Reading Comprehension Questions and Answers

Direction for [ Question No: 201 To 202 ] :

Colour in birds is caused by pigments and structure. Buffs, red browns, dark browns, and blacks are caused by melanins, pigments synthesised by the bird and laid down in granules. Yellows, oranges and reds come from carotenoid or lipochrome pigments; these originate at least in part from the food and are diffused in the skin and feathers. Porphyrin feather pigments occur in birds but less frequently than melanins and carotenoids. Blue colours in feathers are structural, based on a thin, porous layer of keratin overlying melanin pigment. Most greens result from the addition of yellow pigment to the structural blue colour. Iridescent colours result from the thinly laminated structure of the barbules and are enhanced by underlying melanin deposits.

Birds' feet are covered with scales like those of reptiles. The scales are occasionally shed, but the timing of this molt is not known. The toes are tipped with claws, and vestigial claws are not infrequently found on the tips of the first two digits of the wing. The bill is covered with a sheet of keratin, the rhamphotheca, which in petrels and a few other birds is divided into plates. In birds that probe for food (kiwis, woodcocks, etc.), many sensory pores are found near the tip of the bill. Both melanins and carotenoids are found in the rhamphotheca and in the scales of the feet.

The skin of a bird is almost without glands. The important exception is the preen gland, which lies on the rump at the base of the tail. The secretion of this gland contains approximately one-half lipids (fats and oils) and is probably important in dressing and waterproofing the plumage. In a few birds, the secretion has a strong, offensive odour. Some birds, in which the gland is small or absent, have a specialised type of feather (powder down) that grows continuously and breaks down into a fine powder, believed to be used in dressing the plumage.

Direction for [ Question No: 203 To 207 ] :

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.

The definition of a madrigal is a song for several voices that is a setting of a poem. Popular from about 1520 to 1650, performers mostly sang madrigals acapella, meaning without instrumental accompaniment. The style originated in Italy but flourished in many other European countries. What is the Renaissance madrigal? It developed from a form of secular vocal music and verse in the 14^th century, but singers transformed it in the 16^th century. The Renaissance madrigal used richer poetry and developed much more complex music. From its origins in Italy, the madrigal flourished in many other European countries in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. In England, the form was immensely popular in Elizabethan times. The English madrigal was the only version that differed substantially from its Italian counterpart. In about the 1520s in Italy, people began to write manuscripts of madrigals. These musical pieces were quite different from their 14^th-century counterparts. The older versions were for two, or rarely three, voices, with much ornamentation. Their verse was mostly pastoral, consisting of two or three stanzas of three lines each, plus a final couplet. At this point, the music was composed for performance by skilled amateur singers. What distinguished madrigals from earlier forms of vocal music was that they were always secular. Previously, most music had been religious, and madrigals were among the first styles to depart from that tradition. Their themes were social, and composers wrote the verses they used in the vernacular rather than the Latin of sacred music. Where sacred music had been smooth and predictable, madrigals might include dissonance and sudden shifts of melody or rhythm. Renaissance madrigals were also through-composed, meaning that each line of verse had its own music with no internal repetition as there had been in earlier years. Even if lines of verse were repeated, music rarely was.

Direction for [ Question No: 208 To 210 ] :

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.

Then he went into the office. It was a large, bare room with two desks in it and a bench along one side. A number of natives were seated on this, and a couple of women. They gossiped while they waited for the administrator, and when Mackintosh came in they greeted him. “Talofa-li.” He returned their greeting and sat down at his desk. He began to write, working on a report which the governor of Samoa had been clamouring for and which Walker, with his usual dilatoriness, had neglected to prepare. Mackintosh, as he made his notes, reflected vindictively that Walker was late with his report because he was so illiterate that he had an invincible distaste for anything to do with pens and paper; and now when it was at last ready, concise and neatly official, he would accept his subordinate’s work without a word of appreciation, with a sneer rather or a gibe, and send it on to his own superior as though it were his own composition. He could not have written a word of it. Mackintosh thought with rage that if his chief pencilled in some insertion, it would be childish in expression and faulty in language. If he remonstrated or sought to put his meaning into an intelligible phrase, Walker would fly into a passion and cry: “What the hell do I care about grammar? That’s what I want to say and that’s how I want to say it.”

At last Walker came in. The natives surrounded him as he entered, trying to get his immediate attention, but he turned on them roughly and told them to sit down and hold their tongues. He threatened that if they were not quiet, he would have them all turned out and see none of them that day. He nodded to Mackintosh.