LITERATURE
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Level: |
Intermediate |
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Genre: |
Prose |
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Title: |
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban |
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Subject: |
Fantasy |
Harry Potter & the Prisoner of
Azkaban (JK Rowling)
Uncle Vernon and aunt Petunia
announce Aunt Marge’s arrival. She will stay with the family for a week and
uncle
him to leave school from time
to time.
In next to no time, Aunt
Petunia was shrieking up the stairs for Harry to come down and get ready to
welcome their guest.
“Do something about your
hair!” Aunt Petunia snapped as he reached the hall.
Harry couldn’t see the
point of trying to make his hair lie flat. Aunt Marge loved criticizing him, so
the untidier he looked, the happier she would be.
All too soon, there was a
crunch of gravel outside as Uncle Vernon’s car pulled back into the driveway,
then the clunk of the car doors and footsteps on the garden path.
“Get the door!” Aunt
Petunia hissed at Harry.
A feeling of great gloom in
his stomach, Harry pulled the door open.
On the
threshold stood Aunt Marge.
She was very like Uncle Vernon: large, beefy, and purple-faced, she even had a
moustache, though not as bushy as his. In one hand she held an enormous suitcase,
and tucked under the other was an old and evil-tempered bulldog.
“Where’s my Dudders?” roared Aunt Marge. “Where’s my neffy- poo?”
Dudley came waddling down
the hall, his blond hair plastered flat to his fat head, a bow tie just visible
under his many chins. Aunt Marge thrust the suitcase into Harry’s stomach,
knocking the wind out of him, seized
Harry knew perfectly well
that Dudley only put up with Aunt Marge’s hugs because he was well paid for it,
and sure enough, when they broke apart, Dudley had a crisp twenty-pound note
clutched in his fat fist.
“Petunia!” shouted Aunt
Marge, striding past Harry as though he was a hat stand. Aunt Marge and Aunt
Petunia kissed, or rather, Aunt Marge bumped her large
jaw against Aunt Petunia’s bony cheekbone.
Uncle Vernon now came in,
smiling jovially as he shut the door.
“Tea, Marge?” he said. “And
what will Ripper take?”
“Ripper can have some tea
out of my saucer,” said Aunt Marge as they all proceeded into the kitchen,
leaving Harry alone in the hall with the suitcase. But Harry wasn’t
complaining; any excuse not to be with Aunt Marge was fine by him, so he began
to heave the case upstairs into the spare bedroom, taking as long as he could.
By the time he got back to
the kitchen, Aunt Marge had been supplied with tea and fruitcake, and Ripper
was lapping noisily in the corner. Harry saw Aunt Petunia wince slightly as
specks of tea and drool flecked her clean floor. Aunt Petunia hated animals.
“Who’s looking after the
other dogs, Marge?” Uncle Vernon asked.
“Oh, I’ve got Colonel Fubster managing them,” boomed Aunt Marge. “He’s retired
now, good for him to have something to do. But I
couldn’t leave poor old Ripper. He pines if he’s away from me.”
Ripper began to growl again
as Harry sat down. This directed Aunt Marge’s attention to Harry for the first
time.
“So!” she barked. “Still
here, are you?”
“Yes,” said Harry.
“Don’t you say ‘yes’ in
that ungrateful tone,” Aunt Marge growled. “It’s damn good of
Harry was bursting to say
that he’d rather live in an orphanage than with the Dursleys,
but the thought of the Hogsmeade form stopped him. He
forced his face into a painful smile.
“Don’t you smirk at me!”
boomed Aunt Marge. “I can see you haven’t improved since I last saw you. I
hoped school would knock some manners into you.” She took a large gulp of tea,
wiped her moustache, and said, “Where is it that you send him, again,
“St. Brutus’s,” said Uncle
Vernon promptly. “It’s a first-rate institution for hopeless cases.”
“I see,” said Aunt Marge.
“Do they use the cane at St. Brutus’s, boy?” she barked across the table.
“Er
–“
Uncle Vernon nodded curtly
behind Aunt Marge’s back.
“Yes,” said Harry. Then,
feeling he might as well do the thing properly, he added, “all the time.”
“Excellent,” said Aunt
Marge. “I won’t have this namby-pamby, wishy-washy nonsense about not hitting
people who deserve it. A good thrashing is what’s needed in ninety-nine cases
out of a hundred. Have you been beaten often?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Harry,
“loads of times.”
Aunt Marge narrowed her
eyes.
“I still don’t like your
tone, boy,” she said. “If you can speak of your beatings in that casual way,
they clearly aren’t hitting you hard enough. Petunia, I’d write if I were you.
Make it clear that you approve the use of extreme force in this boy’s case.”
As Aunt Marge started to
make herself at home, Harry caught himself thinking almost longingly of life at
number four without her. Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia usually encouraged Harry
to stay out of their way, which Harry was only too happy to do. Aunt Marge, on
the other hand, wanted Harry under her eye at all times, so that she could boom
out suggestions for his improvement. She delighted in comparing Harry with
Dudley, and took huge pleasure in buying
“You mustn’t blame yourself
for the way the boy’s turned out,
Harry tried to concentrate
on his food, but his hands shook and his face was starting to burn with anger.
Remember the form, he told himself. Think about Hogsmeade.
Don’t say anything. Don’t rise -
Aunt Marge reached for her
glass of wine.
“It’s one of the basic
rules of breeding,” she said. “You see it all the time with dogs. If there’s
something wrong with the bitch, there’ll be something wrong with the pup –“
At that moment, the
wineglass Aunt Marge was holding exploded in her hand. Shards of glass flew in
every direction and Aunt Marge sputtered and blinked, her great ruddy face
dripping.
“Marge!” squealed Aunt
Petunia. “Marge, are you all right?”
“Not to worry,” grunted
Aunt Marge, mopping her face with her napkin. “Must have
squeezed it too hard. Did the same thing at Colonel Fubster’s the other day. No need to fuss, Petunia, I
have a very firm grip ...”
But Aunt Petunia and Uncle
Vernon were both looking at Harry suspiciously, so he decided he’d better skip
dessert and escape from the table as soon as he could.
Outside in the hall, he
leaned against the wall, breathing deeply. It had been a long time since he’d
lost control and made something explode. He couldn’t afford to let it happen
again. The Hogsmeade form wasn’t the only thing at
stake – if he carried on like that, he’d be in trouble with the Ministry of
Magic.
Harry was still an underage
wizard, and he was forbidden by wizard law to do magic outside school. His
record wasn’t exactly clean either. Only last summer he’d gotten an official
warning that had stated quite clearly that if the Ministry got wind of any more
magic in
He heard the Dursleys leaving the table and hurried upstairs out of the
way.
Harry got through the next
three days by forcing himself to think about his Handbook of Do-It-Yourself Broomcare whenever Aunt Marge started on him. This worked
quite well, though it seemed to give him a glazed look, because Aunt Marge
started voicing the opinion that he was mentally subnormal.
At last, at long last, the
final evening of Marge’s stay arrived. Aunt Petunia cooked a fancy dinner and
Uncle Vernon uncorked several bottles of wine. They got all the way through the
soup and the salmon without a single mention of Harry’s faults; during the
lemon meringue pie, Uncle Vernon bored them all with a long talk about Grunnings, his drill-making company; then Aunt Petunia made
coffee and Uncle Vernon brought out a bottle of brandy.
“Can I tempt you,
Marge?”
Aunt Marge had already had
quite a lot of wine. Her huge face was very red.
“Just a small one, then,”
she chuckled. “A bit more than that . . . and a bit more . . . that’s the
ticket.”
“Aah,”
said Aunt Marge, smacking her lips and putting the empty brandy glass back
down. “Excellent nosh, Petunia. It’s normally just a
fry-up for me of an evening, with twelve dogs to look after. . . .” She burped
richly and patted her great tweed stomach. “Pardon me. But I do like to see a
healthy-sized boy,” she went on, winking at
“Now, this one here –“
She jerked her head at
Harry, who felt his stomach clench. The Handbook, he thought quickly.
“This one’s got a mean,
runty look about him. You get that with dogs. I had Colonel Fubster
drown one last year. Ratty little thing it was. Weak. Underbred.”
Harry was trying to
remember page twelve of his book: A Charm to Cure Reluctant Reversers.
“It all comes down to
blood, as I was saying the other day. Bad blood will out. Now, I’m saying
nothing against your family, Petunia” – she patted Aunt Petunia’s bony hand
with her shovel-like one – “but your sister was a bad egg. They turn up in the
best families. Then she ran off with a wastrel and here’s the result right in
front of us.”
Harry was staring at his
plate, a funny ringing in his ears. Grasp your broom firmly by the tail, he
thought. But he couldn’t remember what came next. Aunt Marge’s voice seemed to
be boring into him like one of Uncle Vernon’s drills.
“This Potter,” said Aunt
Marge loudly, seizing the brandy bottle and splashing more into her glass and
over the tablecloth, “you never told me what he did?”
Uncle Vernon and Aunt
Petunia were looking extremely tense.
“He – didn’t work,” said
Uncle Vernon, with half a glance at Harry. “Unemployed.”
“As I expected!” said Aunt
Marge, taking a huge swig of brandy and wiping her chin on her sleeve. “A
no-account, good-for-nothing, lazy scrounger who –“
“He was not,” said Harry
suddenly. The table went very quiet. Harry was shaking all over. He had never
felt so angry in his life.
“MORE BRANDY!” yelled Uncle
Vernon, who had gone very white. He emptied the bottle into Aunt Marge’s glass.
“You, boy,” he snarled at Harry. “Go to bed, go on –“
“No,
“They didn’t die in a car
crash!” said Harry, who found himself on his feet.
“They died in a car crash,
you nasty little liar, and left you to be a burden on their decent, hardworking
relatives!” screamed Aunt Marge, swelling with fury. “You are an insolent,
ungrateful little –“
But Aunt Marge suddenly
stopped speaking. For a moment, it looked as though words had failed her. She
seemed to be swelling with inexpressible anger – but the swelling didn’t stop.
Her great red face started to expand, her tiny eyes bulged, and her mouth
stretched too tightly for speech – next second, several buttons had just burst
from her tweed jacket and pinged off the walls – she was inflating like a
monstrous balloon, her stomach bursting free of her tweed waistband, each of
her fingers blowing up like a salami -
“MARGE!” yelled Uncle
Vernon and Aunt Petunia together as Aunt Marge’s whole body began to rise off
her chair toward the ceiling. She was entirely round, now, like a vast life
buoy with piggy eyes, and her hands and feet stuck out weirdly as she drifted
up into the air, making apoplectic popping noises. Ripper came skidding into
the room, barking madly.
“NOOOOOOO!”
Uncle Vernon seized one of
Marge’s feet and tried to pull her down again, but was almost lifted from the
floor himself. A second later, Ripper leapt forward and sank his teeth into
Uncle Vernon’s leg.
Harry tore from the dining
room before anyone could stop him, heading for the cupboard under the stairs.
The cupboard door burst magically open as he reached it. In seconds, he had
heaved his trunk to the front door. He sprinted upstairs and threw himself
under the bed, wrenching up the loose floorboard, and grabbed the pillowcase
full of his books and birthday presents. He wriggled out, seized Hedwig’s empty
cage, and dashed back downstairs to his trunk, just as Uncle Vernon burst out
of the dining room, his trouser leg in bloody tatters.
“COME BACK IN HERE!” he
bellowed. “COME BACK AND PUT HER RIGHT!”
But a reckless rage had
come over Harry. He kicked his trunk open, pulled out his wand, and pointed it
at Uncle Vernon.
“She deserved it,” Harry
said, breathing very fast. “She deserved what she got. You keep away from
me.”
He fumbled behind him for
the latch on the door.
“I’m going,” Harry said.
“I’ve had enough.”
And in the next moment, he
was out in the dark, quiet street, heaving his heavy trunk behind him, Hedwig’s
cage under his arm.
DO THE MULTIPLE CHOICE TEST
1. a) Harry wanted to make his aunt
happier by not combing his hair.
b) Harry did not comb his hair because it was no use trying
to please his aunt.
c) Harry combed his hair because his aunt wanted it.
2. a)
b)
c)
3. a) Harry pretended he goes to St.
Brutus’s school.
b) Harry went to St. Brutus’s school and told so to his
aunt.
c) Harry went to St. Brutus’s school but was not allowed to
say so to his aunt.
4. a) The wine glass exploded because aunt
Marge squeezed it too hard.
b) The wine glass exploded because Harry wanted it to
explode.
c) The wine glass exploded because Harry made it explode.
5. a) Aunt Marge thought Harry was mentally subnormal because
he was thinking of a book about Do-it-Yourself broom care.
b) Aunt
Marge thought Harry was mentally subnormal because he sat there with a glazed
look.
c) Aunt
Marge thought Harry was mentally subnormal because he had had a warning that he
might be expelled from his school.
6. a) Aunt Marge had wine.
b) Aunt
Marge had brandy.
c) Aunt
Marge had wine and brandy.
7. a) Uncle Vernon’s factory produced brandy.
b)
Uncle Vernon’s factory produced drills.
c)
Uncle Vernon’s factory produced balloons.
8. a) Harry couldn’t control his anger when Aunt Marge discussed
his body build.
b)
Harry couldn’t control his anger when Aunt Marge compared him to a dog.
c)
Harry couldn’t control his anger when Aunt Marge started insulting his parents.
9. a) Harry tried to hide for his uncle in the cupboard under
the stairs.
b)
Harry tried to hide for his angry uncle under his bed.
c)
Harry opened the cupboard under the stairs in order to take his trunk.
10. a) The Vernons
didn’t know anything about Harry’s magical powers.
b) The Vernons suspected that
Harry had magical powers.
c) The Vernons knew that Harry had
magical powers.
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(1b 2c 3a 4c 5b 6c 7b 8c 9c 10c)
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How do uncle
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What sounds do they produce? (they shriek, they snap, hiss, squeal and produce
noises associated with animals)
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What do you know of their character? (they are cruel, greedy, selfish, bossy, intolerable
people)
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How does Aunt Marge speak? What verbs does the author
use to describe the way Aunt Marge speaks? (she barks, booms, roars,
shouts, growls, grunts, burps, hiccups, screams. Barking and growling is what
dogs do)
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In which ways is Aunt Marge nasty to Harry? What does
she say about him? (she says that Harry is ungrateful, smirks at her, does not have any manners and should be
caned. Then she says he is rotten on the inside, is mentally subnormal and
compares Harry to a dog. She says he is underbred, ratty
and unhealthy and finally starts insulting
his parents)
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Describe aunt Marge’s dog.
What kind of a dog is it? (It’s an
old, spoiled, disgusting, greedy bulldog with the lovely name of Ripper)
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Why does Harry think of his Handbook of
Do-It-Yourself Broomcare all the time? (He tries to divert his thoughts in order not to
become too angry. If he can’t control his anger, he will probably do magic and
that is forbidden by the Ministry of Magic).
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What’s is the name of the
institution Harry supposedly stays at? Is there irony in the name? (St. Brutus's Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal
Boys is ironic because Brutus was the murderer of Caesar and therefore a very
unlikely ‘saint’ for a Borstal institution).
Writing: dictation
Pair students and have them sit facing each other. Have them fold their
dictation sheet along the dotted line and put it between the two of them. They
are asked to dictate the extracts from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of
Azkaban to each other. They may have to spell out words from time to
time. The students can simply turn the sheet for correction.
SIT IN PAIRS
FACING EACH OTHER. FOLD YOUR DICTATION SHEET IN TWO. DICTATE THE EXTRACTS FROM Harry Potter and the PRISONER OF AZKABAN to each other. Simply turn the sheet for
correction.
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fold here á Harry sat down between Dudley and
Uncle Vernon, a large, beefy man with very little neck and a lot of
moustache. Far from wishing Harry a happy birthday, none of the Dursleys made any sign that they had noticed Harry enter
the room, but Harry was far too used to this to care. He helped himself to a
piece of toast and then looked up at the reporter on the television, who was
halfway through a report on an escaped convict.
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Aunt Marge was Uncle Vernon’s sister. Even though
she was not a blood relative of Harry’s (whose mother had been Aunt Petunia’s
sister), he had been forced to call her “Aunt” all his life. Aunt Marge lived
in the country, in a house with a large garden, where she bred bulldogs. She
didn’t often stay at |
Speaking
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Compare the story of Harry to other stories about poor
young kids that you know from films or literature. (Cinderella, Matilda, David Copperfield)
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Stories about witches and magical powers are popular
at the moment. Do you know TV- series about these? (Buffy, the Vampire Slayer; Angel; Sabrina, the
teenage witch; Dark Angel;
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Why are these stories so popular with kids? (Because young powerless kids like to imagine
themselves more powerful than adults)
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A vicar (priest) in the Church of England held a
special “Harry Potter” family church service some time ago, complete with
wizards, pointy hats and broomsticks. The vicar said that young folk are all
very much into Harry Potter and that the Church should use this interest. But
his opponents say that he is going too far because there is a risk that
children are going to be very confused by the use of symbols associated with
evil. What do you think?
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Do you think some people really do have magical
powers? Explain.
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Discuss what magical powers you would like to have
yourself. What would you use these powers for?