Excerpts from "Things Fall Apart"

This list is based on excerpts from chapters at the end of the novel by Chinua Achebe. Its focus is on an anonymous British District Commissioner, whose focus on his own book does not do justice to the life of Okonkwo and all the other characters the reader met in the earlier chapters.

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 10 Unit 3's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: Things Fall Apart, Prayer to the Masks, The Second Coming, Things Fall Apart (excerpts), An African Voice
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. commissioner
    a government administrator
    "We shall not do you any harm," said the District Commissioner to them later, "if only you agree to cooperate with us.
  2. administration
    the act of governing or exercising authority
    We have brought a peaceful administration to you and your people so that you may be happy.
  3. justice
    judgment involved in the assignment of reward and punishment
    We have a court of law where we judge cases and administer justice just as it is done in my own country under a great queen.
  4. dominion
    a region marked off for administrative or other purposes
    That must not happen in the dominion of our queen, the most powerful ruler in the world.
  5. toil
    work hard
    In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things.
  6. attend
    take charge of or deal with
    One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from the tree.
  7. opinion
    a personal belief or judgment
    Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him.
  8. stress
    single out as important
    In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point.
  9. material
    information that can be used or reworked into finished form
    Every day brought him some new material.
  10. pacification
    actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency
    He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
Created on Mon Oct 13 17:13:25 EDT 2014 (updated Mon Oct 13 19:26:53 EDT 2014)

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