47 What did the narrator do in Yemen?
(A) He taught English Grammar.
(B) He studied how to become an English instructor.
(C) He observed English teaching at a Yemeni school.
(D) He issued certificates to students studying to become an English teacher.

I sat in on an English lesson at the Gamal Abdel Nasser Secondary School. The Scottish蘇格蘭 instructor教練, 大學講師—one of three Britons英國人 employed in the Yemeni葉門school system—was drilling練習, （爲記憶而）反覆訓練 the class in the difference between the “present simple現在式” and the “present continuous現在進行”.

There were twenty very thin, very eager boys aged between about fourteen and twenty-two.

They were part of that tiny educated leaven in a country which has an illiteracy文盲的，不會讀寫 rate of ninety percent, and they had tense緊張, ambitious faces. They had been trained鍛煉 to compete continually經常地，不斷地 against each other, so that the lesson turned into a kind of noisy greyhound格雷伊獵犬 race.

The moment that the instructor was half-way through a question, his voice was drowned覆蓋 by shouts of “Teacher! Teacher! Teacher!” and I lost sight of him behind the thicket灌木叢；小樹叢 of urgently緊急地 raised hands.

If a student began to stumble蹣跚而行, 停頓, 犯錯；結結巴巴 over an answer, the others fought（fight的過去式及過去分詞） to grab the question for themselves, bellowing for the teacher’s attention. I once taught for a term at a comprehensive綜合 school in England: had the children in my class ever shown a small fraction分數 of the enthusiasm displayed by these Yemeni students, I might have stayed in the job a great deal longer.

They were ravenous極其饑餓 for the good marks and certificates which would take them out of their villages and tenements（常指城市貧民區的）公寓大樓, and they behaved as if every minute spent in the classroom could make or break them.