One shoe, two hats
The numbers are right.
A shoe above and a pair of hats below. The poem counts correctly while getting everything else wrong.
📚 Chapter Learning Kit
A Funny Man · Class 7 English · Poorvi
English 3 topics 105 leveled MCQs 51 flashcards 5 games Free
Shared by a Veda teacher · Generated with Veda AI · Oct 2026
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Veda Bites are swipeable micro-lessons — each one teaches exactly one idea. Here's a taste from this kit; the app has the full deck.
A courtesy, wrong object
He raises the shoe.
Raising your hat is a politeness. He performs it exactly, with something that is not a hat.
His manners were polite
The poem says so directly.
Which rules out reading him as rude, and is the thing most readers get wrong about this poem.
What a phrasal verb is
Two words, one idea.
A verb joined to a small word, the particle, so that the pair works as a single unit of meaning.
Walking down, taking out, sat down
Three in the poem, easily missed.
Nothing about them draws attention to itself, which is part of why phrasal verbs slip past a reader.
Not a sum of its parts
No taking, and nothing inside.
To take in a lesson is to understand it. To put off a meeting involves no putting. The meaning has left the parts behind.
📖 Smart notes
What you'll study, topic by topic
1
The Poem: A Funny Man
A stranger arrives wearing his shoe on his head, offers a bun as a rose, and leaves without answering a perfectly reasonable question. The jokes are obvious. The clever part is three short phrases that describe each sens…
- A funny kind of man comes walking down the street wearing a shoe on his head and hats upon his feet.
- His manners are faultless. He raises the shoe to the speaker and smiles, which is the behaviour of somebody being courteous.
- He offers to present a rose and produces a currant bun instead, holding it up to the speaker’s nose.
~33 min · full explanation, examples & memory tricks in the app
2
Phrasal Verbs: One Verb, Five Meanings
Add a small word to an ordinary verb and the meaning can change completely. Take up, take after, take in, take over and take off share one verb and mean five unrelated things. This topic sorts them, and finds the rule ab…
- A phrasal verb is a verb plus a preposition or an adverb, working together as a single unit of meaning.
- The poem supplies three: walking down, taking out and sat down. All three are ordinary and easy to miss.
- The meaning of the whole is often nothing like the meaning of the parts. To take in a lesson has no taking and no inside.
~34 min · full explanation, examples & memory tricks in the app
3
Verbs of Moving, and Telling It Yourself
English has a dozen verbs for going along on foot, and they differ in two ways at once: how fast, and how. Choosing the right one replaces a verb and an adverb with a single word, which is the same economy good descripti…
- The poem supplies three verbs of moving: walking, staggered and hopped. None of them is a plain synonym for the others.
- Verbs of movement differ in pace. Stagger is slower than walk, and sprint is faster than run.
- They also differ in manner. Hop and walk may happen at the same speed, and the difference between them is how the feet are used.
~33 min · full explanation, examples & memory tricks in the app
❓ Leveled MCQ practice
Try the smart MCQs from this kit
105 questions laddered from warm-up to topper-level, each with an explanation. A taste:
The poem describes a man met in the street whose clothes and gifts are all the wrong way round, and it has a named author. Writing A Funny Man was
Beginner
A Hugh Lofting
B Eliza Cook
C Helen Keller
D Natalie Joan
Show answer & explanation
Natalie Joan
The poem is signed at the end, as the others in this reader are.
The funny man has his footwear and his headwear exchanged, and the poem says which is which. Worn on his head is a
Beginner
A a single rose
B a shoe
C nothing at all
D two hats
Show answer & explanation
a shoe
One shoe above, and the hats are on his feet.
One shoe above and two hats below. What does getting those numbers right suggest?
Advanced
A the poet could not think of a third hat
B the man had lost one of his shoes somewhere
C the nonsense is being managed rather than scattered
D the numbers are the only accurate thing in the whole poem
Show answer & explanation
the nonsense is being managed rather than scattered
A poem careless about arithmetic would not have bothered, which is the first sign of control.
On meeting the speaker the funny man does not speak at all; he makes a gesture of courtesy instead. The first thing he does is
Intermediate
A raises the shoe and smiles
B sits himself down upon the ground
C offers to present her with a rose
D begins to sing a song to her
Show answer & explanation
raises the shoe and smiles
Raising your hat is a courtesy, performed exactly, with the wrong object.
🃏 Flashcards
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51 flashcards in this kit — the app reviews them with spaced repetition so the right card returns on the right day.
🎮 Learning games
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Sequence Builder
Categorization
Fact Or Myth
Word Match
Memory Match
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