Direction for [ Question No: 378 To 380 ] :
Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow by selecting the correct/most appropriate options.
Lata stood outside the hall for a minute. Sunlight poured onto the stone steps. The edge of her middle finger was smeared with dark blue ink, and she looked at it, frowning. She was close to tears.
Other English students stood on the steps and chatted. A post-mortem of the paper was being held, and it was dominated by an optimistic and chubby girl who was ticking off on her fingers the various points she had answered correctly.
'This is one paper I know I have done really well,' she said. 'Especially the 'King Lear' question. I think that the answer was 'Yes'.' Others were looking excited or depressed. Everyone agreed that several of the questions were far harder than they had needed to be. A knot of history students stood not far away, discussing their paper, which had been held simultaneously in the same building. One of them was the young man who had brought himself to Lata's attention in the Imperial Book Depot, and he was looking a little worried. He had spent a great deal of time these last few months in extra-curricular activities - particularly cricket - and this had taken its toll upon his performance.
Lata walked to a bench beneath the gulmohar tree and sat down to collect herself. When she got home for lunch, she would be pestered with a hundred questions about how well she had done. She looked down at the red flowers that lay scattered at her feet. In her head, she could still hear the buzzing of the fly.
The young man, though he had been talking to his classmates, had noticed her walking down the steps. When she sat down on the far bench under the tree, he decided to have a word with her. He told his friends that he had to go home for lunch - that his father would be waiting for him - and hurried along the path past the gulmohar. As he came to the bench, he uttered an exclamation of surprise and stopped.
