Reading Comprehension Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The one who lived beyond his salary was the shirastedar.

The last sentence of the passage says the shirastedar's income was reputed to be more than the sahib's, and that although this may be an exaggeration, he certainly lived beyond his salary.

The sahib is the officer being criticised for temper, not for money. The sahib's peon is only mentioned as someone who had to be cajoled, and the passage does not say that the officers lived beyond their salaries.

Answer: A

The ones ready to lend their ears to sycophants were the Princes.

The passage says: 'Princes were always at the mercy of others and ready to lend their ears to sycophants.' That sentence names no one else.

Sahibs, shirastedars and officers appear in the following lines, as people who had to be cajoled or who held power, but they are not described as listening to flatterers.

Answer: D

What had intoxicated him was power.

The first paragraph says the officer could have politely asked the writer to go, 'but power had intoxicated him to an inordinate extent'. His impatience and anger came from his sense of authority.

Wealth, physical strength and money and property are never mentioned in connection with him; the passage speaks only of his rank and temper.

Answer: C

The key gives Doubtful as the tone of the poet.

The poet looks back on a journey that began with high hopes ('exalting minds, making all the burden light') and ended with the travellers barely knowing 'why we were there', their faces darkened and their deeds 'neither great nor rare'. The speaker is questioning what the journey was worth, which the key reads as doubt.

'Pessimistic' is close, but the poem ends on a quiet resolution, 'Home is where we have to gather grace', which is not despair. 'Positive' fails because of the loss and disillusion, and 'Philosophical' names a manner of reflection and not an attitude to the events.

Answer: D

The key says the poet is referring to moral concerns.

The pilgrimage is the surface story, but the poem is about conduct: a quarrel over how to cross a desert, the loss of a friend, deeds that were 'neither great nor rare', and a closing line that places grace in home life. These are questions of right living, so the key reads them as moral concerns.

'Religious matters' is the tempting answer because of the word pilgrimage, yet the poem sets no creed or rite, and the pilgrimage is the vehicle for the lesson. Daily prayers and political issues are not mentioned at all.

Answer: B

The key says the first two lines of the last stanza deal with a dilemma.

The lines read: 'When, finally, we reached the place, / We hardly knew why we were there.' The travellers arrive but cannot say what the arrival was for, and are left puzzled between the purpose they started with and the emptiness they find. The key reads that puzzlement as a dilemma.

An observation, a plain report of what happened, is the nearest alternative reading, and a candidate could defend it; the key does not. 'An irony' would need a gap between expectation and result that the lines state outright, and 'an assertion' would need a claim argued for, which these lines do not make.

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.