Spanish Literature and Culture

In addition to understanding what the meaning of the text, which we can do without knowing each word and without literary knowledge, the test is asking us whether we know what 'perezoso' means as well as these literary terms

If we made it this far in our Spanish, we know that the sentence portion in question is talking about 'El viento Sur', the Southern wind and we also know the basic word, 'caliente', which means hot or warm. From there, we can easily see actually that (B) and (C) are almost the same as their English counterparts, hyperbole and antithesis.

For answer (B), we see that "perezoso" is attached to "caliente" with "y". They cannot be opposites (unless antithesis is employed) just as we cannot say "I like him AND he smells bad" or "The wind is calm AND violent". So we next ask ourselves, is 'warm', or even the word 'hot', a hyperbole for wind? The khamsin of the Bedouin would not say cold is hyperbole... hyperbole is to say the air was like the solar wind or like standing in Tokyo or Hamburg during a fire bombing

What would be the opposite or antithesis of The Southern wind? All we know for sure about it is that it is warm/hot. So does The Southern wind hold both 'caliente' and cool/cold properties simultaneously? Perhaps. Let's keep it.

That leaves us with (A) and (D). We know (A) because it's an English cognate. Personification is ascribing human characteristics to non-human entities. (D) is also an English cognate, anaphora, though less well known to students outside of an AP/IB literature class, who should know it. It requires repetition and therefore we can eliminate it.

In this case and literature in general, weather phenomena are often given features and personality traits. A friendly breeze, a pregnant cloud or "the rolling thunder of eloquence and the monosyllabic brevity of lightning".

(A) fits quite well as a ‘perezoso’, lazy wind, but without knowing the word, the student still has a 50-50 chance.

Take a look at an example unit from the IB Spanish Literature course. Now, take a look at our writing curriculum for our novice and advanced creative writing programs. We already know how to teach all of these skills, and in the advanced program, skills even beyond what is required. So the only real difference for us is that it is in Spanish, and that's no problem at all! We will make sure the student has not only put forth a piece of creative writing in Spanish, but that he or she uses creative writing tools that will be tested and understands the literature it is based on. It’s no different than teaching AP/IB English lit