Reading Comprehension Questions and Answers

Direction for [ Question No: 181 To 182 ] :

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.

Of all the birds in the air, the magpie builds the very best nest. Long ago, all the birds came to Magpie and asked her to teach them how to build nests. So Magpie got them all together and began to show them how to do it. First, she took some mud and patted it into the shape of a pancake. "Ah ha!" said Thrush, and away she flew. So Thrush still builds her nest out of mud. Then Magpie arranged some twigs around in the mud. "Well of course," said Owl, and away she flew. Owls have never made better nests than that. Magpie turned the edges of the pancake up into a bowl shape, and put more twigs around the outside. "What a good idea!" said Sparrow, and Sparrow makes messy nests to this day. And so it went on. Each bird took away some knowledge of how to build nests, but none of them waited to the end. Finally, only silly Turtle-dove was left, and she hadn't been paying any attention all along. She had just been sitting there saying her silly cry. "Take two, take two-o-o-o. Take two, take two-o-o." Magpie was adding the last twig to her lovely nest. "Take two, take two-o-o" cried Turtle-dove. Magpie looked at Turtle-dove. "One's enough," she said. But the Turtle-dove kept on saying, "Take two, take two-o-o." Then Magpie got angry. "One's enough, I tell you." Still Turtle-dove repeated, "Take two, take two-o-o. Take two, take two-o-o." At last, Magpie got even angrier. No one but silly Turtle-dove was left to see her lovely nest that she had worked so long to build. She flew away to find some worms, and refused to show the birds how to build a nest again. And that is why different birds build their nests differently.

Direction for [ Question No: 183 To 187 ] :

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.

As many as 24 elephants enjoyed 'mahua', a traditional country liquor, and slept for hours in an Odisha forest. When people of a nearby village went inside the forest to prepare the liquor, they found that a herd of elephants had already devoured the water fermented with the intoxicating flowers and were in deep sleep.

The villagers living near Shilipada cashew forest in Keonjhar district saw that a total of 24 jumbos, who were apparently drunk, were sleeping near the place where mahua flowers were kept in water in large pots for fermentation.

"We went into the jungle at around 6 am to prepare mahua and found that all the pots were broken and the fermented water was missing. We also found that the elephants were sleeping. They consumed the fermented water and got drunk," Naria Sethi, a villager, told PTI.

"That liquor was unprocessed. We tried to wake up the animals but failed. The forest department was then informed," he added.

Forest department personnel, after reaching the spot in the jungle under the Patana forest range, had to beat drums to wake the herd up. The elephants then went deep inside the forest, said Ghasiram Patra, the forest ranger.

The forest official, however, is not sure whether the elephants got drunk after consuming fermented mahua. Perhaps they were just resting there, he said.

Villagers, on the other hand, insisted that they spotted the elephants sleeping in intoxicated conditions at various places close to the broken pots on Tuesday.

Direction for [ Question No: 188 To 190 ] :

For a quarter of a century, those men had followed Gandhi. They had thrown off their western suits for his khadi, moved their fingers to the unfamiliar rhythms of the spinning-wheel. In his name, they had marched into the flailing lathis of the police and the gates of British jails. Quelling occasional doubts, they had followed him on his improbable crusades to the improbable triumph now beckoning: independence wrested from the British by Gandhian non-violence. They had followed him for many reasons, but above all, because they saw that his unique genius for communicating with the soul of India could draw mass support to their banner. The potential differences between them had been submerged in the common struggle with the British. Now, in that hot Delhi night, those differences began to emerge as they debated Gandhi's plan to make Jinnah Prime Minister. If they refused to endorse his scheme, Gandhi argued, the new Viceroy might find himself driven into a corner from which the only escape would be partition. Walking from village to village in Noakhali and later Bihar, applying his 'ointment' to India's sore spots, Gandhi had understood infinitely better than those political leaders in Delhi the tragedy partition might produce. He had seen in the huts and swamps of Noakhali what havoc communal fury, once unleashed, could wreak. Partition, he argued, risked unleashing those passions, not dampening them. Desperately, he begged his followers to accept his idea as perhaps their last chance to keep India united and to prevent that tragedy. He could not budge Nehru and Patel. There was a limit to the price they were prepared to pay to keep India united and handing over power to their foe, Jinnah, transgressed it. They did not share Gandhi's conviction that partition would inevitably lead to terrible violence. Broken-hearted, Gandhi would have to report to the Viceroy that he had not been able to carry his colleagues with him. The real break was still some distance ahead, but Gandhi and those men he'd so patiently groomed were fast approaching a parting of the ways. The culmination of Gandhi's crusade was now drawing near, and it would end as it had begun, in the stillness of his soul.