EXAMINATION PAPERS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVI, Issue 9325, 30 March 1889, Page 2 (Supplement)

EXAMINATION PAPERS.

A Professor in Household Science has unbosomed himself to a Pall Mall interviewer on the oddities of examination papers that pass through his hands. The girl pupils range in age from twelve' to eighteen, and the Professor seems depressed py the intelligence numbers of them display in answers, such as the following, on food and cookery:— " Potatoes when done should be allowed to sit with a towel oven them. Frying is done on a gridiron. Tea, coffee, and cocoa are usually adulterated with beer, ale, and brandy. Brown bread is more bulky and more spongy, and helps to distend the stomach better than white bread ; thereforo it is more wholesome. Brown bread forms a crust on the stomach. Got a shoulder of mutton, trim it from tho neck neatly, leave an inch or two of bare bono for a handle, add a pinch of pepper and salt. Then put it on the pad, and six or seven minutes will cook it. Begin to prepare cutlets by paring the chops of mutton. Have your fryingpan ruthlessly clean. A few hours should sufficient to cook a cutlet. Cutlets should be boiled in cold water, and served cold with some parsley and warm potatoes. Tea is adulterated with milk, sugar, and water ; coffee the samet Brown broad irritates the intestates. Each cutlet; should be an inch long. Brown bread ruffles tho inside of the gullet." On other subjects there are also ludicrous answers, of which the following are examples:—''Poison should be taken ' out with a pair of tweezers." ".An emetic is best for poisoning." "If you want to | keep a room healthy, sit in it with a bowl of lime water." "In case of a convulsive fit speak to lie patient sharply." " You cannot breathe carbonic acid gas over again." " Place tho person who has fainted in a lying posture, keep him quiet, and wait till lie comes round." "If you want, to know your temperature, put a barometer into your mouth." " When wo go without food for a certain length of time we ascertain the best of the body." "The function of nitrogen in the air is to repair the waste of our solid planet which is constantly taking place-" "If there was no nitrogen in the air, wo would die of fits of laughing." " When sweeping the floor, a servant should pick out all organic matter." " The air is called a compound body because it contains .'i volumes in 1000 volumes of itself —that is, 33 time less than 1 per cent." " A candle burns for a good many reasons—to give light, to give heat, to save the ex{«nse of oil or gas." Starch tho clothes with starch, salt, and butter." "Cotton is derived from a plant called flax with a pretty blue flower." " Wool should bo worn always next the skin, as it soaks tho [>erspiration and the rain." " Shoeblacks consist of pure carbon." "Washing day is considered a day of wetness and general sloppiness." " Carbon may be found in lumbago." " Woollen materials dye well, and are non-conductors of lightning." Surely these answers are not the result of demonstration lessons, but of unmitigated cram, general inattention, and no thinking.