Reading Comprehension Questions and Answers

Answer: D

When she began to use designer legs she attracted the fashion and beauty industry.

The last paragraph says: 'The fashion and beauty industry took note of Aimee's talent and beauty and asked her to model for, or endorse beauty products.' It adds that she is now a global model for a leading cosmetics brand.

Designers were the people she invited to make the legs, so they were not the ones drawn in afterwards. Sports committees and photographers are not mentioned.

Answer: C

Both A and B are correct, so the answer is both A and B are correct.

The passage tells of a painful childhood in these terms: she was born with no shin bones, her legs were amputated, and she 'had to undergo a number of surgeries at the age of two, five and eight, and had to spend a long time in a hospital'. B is directly stated. A says her legs did not have bones, which loosely matches the missing shin bones that caused the amputation.

Taken strictly, the passage says shin bones were missing and not the whole leg. The question treats this as the cause of the pain, and the key accepts A on that reading. Options that reject A or B reject one of the two reasons the passage gives.

Answer: D

The true statement is that at the Boston meet Aimee was the only one on wooden legs.

The passage says: 'she was surprised to discover that she was the only athlete wearing wooden legs. The rest of the athletes had metal, shock-absorbent legs.'

The meet was 'for the disabled' and not for double amputees only, since the other athletes had at least one normal leg. Her mother treated her 'as a self-sufficient person who did not require any special treatment', the opposite of the second statement. She was asked to endorse beauty products, not health products.

Answer: A

She decided to enter the long jump competition next.

After discovering that she was the only one on wooden legs, her determination did not shake. The passage says she won, broke a national record, and then 'decided to enter the long jump competition next', an event double amputees were technically not supposed to enter.

She was already taking part in athletics before the meet, so that is not what she did in response. The designer legs and the fashion industry come later in the passage, after the world record.

Answer: B

In summer the cricket sang.

The first line says he was 'accustomed to sing / Through the warm, sunny months of gay summer and spring'. The complaint that follows, about an empty cupboard, comes only once winter arrives.

Sitting and playing, sleeping and relaxing are never mentioned, and slogging like an ant is what the cricket did not do, which is exactly why he was short of food in winter.

Answer: A

Statement A is right and statement B is wrong, so the answer is A is right and B is wrong.

A matches the poem: the ground is 'snow-covered', with 'not a flower' and 'not a leaf' to be seen, and a cricket who is cold, hungry and 'trembling with cold' could not be dancing about. B is not supported at all. Nothing in the poem mentions skating, and the poem shows a starving cricket in the snow, not a cricket enjoying winter sports. B is an imagined addition and not something the poem says.

So any option that makes B right is wrong, and any that makes A wrong ignores the winter scene.

Answer: A

What sent the cricket to the ant was starvation and famine.

The poem says: 'At last by starvation and famine made bold ... Away he set off to a miserly ant'. Hunger, which turned into famine in the winter, pushed him to ask for help.

The empty cupboard and the approaching winter are parts of his situation, but they are the background to the hunger, not the stated cause of his going. The ant's store of grain is something he hoped for, not the reason he went.

Answer: C

The poem is a fable.

A fable is a short story, here told in verse, in which animals behave like people and the story ends with a lesson. The cricket and the ant, one who sang all summer and one who saved, carry the lesson about preparing for the future.

A sonnet has fourteen lines in a fixed rhyme scheme, and this poem does not. An epic is a long narrative of heroes and great deeds. A lyric expresses the poet's personal feelings, and here the poem tells a story about animals.

Answer: C

The theme is that if we do not care for our future, we will eventually suffer.

The cricket sang through summer, kept nothing for winter, and was left with an empty cupboard, no food and the need to beg. His suffering follows from ignoring the future.

'Keep slogging like the ant' is too extreme: the poem does not ask anyone to work without rest, only to plan ahead. 'Pursue our hobbies' and 'keep partying and dancing' are what brought the cricket to ruin, so the poem argues against them as a way of life, not for them.

Answer: B

The figure of speech is alliteration.

Alliteration is the repetition of the same consonant sound at the start of nearby words. In 'sunny months of gay summer and spring' the s sound begins sunny, summer and spring, giving the line its musical, light-hearted effect.

There is no comparison in the line, so it is neither a simile (which compares with 'like' or 'as') nor a metaphor (which says one thing is another). Nothing non-human is given human qualities, so it is not personification either.