Cinquecento: from the1500s
Boeotian: from a region of Greece called Boeotia
Let's practise
Harthover had been built at 90 different times and in 90 different styles and looked as if somebody had built a whole street of houses of every imaginable shape and then stirred them together with a spoon.
For the attics were Anglo-Saxon. The third floor, Norman. The second, Cinquecento. The first floor, Elizabethan. The right wing, Pure Doric. The centre, Early English, with a huge portico copied from the Parthenon. The left wing, pure Boeotian, which the country folk admired most of all because it was just like the new barracks in the town, only three times as big. The grand staircase was copied from the Catacombs at Rome. The back staircase from the Taj Mahal at Agra. The cellars were copied from the caves of Elephanta. The offices from the Pavilion at Brighton.
Charles Kingsley: from The Water Babies (Macmillan, 1863)
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What is the writer trying to tell you about the age of the house?
1 mark
- Read the question. Read it again. What is it asking?
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It is asking you to make a judgement about the age of the house.
- Find the sentence that tells you about the times in which it was built.
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Harthover had been built at 90 different times and in 90 different styles.
- Read on. Do you recognise any of the periods in history? What do you know about them?
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They were a long time ago. Some of them were hundreds of years apart.
- Answer the question, making an inference about the age of the house.
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The writer is trying to tell you that the house is extremely old and was built over a very long period of time.
- Check your answer.