Question

Punctuate the following passage:
  Mij was out of the box in a flash he disappeared at high speed down the aircraft there were squawks and shrieks and a woman stood up on her seat screaming out a rat a rat

Answer 1

Hint:
 Try to understand the meaning of each of the sentences. This will help you to identify individual sentences, after which you can individually punctuate them respectively.

Complete answer:
 The passage begins with a simple assertive sentence to give us an introduction. This means that the first sentence should be - Mij was out of the box in a flash. There will be no additional punctuations needed for the first sentence.
The second sentence will also be assertive as it gives us additional information. So, the second sentence will also use just a full stop. So, the sentence should be - He disappeared at high speed down the aircraft.
Now, the third sentence is a long sentence. So, we will break it down into two parts. The first part consists of the sentence before ‘and’. This sentence will not require any further punctuation.
Now, the second part of the sentence is more complicated. The first part indicates an incident. So, it will not take any punctuation until ‘out’. After that, there is direct speech with exclamatory sentences. This means that there will be a comma after ‘out’. Then, there will be an inverted comma, and the letter ‘a’ will be capitalized. The word rat will have an exclamation mark. This will be repeated for the second cry. Then, the inverted commas will close.
The sentence should be - There were squawks and shrieks and a woman stood up on her seat screaming out, “A rat! A rat!”
This is how the entire paragraph should be written-
Mij was out of the box in a flash. He disappeared at high speed down the aircraft. There were squawks and shrieks and a woman stood up on her seat screaming out, “A rat! A rat!”

Note:
 In the given sentence, the aim is to get narrate incidents. In order to get information, one has to use enquiring sentences. In order to punctuate shock, one has to use exclamatory sentences. These types of sentences have a special punctuation
mark.