With vivid imagination and captivating narrative, talented writers manage to get readers emotionally attached to fictional characters. Some of us might forget our best friend’s birthday or deadlines at work, but will never fail to recall every single detail of our most beloved characters. Below are descriptions of some iconic characters from novels, both classical and contemporary. Write “True” if the description is accurate and “False” if otherwise.
- In the canon of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes moves to a small farm and keeps bees after ending his career as a consulting detective.
- In Life of Pi, Pi escapes to a small lifeboat when his ship goes down in a storm. Also in the lifeboat are four animals, namely a hyena, a pony, an orangutan and a tiger.
- In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby likes to use the term “old pal” to address his friends.
- Throughout Ian Fleming’s series of James Bond novels, James Bond prefers to have his dry martini stirred and not shaken.
- In Les Misérables, Jean Valjean is imprisoned for 19 years for stealing silverware from a bishop.
- In Journey to the West (《西遊記》), the Bodhisattva transforms three willow leaves into three hairs with lifesaving power, and gives them to the Monkey King.
- In the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter plays as a Seeker in Quidditch, a sport played by two teams riding flying broomsticks.
- In The Little Prince, the Little Prince has a rose with three thorns on his home planet.
Please send your entry by fax (2521 8772) or email (csbolrs@csb.gov.hk) to the Editorial Board of Word Power by 25 August 2022. Watch out for our coming issue to see if you get all the answers right, and better still, if you are one of the lucky ten to win a prize. The Editorial Board will have the final say on the answers.
