If it isn’t, then I’m afraid Mrs Malaprop is at work. The word “epitome” (= best example of a quality, seen in a particular person or thing) would be more suitable, but the sentence would have to be changed somewhat, perhaps to:

2. It may or may not mean that he is still a prefect now, but he was a prefect when he spoke the sentence.

If he has just said those words, you can either say: “He said he is a prefect.” (because he is presumably still a prefect), OR “He says he is a prefect.”

You can use the present tense to report something that has just happened. For example, if you are at a party and talking to somebody, and then you go back to the friend you came with, you can tell her: “That man over there says he knows you.”

3. “What it takes” means the qualities, ability or effort that is needed for success in a particular field or to achieve what you want to achieve.

“I don’t care what it takes” is usually spoken by someone who will spare no effort to achieve something. You can see the expression used, for example, in a story about a successful businesswoman in an online version of a British newspaper, The Argus:

“Her ambition knows no bounds and she is hellbent on increasing the company’s £7 million turnover. ‘I’m going to make it £10 million in the next two years, 20 in the next five years and 50 in ten years. Then I’m retiring,” she says. “I don’t care what it takes, we’re going to get there.”

http://www.theargus.co.uk/lifehealth/reallife/display.var.1345611.0.what_it_takes_to_be_a_top_woman.php

4. The final “-ing” sound is naturally pronounced as “-in” in some regional accents in Britain and the United States. These “-in” endings often find their way into folk songs, pop songs, or films, and I suppose some people just adopt this way of speakin’, which we shouldn’t really use in formal settings.

5. In both the sentences, a verb of perception, “hear”, is used with another verb. In “I hear him talking.”, the second verb has an –ing form, and in “I hear him talk.”, the verb is in the base form.

When we use “hear” with a verb in the base form, it often means that we hear the whole of the action in the second verb. For example, in the sentence “I hear him talk to sports people every week on television.”, it is assumed that “I” listen to everything he says in the weekly sports programme.

When we use “hear” with a verb in the –ing form, it often means that we hear something that is in progress. For example, in the sentence “Whenever I pass his house in the evenings, I hear him talking to his plants.”, he probably is in the middle of talking to his plants (as some keen gardeners do) when “I” pass his house, but “I” don’t hear the whole of his “conversation” with them.

“I hear him talking.” is not a sentence in the continuous tense, since “hear” is the main verb, and it is in the simple present tense. Besides, a continuous tense consists of a “be” verb + an -ing verb, as in “is talking”.

2) Both (A) and (B) are acceptable. When we say “ostrich egg” or “chicken egg”, we are describing what sort of egg it is, but when we say “ostrich’s egg” or “chicken’s egg”, we are saying that the egg belongs to or comes from an ostrich or a chicken. We usually use the apostrophe ‘s’ to indicate possession in the case of people, animals, organisations consisting of people, and a few non-living things.

3) Although it is acceptable to say (A) since you are presumably talking about a living fish, and (C) is technically not incorrect, it is best and most natural to say “The fish has hurt its tail.”

“Fish tail” as in your sentence (B) is usually used for the tail of a dead fish which may be cooked or found on its own on the beach, for example. I suppose we can have “fish tail curry” as we have “fish head curry” and “ox-tail soup”.

4) A chair is not a living thing and it is not followed by an apostrophe ‘s’. So sentence (C) is not acceptable. Sentence (A) is not wrong grammatically, provided the chair referred to has only one leg. Sentence (B) can be accepted after correcting “leg” to “legs”, since “one of” must be followed by a plural noun (one of many). So it becomes: “One of the legs of the chair is broken.”, which is a correct but long sentence with two “of”s.

To write a simpler sentence, you could say: “One leg of the chair is broken.”

5) Strictly speaking, “were” is the correct answer there, since the narration is in the past and there are two activities that form the coordinated subjects of the sentence, i.e. “waking to beautiful birdsong” and “listening to the river water rushing by”. But to my ears, “was” sounds so much better.

We can argue that the two activities are part of one listening experience on waking up, but this could be better justified if we change the sentence to:

“Waking to beautiful birdsong and the sound of the river water rushing by was awesome."