Text IV
In the middle of July, Roger was making his first
ministerial speech. I did not need reminding, having drafted
enough of them, how much speeches mattered — to
parliamentary bosses, to any kind of tycoon. Draft after draft: the
search for the supreme, the impossible, the more than Flaubertian
perfection; the scrutiny for any phrase that said more than it
ought to say, so that each speech at the end was bound, by the
law of official inexplicitness, to be more porridge-like than when
it started out in its first draft. I had always hated writing drafts for
other people, and nowadays got out of it. To Hector, to Douglas,
it was part of the job, which they took with their usual patience,
their usual lack of egotism: when a minister crossed out their
sharp, clear English and went in for a literary composition of his
own, they gave a wintry smile and let it stand.
C. P. Snow. Corridors of Power. London: Penguin Books, 1972, p. 31.
Considering the grammatical and semantic aspects of text IV, judge whether the following statements are right (C) or wrong (E).
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In the third sentence of the text, “supreme” is an adjective modifying the noun “perfection”.
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The text suggests that, when their original drafts were modified by a minister, Hector and Douglas would stand up to him and insist on retaining the sharp, clear English of the original.
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In the first sentence of the text, the verb “making” is being used with the sense of writing.
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The narrator of the text considers that the process of rewriting the speech multiple times contributes to its becoming more focused and direct.
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