Reading Comprehension Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The poet thinks himself fortunate because he has light at night by his door.

The poem says, 'For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door; / And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more'. The luck is the lamp at the door, which the lamplighter lights.

His father is a banker, but the poem does not give that as the reason for his luck. The poet wishes to go round lighting lamps with Leerie, so (2) is not what he says, and nothing is said about being strong enough to avoid choices.

Answer: D

The phrase indicates that it is evening time.

The poem begins with tea nearly ready and Leerie coming up the street 'every night at tea time' with a lantern and ladder. A lamplighter lights the lamps when it grows dark, so the sun having left the sky means that evening has come.

Morning, forenoon and afternoon are all times when the sun is up, and no lamps are lit.

Answer: C

Only statement (c) is correct, so the answer is '(a) and (b) are incorrect, (c) is correct'.

(c) is correct: the poet watches for Leerie, says he will go round at night and light the lamps with him, and asks him to 'nod to him tonight', which shows he is fascinated by the profession.

(a) is incorrect: Leerie comes 'every night', so the light is not occasional. (b) is incorrect: the poet mentions that his papa is a banker, but his own wish is to go round lighting lamps with Leerie, not to become a banker.

Answer: D

The word that completes the analogy is banker.

Leerie is the lamplighter, a person and his job. In the poem the poet says, 'my papa's a banker', so the father is a banker.

A driver is what Tom would like to be ('Tom would be a driver'). Maria may go to the sea, which does not make her father a sailor, and 'rich businessman' describes the father's wealth loosely, not his occupation as the poem gives it.

Answer: B

The rhyme scheme of lines 5 to 8 is aabb.

Lines 5 to 8 end in 'sea', 'be', 'do' and 'you'. Lines 5 and 6 rhyme with each other (a, a) and lines 7 and 8 rhyme with each other (b, b), which gives a a b b.

The patterns abba, abab and aaba would need the first and fourth, or the first and third, lines to rhyme, which they do not here.

Answer: A

The key says the poet looks at the lamp-lighter's profession with wonder.

He waits at the window to see Leerie go by, chooses to go round lighting lamps with him when he is grown up, and asks the lamplighter to nod to him. That shows admiring delight at the job.

Jealousy is wrong because he does not resent Leerie, and confusion is wrong because nothing in the poem puzzles him. Curiosity is the closest rival, since he watches closely, but his wish to join in goes beyond curiosity; the published key gives wonder and I could not find a source that separates the two further.

Answer: B

The relationship is mother and daughter.

The anecdote begins with the writer walking in a garden when 'my daughter' spots red flowers, pulls her down to her height and whispers a secret. The writer is the girl's mother, and the later questions on the passage refer to 'the mother' in the same way.

The 'friend' in paragraph 2 is a school friend from the writer's own childhood, which is a memory within the story, so 'best friends' and 'school-mates' describe a different pair. A grandmother and grand-child are not mentioned anywhere.

Answer: A

According to the mother, it was not a good idea to taste sweet nectar from flowers.

In paragraph 1 the daughter whispers a secret, and the writer is 'about to tell her that it was probably not a good idea to do so' when memory takes over. The secret is only revealed by the end: in paragraph 3 the writer decides that the child 'too needed to know the joy of tasting sweet nectar from beautiful blooms'. So what the mother first thought unwise was the child's wish to taste the nectar of the flowers.

Raiding the ixora plants, walking in the garden all day and walking alone along the pathway belong to the writer's own childhood story in paragraphs 2 and 3, and are not what the mother is about to advise against in paragraph 1.

Answer: D

Statements (b) and (c) are correct and (a) is incorrect, which is option (4).

(b) is correct: the daughter's whispered secret transports the writer back to her school days, and the memory is a happy one. (c) is correct: the writer decides that her child too must know the joy of tasting sweet nectar from blooms, so she wants the child to be connected to the pleasures of nature.

(a) is incorrect: the memories are fond and playful ('we really had a lot of fun', 'I could still taste the sweetness till today'), not traumatising.

Answer: C

A birder should have sharp ears because one can easily locate the birds from their chirping.

The writer says that spotting birds in foliage is hard enough, 'but if you hear them, you know they are there'. Hearing the call tells the birder where a bird is even when it is hidden among leaves.

Mating calls, morning greetings and shrieks of alarm are not mentioned as the reason; the passage speaks only of finding the birds.