Reading Comprehension Questions and Answers

Answer: B

Correct answer: provide food to modern leaders for reflection

The passage recommends studying famous battles for the lessons they contain for those of us who lead or aspire to leadership. The lessons are about leadership rather than about warfare, which is why the option about modern war misses; and the passage adds to the value of ancient history rather than ranking itself above it.

Answer: C

Correct answer: they may be repetitions of past events

The passage closes by saying the student will see that the same pattern recurs consistently, again and again, throughout the centuries. Recurrence is what makes the past useful for reading the present; roots and context are true enough in general but are not what this passage argues.

Answer: B

Correct answer: wants better evaluation of news before publication

The passage's complaint is that evaluation is always weak and often wanting entirely, and it imagines someone putting his foot down to stop the worthless items travelling the wires. The horrors are the symptom the writer uses, not the object of his shock, and it is the newspapers he wants to do the deciding, not himself.

Answer: B

Correct answer: deserves no one's attention

The phrase is glossed in the passage itself: the imagined editor says an item does not amount to a row of beans; deserves no one's attention, and should travel the wires no farther. The clauses run in apposition, so the second explains the first.

Answer: A

Correct answer: they do not separate the real news from mere sensationalism

The passage says casual horrors and real disasters are thrown at the reader without discrimination and that the junk is dressed up to look as meaningful as the real news. Manpower and reader ignorance are explanations the passage never offers.

Answer: C

Correct answer: newspapers always dress up junk to look meaningful

This is stated in the passage's last sentence. Censorship is nowhere raised: what the writer wants is editorial judgement about importance, which is a different thing from suppression.

Answer: B

Correct answer: more careful analysis of each news story and its value

The passage defines the missing element as the moment when someone judges this is important and that does not amount to a row of beans. That is an assessment of each item's worth. Separating beans from junk mixes the passage's two metaphors into something it never says.

Answer: A

Correct answer: children retaining their curiosity in spite of being discouraged by their parents

Survives implies something that tried to end it, and the passage has just said parents do their best to extinguish curiosity in their children. The children in question are therefore the ones whose curiosity outlasted that effort.

Answer: A

Correct answer: by their ceaseless curiosity

The passage says it makes life difficult to be faced everyday with a string of unanswerable questions. The difficulty is the endlessness of the curiosity, not the profundity or irrelevance of any one question - the examples given, why fire is hot and why grass grows, are ordinary enough.

Answer: C

Correct answer: as it's beyond their comprehension

The passage says scholars ask questions too minute and specialised for you and me to understand without years of explanation. The questions seem not worth asking because the world cannot follow them, not because of any judgement about the scholars themselves.