Reading Comprehension Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The writer saw the peacocks in a Rajasthan city.

The passage speaks of leaving 'the city', seeing peacocks on every tree, rock and hill, and later asks 'Did the peacocks of Rajasthan actually come out to greet me?', which places the city in Rajasthan.

The dark sea is a separate image, where the writer sees a duck covered with oil. The Himalayas and a mountaintop are not mentioned; the lonely peacock is seen on a distant hill in a vision.

Answer: D

The writer sees desolation because the peacocks have disappeared.

The writer tries to imagine the city now and sees 'a picture of desolation'. He is neither able to see the peacocks nor hear their song, and asks where they have all disappeared.

Dirt and filth and an uprooted city are not mentioned. The ducks come in a different image, the forlorn duck on the oil-soaked sea, which the writer recalls only when he thinks of the dejected peacock.

Answer: C

The answer is A is true but B is false.

A is true: the writer says the peacocks were there 'to both welcome and bid me farewell'. B is false: it is the duck, not the peacocks, whose wings are 'so heavy with slime that he can no longer fly'. The peacocks are described as graceful, and later as battered and terrified, but nothing is said of slime on them.

Answer: D

The statement that is not true is the peacocks can no longer fly now.

It is the duck on the oil-soaked sea whose wings are so heavy with slime that 'he can no longer fly'. The lonely peacock on the hill, by contrast, 'rises into the sky screaming with terror', so it can fly.

The other statements are true: the peacocks he saw had the same peace, grace and beauty, the writer sees only desolation in the city now, and he visits it again in a vision.

Answer: A

'The huts of history's shame' refers to a shameful event in history.

The speaker rises 'out of the huts of history's shame' and 'up from a past that's rooted in pain'. Here the poet means the shameful history of slavery and racial oppression, in which her people lived in those huts. The phrase points to that wrong done in history.

Abject poverty and modest living standards describe conditions, which were a result of that history and are not what the phrase refers to. 'Comfortable existence' is the reverse of the poem's image.

Answer: C

The theme is oppression, and the poem's answer to it.

The poem begins with the speaker being shot at with words, cut with eyes and killed with hatefulness, and goes on to a past of shame and pain, nights of terror and fear, and the dream and hope of the slave. Against all of that the speaker repeats 'I rise': the subject is oppression and the refusal to be kept down.

Feminism, relationship and environment are not the matter of the lines printed here.

Answer: B

The poet is an optimist.

To call herself 'the dream and the hope of the slave' is to claim that she carries hope forward, and the refrain 'I rise' says that she will go on climbing out of pain into a clear daybreak.

A pessimist expects the worst, a cynic distrusts people's motives and a nihilist rejects values and meaning, so each of them contradicts the hope and strength of these lines.

Answer: C

'A past that's rooted in pain' refers to a past that has always been painful.

'Rooted' means firmly fixed at the base, so pain is the foundation of the past the poet speaks of: generations of bondage and ill treatment, not a pleasant time that turned sour. The next lines speak of 'nights of terror and fear', which fits a past of unbroken pain.

A past that was pleasurable once, always pleasurable or mixed with pleasure does not fit the word 'rooted in pain'.

Answer: D

The use of 'I rise' is an example of repetition.

The words are repeated at the end of stanzas and, in the last lines, three times together, as a refrain that builds force and stresses the determination to rise.

Parallelism means similar grammatical structure in parts of a sentence, and hyperbole is deliberate exaggeration. Alliteration repeats initial consonant sounds, such as 'welling and swelling'; it is not the repetition of a whole phrase.

Answer: B

The device is a simile.

The line compares the speaker's rising to air using the word like: 'like air, I'll rise'. A comparison made explicit with 'like' or 'as' is a simile.

A metaphor makes the comparison without 'like' or 'as' (for example 'I am air'). An oxymoron joins two contradictory words, such as 'deafening silence', and metonymy names something by a thing closely associated with it, such as 'the crown' for a monarch.