Reading Comprehension Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The movement of the water reflects joy.

The poet describes the fountain 'Leaping and flashing / From morn till night' and says it is 'Happy at midnight, / Happy by day!'. Leaping, flashing water that the poet calls happy is a picture of joy.

Sadness and weariness are contradicted by the energy of the leaping water and by the word 'happy'. Earnestness (serious purpose) is not a mood the poem gives the fountain; it is playful and light.

Answer: D

The key reads this as to keep on moving all the time. The other option about ideas is the nearest rival, and the poem does not state the meaning outright.

The poet admires the fountain, which is always in motion, leaping 'from morn till night', and asks that his heart be 'Fresh, cheerful, constant, / Upward, like thee'. Water that keeps moving does not go stale, so 'fresh' is read as never stagnating, which the key expresses as moving on all the time.

Taking a bath regularly and dressing elegantly are literal and unrelated to a heart. 'To have new ideas all the time' is a fair paraphrase of freshness in everyday speech, and nothing in the lines I could check rules it out; it is the key's reading, with the fountain's constant motion as the comparison, that the question accepts.

Answer: A

The word is Glorious.

The last stanza opens 'Glorious fountain!', an exclamation of praise: glorious means splendid and deserving of admiration, so it shows how the poet feels about the fountain.

Cheerful, fresh and upward describe the qualities the poet wishes for his own heart ('Fresh, cheerful, constant, / Upward, like thee'); they are what he wants to be, not the word with which he admires the fountain.

Answer: C

The keyed device is personification.

'Waving so flower-like / When the winds blow!' shows the spray of the fountain waving, an action of living things, and being compared to a flower swaying in the wind. The key counts this as giving the fountain a living, human-like action, which is personification.

The phrase also contains a comparison with a flower, and strictly 'flower-like' makes it a simile, which is not among the options; that is why metaphor is the nearest rival, but a metaphor would state that the spray is a flower without 'like'. Alliteration needs repeated consonant sounds at the start of nearby words, and hyperbole needs exaggeration, which this line does not have.

Answer: A

The device is alliteration.

Stanza 2 reads 'Into the moonlight, / Whiter than snow, / Waving so flower-like / When the winds blow!'. The sound w is repeated in 'Whiter', 'Waving', 'When' and 'winds', which gives the lines their soft, rippling sound. That repetition of an initial consonant is alliteration.

Oxymoron joins two opposite ideas, and no pair like that appears. A transferred epithet gives an adjective to the wrong noun, which is not the case here. Anaphora is the repeated opening of lines; the poem repeats 'Into the' at the start of stanzas, but not within stanza 2's lines, so it does not describe this stanza.

Answer: A

The words belong to the Adjective class.

'Whiter' (the comparative of white), 'blithesome' (merry, light-hearted) and 'cheerful' all describe nouns, telling what something is like: in a poem about a fountain they describe its water and its mood. Words that qualify nouns are adjectives.

A noun names a person, place or thing; an adverb modifies a verb, adjective or another adverb, often ending in -ly; an interjection expresses sudden feeling, such as 'Oh!' or 'Hurrah!'. None of these fits whiter, blithesome and cheerful.

Answer: B

The gods were afraid of Shibi because they thought Shibi might take away their kingdoms.

The passage says: 'They feared that Shibi might one day take away their kingdoms.' The fear came from his great power, and they set out to test him.

The gods did not fear that he was a disguised god; they disguised themselves, as the dove and the eagle. His sense of justice was what they tested, not what they feared, and the gardens around his courtroom have nothing to do with their fear.

Answer: B

The king saved the dove from the fierce eagle.

The passage says 'There came a scared dove flying to him and it was followed by a fierce looking eagle. The king gave shelter to the dove and saved her.' The dove is the one in need of saving and the eagle is the one described as fierce.

Reversing the pair makes the king save the eagle from the dove. Indra and Agni are the gods who took the forms of the eagle and the dove, and the king did not save them from anything.

Answer: D

The king was blessed for his benevolence and greatness, which is (a) and (b) together.

The last lines say that Indra and Agni stood 'smiling and blessing the king for his benevolence and greatness'. Both (a) and (b) are named.

Calmness, (c), is mentioned earlier ('the king remained calm and unperturbed'), but it is not given as a reason for the blessing. So 'only (a)', 'only (b)' and 'only (c)' each leave out part of what is true or add what is not.

Answer: D

The underlined part is a Noun clause.

In 'The king assured the eagle that he would give equal quantity of any other food', the clause 'he would give equal quantity of any other food', introduced by 'that', tells what the king assured the eagle of. It does the work of a noun, as the object of the verb 'assured'. One can test this by replacing it with a noun phrase: 'The king assured the eagle of compensation.'

It does not describe a noun, so it is not an adjective clause, and it does not tell when, why or how, so it is not an adverb clause. The principal clause is 'The king assured the eagle'.