Reading Comprehension Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The poet describes the beauty and vastness of Earth.

The poem opens 'Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful world', praises the water, grass, air and wind, asks 'How far do you go', listing wheat-fields, rivers, cities, gardens, cliffs, isles and people 'for thousands of miles', and ends 'Ah, you are so great, and I am so small'. Every stanza returns to how beautiful and how vast the world is.

The poem says nothing of the Earth's past. Plants (grass, trees, wheat-fields) and cities are only items in its lists, not its subject.

Answer: A

The wind in the poem talks to itself.

The second stanza says of the wind: 'It walks on the water, and whirls the mills, / And talks to itself on the tops of the hills.' The poet personifies the wind as murmuring to itself up on the hilltops.

The hills are where the wind talks, not whom it talks to, which makes that option the main trap. The trees are what the wind shakes in the line before, and clouds are not mentioned anywhere in the poem.

Answer: C

The figures of speech are alliteration in line 1 and personification in line 4.

Line 1, 'Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful world', repeats the opening w sound in wide, wonderful and world: that is alliteration. Line 4, 'World, you are beautifully drest', speaks to the world as a person and says it is dressed, giving it a human quality: that is personification.

Anaphora is the repetition of a word at the start of successive lines, which line 1 does not show. There is no metaphor or simile (a comparison using like or as) in either line.

Answer: A

The three things are rivers, gardens, cliffs.

Stanza 3 reads: 'You friendly Earth! How far do you go, / With the wheat-fields that nod and the rivers that flow. / With cities and gardens, and cliffs, and isles, / And people upon you for thousands of miles ?' Rivers, gardens and cliffs are all named there.

Each other option includes something from outside stanza 3: oceans are not named in the poem; trees appear in stanza 2 and the whisper in stanza 4; grass belongs to stanza 1 and the mills to stanza 2.

Answer: D

People watched the meteor explosion on Facebook and YouTube.

Paragraph 2 says that when a meteor exploded over a Russian city in 2013, millions of people around the world watched videos and photos of the event on Facebook and YouTube.

YouTube alone is only half of what the passage names. Twitter appears in the passage in connection with the Hudson crash and the Haiti earthquake, not the meteor. All social media handles goes beyond the passage, which names just two platforms.

Answer: C

The keyed answer is that they can change our lives for the better.

To take something lightly is to treat it as unimportant. The passage ends: 'But social media can change our lives for the better', after showing in paragraph 2 that social media spreads news of dramatic events and can even save lives, as in the Haiti earthquake. That is the passage's reason for treating it seriously.

'The facts are erroneous' overstates the passage, which says only that some facts are erroneous. Strangers calling for information happened to Jim, but it is not offered as a reason. 'News posted are hoax' contradicts the passage, which says only some posts are hoaxes.

Answer: D

The correct order is (c) → (a) → (b) → (d).

Paragraph 1 tells the story in this sequence: a plane crash landed into the Hudson River (c); Jim, who was nearby, watched it and immediately tweeted (a); people then contacted him and asked what was happening (b); and it was 15 minutes before the news broke on official news channels (d).

The other orders cannot be right. Two of them put an event before the crash itself, either people contacting Jim (b) or the broadcast (d). The first option puts the broadcast and the contacting before Jim had even tweeted, though the passage says the news spread from his tweet.

Answer: C

Only statement (a) is correct, so the answer is (a) is correct, but (b) and (c) are incorrect.

(a) matches the passage: 'On 15 January 2009 ... A plane crash landed into the Hudson River'.

(b) is wrong because the passage says 'The pilot, crew and 155 passengers escaped safely'; the pilot did not lose his life.

(c) is wrong because Jim tweeted about the crash; it was other people on the street who took photos and videos and posted them online, and Facebook is not mentioned in this part of the story.

The options that call (b) or (c) correct, or call (a) incorrect, are therefore ruled out.

Answer: B

According to the passage, news on social media travel fast.

Paragraph 3 opens: 'News travels fast on social media, but false stories spread just as quickly as the truth.' The Hudson crash example makes the same point, since Jim's tweet spread the news 15 minutes before official channels had it.

The passage does not call such news reliable; it warns that not everything posted is reliable. It says some stories are deliberate hoaxes, not that all of them are. And far from being insignificant, social media news is shown helping people during the Haiti earthquake.

Answer: A

It means they started posting news-bits, pictures and videos on social media.

The sentence comes right after the passage says that people on the street 'took photos and videos with their phones and posted them online'. By recording and sharing what they saw, ordinary people did the work of journalists, reporting the news before official channels did.

Nothing in the passage says anyone sought employment at media houses or left their jobs; the phrase is figurative, not about careers. Contacting Jim for details is what other people did, and asking for news is not reporting it.