'like a heavy bird' suggest about the ball?
This is from 'Time Bomb' by Nigel Hinton. A boy describes a winter playground at sunset.
The sun was setting and our slide looked like a thin red mirror across the playground. My knees were bleeding from a couple of falls on the fast ice and the air was so cold that I could feel the blood freezing on my skin. I was standing in line for my go when I happened to look across at the horse chestnut tree. It was black against the fiery sky and a wisp of cloud was passing across the top branches so that the tree looked like a factory steaming in the brittle air.
My heart was throbbing fast and suddenly the ground seemed to be throbbing, too. It was as if I could feel all the energy in the earth. It was waiting there, building up for spring, when it would pulse up through the trunk of the tree and along the branches to produce thousands of leaves.
3. How is this playground description DIFFERENT from the Joyce passage?
4. What does 'the ground seemed to be throbbing, too' suggest?
5. Why is 'brittle air' an effective description?