Reading Comprehension Questions and Answers

Answer: B

According to the passage, sweet foods are energy boosters.

The quotation in paragraph 3 that follows the doctors' warning says 'sweet foods in nature are not poisonous, they give us energy. We all need to have some sugar in our diet'. Foods that give us energy are energy boosters.

Sweet foods are explicitly called not poisonous, and the passage nowhere calls them dangerous, though it notes children risk their health by eating too many. Deactivated genes confuses the food with the gene therapy that seeks to deactivate the sweet gene.

Answer: A

The answer is that (a) and (c) are incorrect, (b) is correct.

(a) is incorrect: the passage says 'Doctors warn against any form of gene therapy which seeks to deactivate the sweet gene', so they do not favour it.

(b) is correct: a team member is quoted saying 'A sweet taste receptor recognises the sweet content of food', and the sweet content of food is its amount of sweetness.

(c) is incorrect: the passage says 'The same gene exists in humans, so it means that if your parents have a sweet tooth then you probably will as well', which is heredity at work.

Any option calling (a) or (c) correct, or calling all three incorrect, is therefore wrong.

Answer: C

The willows and poplars look out of place because the landscape is generally treeless.

Paragraph 3 says the larger villages 'have healthy trees, usually willows or poplars which look quite out of place in the generally treeless landscape'. To look absurd here means to look out of place, and the reason given is the treeless country around them.

The passage calls them healthy trees, not stunted shrubs, and says nothing about their having few branches and leaves. There are no other trees to camouflage them; the point is that trees are rare.

Answer: B

The keyed answer is that (A) is correct and (R) is not the reason for it.

The Assertion matches paragraph 3: 'each courtyard wall is piled high with sticks gathered from the mountains to get a fire started'.

The Reasoning does not: the passage says 'Wood is a precious commodity in the highland areas of Tibet and is never wasted', in a 'generally treeless landscape'. Wood is scarce, not abundant, so (R) is false and cannot be the reason for (A).

The options do not include 'A is true but R is false'. The keyed option is the only one that accepts (A) without making (R) its reason. The options calling (A) incorrect are ruled out by the passage, and the one making (R) the reason requires (R) to be true.

Answer: D

Yak dung is used as a substitute for wood.

The passage ends: 'The lack of solid fuel in the shape of wood is not a problem for the Tibetans, who have an ingenious wood substitute : yak dung.' Wood is scarce in the treeless highlands, so dried yak dung is burnt as fuel in its place.

Yak dung feeds a fire; it is not a substitute for fire itself. Buildings are made of stone and mud bricks, and the marigolds are flowers on the window ledges, neither connected with yak dung.

Answer: A

The incorrect description is that walls are made of mortar and cement.

Paragraph 1 says: 'Walls are made up of stone to waist height and finished off with mud bricks to the roof.' Mortar and cement are not mentioned; the walls are stone and mud brick.

'Tin cans line the window ledges' and 'They are solidly built' both match the passage ('Tin cans lined the window ledges'; 'The houses looked solid'). 'Roofs are made of mud bricks' is a loose reading of 'mud bricks to the roof', which describes the walls; the passage gives the roofs only as flat. It is unsupported rather than contradicted, which makes the mortar-and-cement statement the clearly incorrect one, as keyed.

Answer: D

'Courtyards jostling together' implies being in close proximity.

To jostle is to push and bump against others in a crowd. Used of buildings or courtyards, it pictures them crowded close together, as if pressing against one another for space.

Being far apart is the opposite. Different sizes and dimensions is not implied by the verb, and 'one on top of the other' suggests stacking, while jostling suggests side-by-side crowding.

Answer: B

The passage is a news item about archaeological findings. It begins with a dateline, Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh), reports recent events (excavations that have unearthed temples), and quotes an official, the archaeologist Ramesh Kumar Yadav, which are features of a news report. It is not an excavation report written by the archaeologists, since it is told about them. It has no features of an article in a historical magazine, and it does not report scientific research by scientists.

Answer: A

The passage is mainly about the finding of 40 ancient temples in Madhya Pradesh. Its first paragraph states that excavations unearthed 40 temples, and the later paragraphs describe where they were found, how they were found and what is planned for them. The clearance of debris, the exhibition Naveen Uplabdhiyan and the restoration of the temples are mentioned only as supporting details, so they are parts of the story and not its main subject.

Answer: C

The maximum number of temples were found in Raisen. The passage lists 24 temples in Ashapuri (Raisen), 4 in Dhawala (Raisen) and 2 in Richhawar (Raisen), a total of 30 of the 40. Sehore has 10 (Devbadla), Khandwa has 2 (Omkareshwar) and Jhabua has 1 (Samohi). The count for Raisen alone is larger than the other districts together, which settles the answer.