Use Of English 2014 Jamb Examination

Like all reptiles, snakes are cold-blooded, or more correctly, ectothermic—they cannot produce their own body heat. Instead, they rely on the sun to warm their bodies. Because they do not depend on energy from food to generate body heat, snakes can survive on an extremely meagre diet. Some wait for months between successive meals, and a few survive by eating a large meal just once or twice a year. When they do eat, snakes swallow their prey whole rather than biting off small pieces. Many snakes have specialised jaws that enable them to swallow animals far larger than their own heads. Although uncommon, some snakes, such as the African rock python, have been observed eating animals as large as an antelope or a small cow.

With over two thousand five hundred species belonging to more than ten families, snakes are a large and successful group. They owe much of this success to their versatility—snakes occupy habitats ranging from underground burrows to the tops of trees, and even to ocean depths as great as one hundred and fifty metres. They are found on every continent except Antarctica, and although they are most abundant in tropical areas, many survive in regions marked by extreme cold. The only places without snakes are parts of the polar regions and isolated islands, such as the Republic of Ireland and New Zealand, as opposed to places in Nigeria like Plateau and Gombe States in the northern part of the country, where there is a large population of snakes.

Setting up a newspaper involves a lot of preparations. The __11__ has to employ a lot of people. Other people working with him are cartographers, editors, typesetters, and readers, who work in various ways to produce the text of the newspaper. __12__ go out and collect stories and items of news, while __13__ specialise in one kind of topic. Another important person who works closely with the Editor-in-Chief is the __14__, who has to choose the most important stories, __15__ go through stories sent to them and make necessary adjustments.

The Editor-in-Chief could determine, for instance, whether a particular journalist should write articles daily or weekly in a particular column. Such a journalist is known as __16__. The editorials of the newspaper will be coordinated by __17__. The publisher could decide to establish __18__, which would be on sale weekly, fortnightly, or monthly, __19__ the eye-catching, screaming headlines and captions of newspapers on sale every day from the __20__.