Reading Comprehension Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The food was divided equally among all members.

The passage says: 'all the food that was produced was divided between all the members of the tribe. Everything belonged to the tribe.' The patriarch did the dividing, but the whole produce was shared and nobody owned it.

The passage never says that the strong got more, that the patriarch took the lion's share or that the division followed gender. All of those contradict the shared ownership it describes.

Answer: D

Both (A) and (B) are True.

Statement (A): the narrator says 'I went to the old woman and took her hand in mine, gripping it tightly.' Taking and gripping the hand of a distressed old woman is a gesture of comfort and sympathy. Statement (B): the boy grabbed the girl by the hair and 'rained blows and kicks on her stomach', which is a violent attack. The question treats the girl as his sister.

Any option that calls either statement false therefore contradicts the passage.

Answer: D

Both (A) and (B) are True.

Statement (A): the narrator notes that 'the boy was wearing black jeans and a khaki jacket', which is casual clothing and not formal or uniform dress. Statement (B): when the boy's eyes fell on the girl, he 'sped like a bullet towards the girl' and attacked her, shouting abuse and threats, which shows rage. The question treats the girl as his sister.

Options that call either statement false are contradicted by these lines.

Answer: A

The people present were shocked beyond belief.

The narrator describes the reaction to the big bang: 'We felt as if we were being thrown violently to the ground', and later, on seeing the boy's face, 'my throat went suddenly dry'. The old woman bursts into a hysterical cry and everyone shivers. These are signs of deep shock.

'Indifferent' and 'maintained their composure' are contradicted by the shivering and the cry. 'Confused' is a milder state than the passage shows, which describes fear and a violent shock.

Answer: C

The young man was grievously wounded.

The passage describes 'a deep gash, from eye to lip' made by a bullet or sharp knife, 'blood and pus in it', and flesh under the lip that looked ripped open. That is a grievous, or very serious, injury.

He is neither happy and smiling nor hale and hearty, which would mean healthy. Nothing suggests curiosity either: he walks in, wounded and enraged, and attacks the girl.

Answer: B

The figure of speech is personification.

'The god of rain turned away his face' gives rain a god who has a face and who deliberately looks away, as a person might out of anger or indifference. Treating the failure of the rains as a human act is personification.

Alliteration needs repeated initial sounds, which are absent. Oxymoron joins contradictory terms, as in 'bitter sweet'. A transferred epithet shifts a describing word from the person to a nearby noun, as in 'a sleepless night'. None of those happens here.

Answer: B

The line signifies that poverty is increasing.

The poverty line is the threshold below which people count as poor. If it 'receded further', it moved away from the people living below it, so more of them fall under it and their distance from it grows. The line before it, 'All the plans failed', supports this: the schemes meant to lift people out of poverty did not work.

'No consequence', 'a thing of the past' and 'going down' all suggest that poverty is easing, which contradicts the poem's picture of hunger and failure.

Answer: D

The metaphor means that people are dying in large numbers.

'The whole village a graveyard' compares the village to a place full of dead bodies. It tells the reader that so many have died, of hunger and drought, that the village is as silent and lifeless as a burial ground.

The other readings take the image literally. Nothing in the poem speaks of migration, of new graveyards being planned or of people living in graveyards, and a metaphor does not describe real places.

Answer: B

Kalahandi stands for hunger.

The poet says: 'wherever there is hunger, there Kalahandi is.' The district's name has become a symbol of hunger, so wherever hunger is found, one can say Kalahandi is there, even with no road map or helicopter.

Prosperity and development are the opposite of the picture drawn. Natural disasters, such as the drought, are part of the cause in the poem, but the poet's own equation is between Kalahandi and hunger.

Answer: A

The calamity is drought.

The poem says the god of rain turned away his face, no green leaf was left on the trees, and the ground is cracked with drab river sand. A lack of rain, dry earth and a dried-up river are the marks of a drought.

An earthquake would bring collapsed buildings, a landslide a moving hillside and floods too much water. The rain withheld and the cracked ground point only to drought.