Learning Task 2: Let's Read
From the previous activity, you were able to find the answers to the underlined words through understanding how each of the
words is used in the sentences.
One of the best ways of discovering word meanings is through context clues or hints given by other words in the sentence. In
the next activities, you will refine your skill in using them through a piece of literature from Israel
"THE CAT”
By Zygmunt Frankel
"Published in "The European"
He lay on the bunk in his cell, smoking a cigarette. The day had been hot, but now, with the dusk falling, a pleasant breeze
had sprung up and was coming in from the courtyard, along the corridor, and into his cell. The old prison was very much like the
ones in cowboy movies. The door of his cell, as well as the one at the end of the corridor were steel frames with iron bars less than
twenty centimetres apart; too close for even the thinnest man to squeeze through, but ample for a cat. One could see through the
bars, talk with the guards and the prisoners in the other cells, and be disturbed by someone snoring at night, and the barred doors
made the prison airy.
It was much better than the foreign prisons he had read about, with solid doors, peepholes, and electric bulbs burning the
whole night long. Although the local revolution modelled itself on the Russian one to some extent, it did not have the means to
imitate Lubyanka. The revolution was also milder in other respects. A political prisoner usually had done something against the
regime, be it only grumbling in public. The interrogations were mostly carried out without torture. Although no public or journalists
were admitted to the more serious political trials, the prisoner had the right to defend himself, and, in case of a death sentence -
these, unfortunately, were rather common and mostly undeserved - the condemned man had the right to appeal to the President,
although in most cases it only delayed the execution by a few days.
The prisoner finished his cigarette, put it out in an empty sardine tin which served him as ashtray, sat on his bed, and looked
at the door again. The spaces between the bars were fine, even for the largest cat to pass through, and the door at the end of the
corridor was the same. In the small rectangular cobbled courtyard where they took their daily walks and where they shot condemned
prisoners at dawn, a couple of skinny young trees, hardly more than saplings, grew by the wall on the right, a few of the thin
branches reaching the top of the wall, nothing to support a man, but good enough for a cat. It was not the wall where they shot
people; that one was opposite it, at right angle to the door. On days following an execution, of which they had heard every word
and shot through the barred doors, walking in a circle during their daily exercise, they would look furtively for traces of blood on
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