Reading Comprehension Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Tauji can be described as a conservative.

He is strict and disapproves of the girls going out to a concert: 'Flowers in your hair ? Rushing off in exam time ... Everyone will think you are completely dissolute'. He worries about reputation and the girls' chances of marriage and has threatened to send everyone home. These are the attitudes of someone who holds to traditional ideas of conduct.

An anarchist rejects authority, an agnostic doubts that God can be known, and a liberal would allow the freedom that Tauji denies.

Answer: C

The sound comes from a contingent of soldiers.

The first speaker asks what the sound is, and the reply is 'Only the scarlet soldiers, dear, The soldiers coming.' The drumming is the soldiers marching down the valley. A crowded street, a group of commoners or a market place are never mentioned.

Answer: D

The poem is a conversation between two persons.

It runs in question and answer: each stanza opens with a question beginning 'O what ...' or 'O why ...', and the next lines answer it, closing with 'dear'. The same two voices alternate throughout, one anxious and asking, the other reassuring. The last line, 'Why are you kneeling ?', is addressed to the one who questioned.

Nothing suggests a third speaker, a crowd or a larger group.

Answer: C

The poem is written in the form of a ballad.

A ballad tells a story in short stanzas, often in dialogue and with repeated words and lines. This poem is four quatrains of question and answer, with repeated words ('drumming, drumming', 'brightly, brightly') and a story of approaching soldiers that builds to a threat, all marks of the form.

An elegy is a lament for the dead, an epic is a long narrative poem about heroic deeds, and a lyric expresses a speaker's own feeling. This short narrative in dialogue is none of them.

Answer: D

The rhyme scheme is abab.

In the first stanza the line endings are 'ear' (a), 'drumming' (b), 'dear' (a), 'coming' (b). The other stanzas follow the same pattern: 'clear' and 'dear' rhyme, 'brightly' and 'lightly' rhyme, then 'gear' and 'dear', 'morning' and 'warning', and 'there' and 'dear'. Lines one and three rhyme with each other, and lines two and four with each other.

'baba' would put the second line's rhyme first, and 'abcb' and 'abdc' leave lines that do not rhyme.

Answer: C

Kneeling reflects anxiety.

The questions get more worried as the stanzas go on. The soldiers have left the road, and the last question, 'Why are you kneeling ?', shows the person asking the questions has dropped to his or her knees, in fear or prayer, as the danger comes close. Kneeling here is a sign of dread, not calm.

Indifference, anger and jubilation do not fit a person who has been asking nervous questions about armed men approaching.

Answer: B

Mr. Upadhyay was the hostel warden.

The narrator and Patil have slipped out of the hostel, and Upadhyayji stops them on the road and asks where they are going. Later the narrator says to Mrs. Upadhyay, 'Warden Saheb is bothering you unnecessarily', and she scolds her husband with 'what kind of a warden are you ?'. The boys call him 'Sir' as students would, but his role in the institution is that of warden.

Nothing in the passage makes him a school administrator or principal, and he is not shown teaching.

Answer: D

'had managed' is in the Past Perfect tense.

The past perfect is formed with had + past participle (had managed, had gone, had seen). It describes an action completed before another point in the past. Here the narrator had got the tickets before the evening of the play that the rest of the story describes.

The past indefinite (simple past) would be 'we managed', with no auxiliary. The present perfect uses has/have + past participle ('we have managed'), and the present continuous uses am/is/are + -ing ('we are managing'). Neither has had.

Answer: C

She welcomed them.

When the narrator went into the kitchen, 'She was pleased to see me'. She asked about the play, laughed when the boys explained that they could not go, and then told her husband to let the children go and have some fun. Every act is friendly, so she was far from cold or displeased.

The options that say she received them coldly, was displeased with her husband for bringing them or was unhappy to see them all contradict her warmth. She disagreed with her husband only about holding the boys back, not about bringing them home.

Answer: C

Both statements are true, so the answer is both (A) and (B) are True.

(A): the narrator says 'We had managed to get the tickets for the play after much running around' and later shows the tickets to Mrs. Upadhyay, so they had the tickets before setting out, that is, in advance. (B): Mrs. Upadhyay listens to the boys' secret and then tells her husband, 'Why don't you let the children go and have some fun ?', so she takes their side.

The options that call either statement false therefore fail, because the text bears out both.