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Read the following passage and answer the question that follows :

Learning the Queen's English is like scrubbing off the bright red varnish from your toe nails, the morning after a dance. It takes a long time and there is always a little bit left at the end, a stain of red along the growing edges to remind you of the good time you had. So, you can see that learning came slowly to me. On the other hand, I had plenty of time. I learned your language in an immigration detention centre, in Essex, in the southeastern part of the United Kingdom. Two years, they locked me in there. Time was all I had.

But why did I go to all the trouble ? It is because of what some of the older girls explained to me: to survive, you must look good or talk even better. The plain ones and the silent ones, it seems their paperwork in never in order. You say, they get repatriated. We say, sent home early.

The Other Hand is the story of a young woman who flees conflict in her home village in the oil-rich region of southern Nigeria. She makes her way to the UK as an illegal immigrant and is detained for a long period of time at an immigrant detention centre near London. When she finally gets out, she seeks out the only two people she knows in England, whom she met on a Nigerian beach during a life-changing event a few years before. Will she be able to find them, and if so will they help her ? And if not, will she survive in her newly adopted country as an immigrant ?

Learning Queen's English is described using a metaphor which is :

Solution

Correct Option: 3

The opening line compares learning the Queen's English to scrubbing off bright red varnish from toenails. This is the figurative comparison used in the passage.

Note: The comparison uses the word like, which technically makes it a simile rather than a strict metaphor. We have selected the option that matches the figurative comparison in the passage.

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