Reading Comprehension Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Doctors are against gene therapy because sweet foods give energy to the body.

Paragraph 3 says: 'Doctors warn against any form of gene therapy which seeks to deactivate the sweet gene. "We have produced this gene through evolution because sweet foods in nature are not poisonous, they give us energy. We all need to have some sugar in our diet"'. Switching the gene off would work against something the body needs.

The passage says sweet foods are not poisonous. The guilt mentioned is the chocoholics' guilt about chocolate, not a result of therapy. Nothing is said about the therapy raising sugar levels.

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 underlined word It refers to the wind.

The line comes straight after 'And the wonderful wind is shaking the tree,'. The next lines go on: 'It walks on the water, and whirls the mills, / And talks to itself on the tops of the hills.' Walking on water, turning windmills and 'talking' on hilltops are all things the wind does, so it points back to the wind.

The river and the Earth do not whirl mills or talk on hilltops, and the grass belongs to the first stanza, not this one.

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.