Reading Comprehension Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The poet longs for homely stay.

The closing line, 'Home is where we have to gather grace', is the poem's answer to the failed journey. After the effort and quarrels of travel, grace is to be found at home, so what the poet longs for is a settled life at home.

Outings and tourist places are the kind of travel the poem has just found empty. Friendship appears only as a loss on the road ('We lost a friend'), and the closing line does not turn to it.

Answer: C

The key's answer is perceived knowledge.

The passage describes human consciousness as boundless freedom, as having 'supremacy over perceived human conceptions', and as reaching the 'eternity of human expression'. Freedom and eternity are therefore named features. 'Seamlessness' fits the closing picture of a limitless vision transmitted without any 'artificial enforcing machinery', a smooth, unbroken flow, though the passage never uses the word itself.

'Perceived' is the one term the passage places below consciousness: consciousness has supremacy over perceived conceptions, so what is merely perceived is what consciousness overcomes, not a feature of it. This question is answered by that one phrase and by elimination.

Answer: D

The passage says The Life Divine exalts and envisages knowledge of spiritual truth.

The text calls the book 'a spiritual discourse' and a 'consummate example' of Sri Aurobindo's ability to create 'the limitless vision of truth and power of human consciousness'. Truth seen through the spirit is what is exalted.

'Perceived human conceptions' are what consciousness has supremacy over, so they are not exalted. The passage does not turn to the material world or to social relations anywhere: its subject is the psyche, expression and the seer's vision.

Answer: B

The key's answer is that Sri Aurobindo leaves his mark as a visionary saint.

The passage names him 'a seer', with an 'indefatigable spirit of the seer', and credits him with a 'limitless vision of truth'. A seer who works through spiritual vision is a visionary saint.

'Literary artist' is the nearest rival, since the passage mentions higher aesthetics and The Future Poetry; but it presents the aesthetics as the seer's own expression, not as the mark he leaves. Nothing in the passage presents him as a social reformer or a historical critic.

Answer: D

The word 'expression' is not related to rational expression.

The passage ties expression to the higher, non-rational side of consciousness: 'higher aesthetics' gives aesthetic expression, 'the creative vital' gives creative expression, and the 'subtle plane' and the 'eternity of human expression' point to the transcendental.

Reason or logic is never mentioned as a source of expression, which is why rational expression is the odd one out. The other three can each be traced to a phrase in the text.

Answer: C

A person can be truly contented when he obtains what he cherishes.

The poem asks: Let all living beings obtain Whatever they truly cherish. Let every person on this planet be truly contented. The two wishes are placed together, so contentment follows from obtaining what one truly cherishes.

Obtaining what one did not even dream of, the destruction of enemies and living among one's kin are not mentioned anywhere in the poem as sources of contentment. The poem in fact wishes the wicked to be reformed, not destroyed.

Answer: D

The wickedness of the wicked can cease when the wicked themselves develop the desire to do good.

The poem's second and third lines read: Let wickedness of the wicked cease. Let the desire to do good in them increase. The cure it prays for is an inner change in the wicked, a growing desire to do good.

Destroying the wicked, outnumbering them by the good and the Lord drinking their poison are never suggested in the poem; the first would also contradict its prayer that all beings become friends and all be contented.

Answer: B

The prayer spreads the message of the well-being of everyone in this world.

The poem prays that wickedness cease, that all living beings come together as best friends, that all obtain what they truly cherish and that every person on the planet be truly contented. Its concern is universal welfare, which this option states.

'Only a few', the wicked never getting peace and the good being rewarded while the bad are punished all set one group against another, but the poem wishes the wicked to turn good and wants everyone to be content.

Answer: D

The key gives that the sun stands for duty.

The image is 'The Sun of one's own Dharma arise', following the wish that the darkness of sin recede. The sun is the sun of one's own dharma, a word that here means one's duty and right conduct, so the metaphor is of duty arising like the sun to dispel the darkness of sin.

'Dark' is the opposite of the sun in the poem (the darkness of sin), and 'heat' is only a physical property of the sun that the poem does not use. 'Knowledge' is a common metaphor for light in general, but here the sun is tied by the poem to dharma, so the key reads it as duty.

Answer: C

All early motor cars were loud, awkward and unusual in appearance.

The passage says that the early cars varied in size, 'Nevertheless, they were all characterized by their noise, clumsiness, and peculiar appearance'. That is option (c) in other words.

Option (a) confuses what people thought with what the cars were: most people saw them as jokes or potentially dangerous toys, but the passage does not say all of them were objects of amusement. Option (d) is the same kind of slip, since 'potentially dangerous' describes how they were perceived. Option (b) is the opposite of the passage, which describes them as clumsy and says the law held them back.