Quiz playing is a wonderful way to increase your knowledge of English as a Second Language. Remember that all of our ESL quizzes have titles that are both friendly and technical at the same time… In the case of this quiz you might like to tell your friends about the “Bold as Brass Quiz” but no doubt your teachers will talk about “Comparatives”. If you hear a technical term and you want to find a quiz about the subject then just look through the list of quiz titles until you find what you need.
English has some splendid phrases for conveying ideas and such phrases are often known as comparatives. 'Bold as brass' is one example. If you say that someone is 'Bold as brass" it means they are brave and fearless. See how many of the comparatives below you have seen or used in your own speaking and writing.
1. A chocolate teapot would (fairly obviously) melt, and lose its shape, and generally be 'unfit for purpose' if you tried to put a hot liquid inside it.
2. Instead of a barbecue, with lots of fairly small pieces of meat, some people prefer the old tradition of slowly cooking a whole pig ('hog') over an open fire. For those who like such things, no doubt that's fine ... but there are plenty of people who don't, such as vegetarians, Muslims and Jews. Bar-mitzvah is a Jewish celebration (the 'rite of passage' when a boy officially becomes a young man), so a gathering of Jews would be unlikely to want a hog-roast, because they regard pigs as 'un-clean'.
3. Quite a good phrase, but we don't seem to use it.
4. If you have spent any time in Britain you will know how depressing a rainy day can feel in the middle of a long working week. Nobody wants one of those! But this is not the usual situation to use such an expression. You might just as likely use it to describe someone who arrives looking angry, who will not join you in polite conversation.