Reading Comprehension Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The answer is (A) is correct, but not (B).

Paragraph 2 gives the ways to break monotony: 'One of the ways would be to blend light and dark colours. Or to paint two opposite sides in a lighter shade than the other two.' So blending light and dark shades is a way to break the monotony, and (A) is right.

(B) is the opposite of the writer's advice. The paragraph opens by contrasting imaginative colour with 'a plain monotonous colour on all four walls', so painting all four walls in plain colours is the monotony itself. That rules out 'both (A) and (B)'. Options (A) alone and (B) alone are partial or wrong: the keyed choice is the one that accepts (A) and rejects (B).

Answer: A

'To think out of the box' does not mean to think traditionally.

The idiom means to think creatively, beyond the usual limits and conventions: to come up with original, unusual ideas.

Thinking creatively and imaginatively, about novel ideas, and in unusual ways all describe the idiom. Thinking traditionally, following established patterns, is its opposite.

For example, a teacher who thinks out of the box might teach fractions through cooking instead of only through textbook exercises.

Answer: C

The writer says it is important to pay attention to the colour scheme because it reflects the personality of the owner.

Paragraph 3 states: 'Every room reflects the personality of the occupant, hence it is important to pay attention to every detail.' The word 'hence' links the reason (the room reflects its occupant) to the advice.

'Monotonous shades add life to the rooms' reverses the passage, which treats plain monotonous colour as the thing to avoid. 'The ambience created makes it look boring' also reverses it, since the ambience is made right by good colour. 'The walls reveal the secrets of your life' is an exaggeration the passage never makes; it says only that the room shows the occupant's personality.

Answer: B

The answer is (A) and (C) are correct, (B) is incorrect.

(A) matches the first paragraph: 'if used right, they can give a perfect look', and the second paragraph shows imaginative uses. (C) matches the idea of colour creating a spacious feeling on walls and ceiling: the writer says right use of colours 'helps you create the spacious feeling', blending light and dark on walls and painting the false ceiling a light blue to add height.

(B), 'Space is abundant nowadays', contradicts the opening: 'when there is an abundance of everything but space'. So (B) is the incorrect statement. The options that call (B) correct, or all three correct, therefore fail, and so does the one calling (A) and (C) incorrect.

Answer: C

People draw colourful sceneries on their walls to bring nature into their homes.

Paragraph 3 says: 'Some people draw an entire scenery on one side of the wall to give the feeling of bringing the outdoors inside.' Bringing the outdoors inside is the same as bringing nature into the home.

Blending dark and light colours and creating a sense of space belong to the earlier ideas in paragraph 2, where they are done with shades and ceilings, not with painted scenery. 'Give a deeper significance to their home' echoes the first sentence of the passage about colours in general, but it is not the reason the passage gives for drawing scenery.

Answer: C

The modern home owner is longing for space.

Paragraph 1 says: 'In today's time, when there is an abundance of everything but space, colour plays an important role in creating the right ambience and perhaps the space that you crave for.' To crave is to long for, so space is what is wanted.

Imagination is something the writer asks the reader to use ('Just let your imagination flow'), not something the owner longs for. Colours are the means of getting the effect, and 'sheer appeal' is the appeal to the senses that colour has. Neither is named as the thing craved.

Answer: D

The devices are simile and alliteration.

Line 2, 'The squat pen rests: snug as a gun', compares the pen to a gun using the word 'as', which is a simile. Line 4, 'When the spade sings into gravelly ground', repeats sounds in 'spade sings' and 'gravelly ground', which is alliteration. (The verb 'sings' also gives the spade a human act, so personification is present too, but no option pairs a simile with personification.)

Both option (A) 'metaphor and simile' and option (B) 'metaphor and personification' start with a metaphor, but line 2 is a simile, not a metaphor. Hyperbole is not present in either line. So (D) is the only pair that is right for both lines.

Answer: A

The tone is nostalgic and admiring.

The speaker watches his father digging and is carried back 'twenty years away' to the potato drills, remembering the boot on the spade, the firm leverage and the new potatoes picked together, with 'Loving their cool hardness in our hands'. Looking back to the past is nostalgia, and the careful description of his father's skilled work shows admiration.

Annoyance and anger, disgust and animosity, or pity and sympathy would need words of complaint, revulsion or sorrow, and the poem has none. The father is shown as skilled and the memory as warm.

Answer: A

The answer is comfortable.

'Coarse' and 'rough' are synonyms. 'Snug' means warm, cosy and comfortable, or fitting closely and neatly, so its synonym here is 'comfortable'.

'Lazy', 'perfect' and 'lethal' do not share the meaning of snug, so they break the synonym relationship the analogy sets up.

A snug room or a snug jacket is one that feels warm, cosy and well fitted, which is the sense the analogy expects.

Answer: B

The answer is the poem does not make it clear.

The printed lines describe the father digging and the speaker's memory of picking potatoes with him. They say nothing about the father's reaction to his son's choice of career. The only link to a career is the pen in the speaker's hand in the first lines, and no feeling of the father about it is stated.

'Ambivalent', 'wishes his son chose a more practical path' and 'glad his son is not a farmer' each attribute a feeling to the father that no line supports. A reader should not import feelings from outside the text, so the safe answer is that the poem does not make it clear.