Class 8 English Unseen Passages Type II

 Read the passages given below and answer the questions that follow each of them:

Passage 1

1. Can’t Sleep ? Join the crowd. Millions of people have trouble getting enough restorative shut-eye. With recent research linking lack of sleep to health problems ranging from hypertension to weight gain, there’s more reason than ever to make over your sleep habits. But how ?

2. You may have tried medication. You know to stay away from saboteurs like caffeine, nicotine and alcohol. And you’ve probably heard it’s not wise to exercise too vigorously or eat too big a meal a couple of hours before bedtime.

3. Let Go of Your Worries. Anxieties often seem magnified in the still of the night. Dealing with them can help you sleep. Just writing down worries, deadlines or to-dos before hitting the pillow can make them feel more manageable.

4. Do whatever helps you relax. Try simple yoga exercises, like the forward bend. Standing with your legs hip-width apart, bend at your waist, letting your arms and head dangle while releasing the tension in your neck and shoulders. Or while lying on your back, do progressive muscle relaxation, tensing and then releasing body parts, beginning with your feet and progressing towards your forehead.

5. Cut the Light at Night. Avoid bright light, which signals the brain to be alert, within two to three hours of bedtime or if you wake up during the night. Michael Breus, suggests aiming for no more than 45 to 60 watts of light in the room when winding down before bedtime, and no more than 30 to 40 watts of indirect light when you’re trying to sleep. Use low wattage or shielded night-lights in hallways and bathrooms. Make sure your bed is out of the way of direct sunlight, moonlight or streetlights.

6. Help cement the sleep-wake cycle by exposing yourself to bright light within an hour of waking up for the day, either by taking a 30-minute walk outside or by lingering in a part of the house that gets a lot of sunlight.

7. Follow the 20-Minute Rule. If you can’t fall asleep in about 20 minutes, whether at bedtime or after awakening in the night, go into another room and do something else until you get drowsy. “The bedroom needs to be associated with sleeping, not with being restless.” Estimate the 20 minutes; don’t use a clock or watch, which causes alertness and possible stress.

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8. Avoid things requiring concentration, such as video games; stimulating activities, like vigorous exercise or cleaning; or anything upsetting, like watching the news or paying bills. Try light reading or listening to music.

9. Re-do Your Bedroom. Make your bedroom more sleep-friendly. If noise from an adjacent room keeps you up, move your bed to another wall. Replace a sagging mattress and deflated pillows. If you must keep a computer switched on in the. bedroom, cover the green light on the monitor’s switch with black electrical tape. If you insist on falling asleep with the TV on, use a timer.

(481 words)

 

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow :
Questions
1. Why is it important to sleep well ?
2. How should the eating and drinking habits be regulated to have good sleep ?
3. How can the worries be made manageable before going to sleep ?
4. What do you understand by the phrase ‘progressive muscle relaxation’ ?
5. How much light should be there when one tries to sleep ?
6. How should the light be used when one gets up ?
7. What should one do if one is unable to sleep even after being in bed for twenty minutes or so.
8. What does the author suggest about mattresses and pillows in the bedroom ?
9. Which word in para 2 means the same as ‘destroyers’ ?
10. Find the word in para 8 which is the opposite of ‘discourage’.
11. Give the noun form of‘expose’.
12. Which part of speech is the word ‘sagging’ in para 9 ?
Answers:
1. Lack of sleep can cause health problems ranging from hypertension to weight gain.
2. For a good sleep drinks containing, caffeine, nicotine and alcohol should be avoided. Nothing heavy should be eaten a couple of hours before sleeping.
3. Writing down the worries before going to sleep can help manage them.
4. ‘Progressive muscle relaxation’ is a yogic exercise meant to relax the body. It means lying on the back, tensing and then releasing the body parts beginning with the feet and going towards the forehead.
5. No more than 30 to 40 watts of indirect light should be used when one is trying to sleep.
6. Within an hour of getting up in the morning, one must linger in a part of house that gets a lot of sunlight. In other words one should pass at least some time in bright light.
7. When one fails to sleep even after 20 minutes of being in the bed, one should go into another room and do something else until one gets drowsy. While doing so, the clock or watch should be avoided.
8. Mattresses must be tight and the pillows must not be deflated.
9. saboteur.
10. stimulate.
11. exposure.
12. present participle.

Passage 2

1. I remember taking punga with a German researcher in India from some provincial town. I think it was Tubingen. She declared, “Indians never travelled. It is something new for them,” I asked, “inside or outside ?” She said, “both”. We know that’s not true. Yes, we did not cross the seas. But there was an ancient practice of yatra or pilgrimage, since before the Buddha’s time. If you join the dots there’s a hug egrid of sacred geography underpinning this enormous subcontinent of ours and we should not be in such a hurry to accept feringhee opinions on ourselves and our ways. Do let us apply our own minds to understanding ourselves, so that neither the feringhee nor our own cynical politicians can make fools of us as they repeatedly have. Just think: there are twelve Jyotirlinga or Shaiva shrines of special sanctity scattered all over India. The Dwadasa Jyotirlinga Stotra lists them: Saurashtre Somanaatham cha, Srishaile Mallikarjunam, Ujjayinyaam Maha Kaalam, Omkaare Mamaleswaram, Himalayeto Kedaram, Daakinyaam Bhima Shankaram, Vaaranaasyaam cha Viswesam, Triyambakam Gautamitate, Paralyaam Vaidyanaatham cha, Naagesam Daarukaavane, Setubandhe Rameshwaram, Grushesam cha Shivaalaye.

2. Then you have the places where bits of Sati’s body are said to have fallen, of which two famous examples are Kamaakhya in Assam and Maihar in Madhya Pradesh. There is a separate Devi circuit memorised as “Kanchi Kamakshi, Madurai Meenakshi, Kashi Vishalakshi”. There’s the Char Dham, which you’ll see shivering small-town South Indians, most woefully clad in thin woolies, staunchly assay in the Himalayas : Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri, Yamunotri. Nothing in their entire lives has prepared them for mountain cold, but they gamely quake and quiver on this very holy pilgrimage as an act of pure faith. Each year the Amarnath pilgrims from every corner of India brave the real and present danger of terrorist attacks in J&K.

3. The south has a six-temple circuit to Kartikeya and the nine important, beautiful Navagraha temples of the Thanjavur district. Plus there are all those great stand-alone temples that you just show up at wherever you’re from and are welcomed at without questions : be it Dakshineshwar in Kolkata or Tirupati. Yes, there are issues at some temples, like not allowing women or non-Hindus. But the issue here is that there’s a dense, huge grid of tirthas and kshetras that has held up Bharat since forever. Other layers were added with Buddhism, Jainism, Islam, Sikhism and Christianity.

4. The point is, sacred geography is an old, ticking concept. To dismiss it as just stories is unrealistic. Development does NOT have to be exactly there. Think how Kashi, Mathura and Ayodhya became flashpoints only because a certain ruler who died in 1707 disrespected the common people’s beliefs. We’re still paying the price for his deeds, aren’t we ?

(455 words)

 

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow :
Questions
1. What falsehood had a German researcher told the author ?
2. Why according to the author are the foreigners and our cynical politicians able to make fools of us ?
3. What are Kamakhya and Maihar temples famous for ?
4. What makes the South Indians go to the Himalayas ?
5. What danger do the pilgrims of Amarnath face ?
6. What was the reason which made Mathura and Ayodhya the flashpoints?
7. Find a word in para 1 which means the same as ‘huge’.
8. Which word in para 1 is opposite of ‘profanity’.
Answers:
1. The German researcher had told the author that Indians never travelled. This was false.
2. The foreigners and cynical politicians are able to make fools of us because we do not apply our own minds.
3. Kamakhya and Maihar temples are famous and sacred because it is believed that the bits of Sati’s body had fallen there.
4. South Indians go to Himalayas for pilgrimage.
5. The Amarnath pilgrims face the danger of terrorism.
6. A ruler who died in 1707 did not respect the common people’s belief about the sacredness of Mathura and Ayodhya . This has made these places the flashpoints.
7. enormous.
8. sanctity.

Passage 3

1. One morning, while attending to my father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theatre of death, I was in pain. I was frustrated and angry. Finally when the nurse relented and came, my father opened his eyes and murmured to her, “Why have you not gone home yet ?” Here was a man on his deathbed more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state ! I was stunned. I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being, and what is the limit of inclusion you can create. Father died the next day.

2. Father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of post-Independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Pabna, Bangladesh, my mother, then a school girl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords.

3. Consequently, our household saw diversity in thfe political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions. In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking. Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state ; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.

4. It was at the age of 82 that Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneshwar. I flew down from the US, where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralyzed state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work.

5. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, “Why are you kissing me ? Go kiss the world.” Her river was nearing the end of its journey.

6. At the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, who was raised by a widowed mother, no more than high school educated, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rs 300, who was robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity—she was telling me to go and kiss the world !

7. Success to me is about vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extraordinary success with ordinary lives.

8. Good luck and Godspeed. Go, kiss the world.

(526 words)

 

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow choosing the correct options from, the ones given below each question :

Question 1.
The narrator was angry with
(a) his father
(b) the nurse
(c) his mother
(d) himself

Question 2.
The author was stunned that his dying father was concerned about
(a) his son
(b) himself
(c) the nurse
(d) his mother

Question 3.
The author’s father was a supporter of
(a) India’s independence
(b) British Raj
(c) Indian princes
(d) Indian National Congress

Question 4.
The author’s mother was a supporter of
(a) India’s independence
(b) British Raj
(c) Indian princes
(d) Indian National Congress

Question 5.
According to the author, success consists in having some
(a) definite principles
(b) clear ideas
(c) provoking thoughts
(d) common ideas

Question 6.
The author’s dying mother advised him to
(a) work hard
(b) love her
(c) go away
(d) kiss the world

Question 7.
The word ‘bluntly’ means the same as
(a) blue
(b) roughly
(c) badly
(d) well

Question 8.
The word adversity is the opposite of
(a) diversity
(b) sincerity
(c) prosperity
(d) poverty

Answers:
1. (b) 2. (c) 3. (b) 4. (a) 5. (c) 6. (d) 7. (b) 8. (c)

Passage 4

The train for Gaya left at 8 p.m. and when that evening I returned to the bungalow a little before that hour, I found Lalajee with freshly washed clothes, and a bundle in his hand, a little bigger than the one he had arrived with, waiting in the veranda to say goodbye to me. When I put a ticket for Gaya and five one hundred rupee notes into his hand he, like the man with the coalgrimed face, was tongue-tied. All he could do was to keep glancing from the notes in his hand to my face, until the bell that warned passengers the train would leave in five minutes rang ; then, putting his head on my feet, he said ; ‘Within one year your slave will return you this money’.

And so Lalajee left me, taking with him the greater part of my savings. That I would see him again I never doubted, for the poor of India never forget a kindness ; but the promise Lalajee has made was, I felt sure, beyond his powers of accomplishment. In this I was wrong, for returning late one evening I saw a man dressed in spotless white standing in my veranda. The light from the room behind him was in my eyes, and I did not recognize him until he spoke. It was Lalajee, come a few days before the expiry of the time limit he had set himself. That night as he sat on the floor near my chair he told me of his trading transactions, and the success that had attended them. Starting with a few bags of grain and being content with a profit of only four annas per bag he had gradually, and steadily, built up his business until he was able to deal in consignments up to thirty tons in weight, on which he was making a profit of three rupees per ton. His son was in a good school, and as he could now afford to keep a wife he had married the daughter of a rich merchant of Patna ; all this he had accomplished in a little under twelve months. As the time drew near for his train to leave he laid five one-hundred rupee notes on my knee. Then, he took a bag from his pocket, held it out to me and said, ‘This is the interest, calculated at twenty five per cent, that I owe you on the money you lent me’. I believe I deprived him of half the pleasure he had anticipated from his visit when I told him it was not our custom to accept interest from our friends.

(438 words)

 

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow :
Questions
1. Who was Lalaji?
2. Why did Lalaji keep glancing from the notes to the author’s face?
3. What promise did Lalaji make to the author?
4. What did author feel about Lalaji’s promise at the time when it was made?
5. What gift of Lalaji did the author not accept?
6. Why did the author say while not accepting the interest?
7. Which word/phrase in para 1 means ‘unable to speak’.
8. What part of speech is the word ‘trading’ in para 2?
Answers:
1. Lalaji was a trader.
2. Lalaji was much surprised at the author’s generosity. He found it difficult to believe his eyes.
3. Lalaji promised to return the five hundred rupees of the author within a year.
4. The author believed in Lalaji’s honesty but he thought that it was beyond his power to return his money within a year.
5. The author did not accept the interest on his money.
6. The author said that it was not his custom to accept interest from his friends.
7. tongue-tied.
8. present participle.

Passage 5

1 I had read of Addison that he began his maiden speech in the House of Commons, repeating ‘I conceive’ three times, and when he could proceed no further, a wag stood up and said, ‘The gentleman conceived thrice but brought forth nothing’. I had thought of making a humorous speech taking this anecdote as the text. I therefore began with it and stuck there. My memory entirely failed me and in attempting a humorous speech I made myself ridiculous. ‘I thank you, gentlemen, for having kindly responded to my invitation’, I said abruptly, and sat down.

2 It was only in South Africa that I got over this shyness, though I never completely overcame it. It was impossible for me to speak ‘impromptu’. I hesitated whenever I had to face strange audiences and avoided making a speech whenever I could. Even today I do not think I could or would even be inclined to keep a meeting of friends engaged in idle talk.

3 I must say that, beyond occasionally exposing me to laughter, my constitutional shyness has been no disadvantage whatever. In fact I can see that, on the contrary, it has been all to my advantage. My hesitancy in speech, which was once an annoyance, is  now a pleasure. Its greatest benefit has been that it has taught me the economy of words. I have naturally formed the habit of restraining my thoughts. And I can now give myself the certificate that a thoughtless word hardly ever escapes my tongue or pen. I do not recollect ever having had to regret anything in my speech or writing. I have thus been spared many a mishap and waste of time. Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. Proneness to exaggerate, to suppress or modify the truth, wittingly or unwittingly, is a natural weakness of man, and silence is necessary in order to surmount it. A man of few words will rarely be thoughtless in his speech; he will measure every word. We find so many people impatient to talk. There is no chairman of a meeting who is not pestered with notes for permission to speak. And whenever the permission is given the speaker generally exceeds the time-limit, asks for more time, and keeps on talking without permission. All this talking can hardly be said to be of any benefit to the world. It is so much waste of time. My shyness has been in reality my shield and buckler. It has allowed me to grow. It has helped me in my discernment of truth. (435 words)

 

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow choosing the correct options from the ones given below each question :

Question 1.
The author and Addison had one thing in common
(a) both were great speakers
(b) both were statesmen
(c) both failed in their maiden speech
(d) both were Indians

Question 2.
The author wanted to make
(a) a learned speech
(b) a humorous speech
(c) no speech
(d) a motivating speech

Question 3.
The author did not like to make
(a) a speech
(b) a poem
(c) good talk
(d) idle talk

Question 4.
The author says that ‘shyness’ has been
(a) a disadvantage to him
(b) an advantage to him
(c) no disadvantage to him
(d) a great weakness

Question 5.
The author believes that it is a good habit to be a man
(a) of few words
(b) known for making great speeches
(c) who causes annoyance
(d) who can speak thoughtlessly

Answers:
1. (c) 2. (b) 3. (d) 4. (c) 5. (a) 6. (b) 7. (c) 8. (a).

Passage 6

1 But when you are reading a thing as a task you need reasonable quiet, and that is what I didn’t get, for at the next station in came a couple of men, one of whom talked to his friend for the rest of the journey in a loud and pompous voice. He was one of those people who remind one of that story of Horn Tooke, who, meeting a person of immense swagger in the street, stopped him and said, ‘Excuse me, sir, but are you someone in particular ?’ This gentleman was someone in particular. As I wrestled with clauses and sections, his voice rose like a gale and his family history, the deeds of his sons in the war, and his criticisms of the generals and the politicians submerged my poor attempts to hang on to my job. I shut up the Blue Book, looked out of the window, and listened wearily while the voice thundered on with themes like these :

2 ‘Now what French ought to have done….’ ‘The mistake the Germans made….’ If only Asquith had….’ You know the sort of stuff. I had heard it all before, oh, so often. It was like a barrel-organ groaning out some banal song of long ago.

3 If I had asked him to be good enough to talk in a lower tone I dare say he would have thought I was a very rude fellow. It did not occur to him that anybody could have anything better to do than to listen to him and I have no doubt he left the carriage convinced that everybody in it had, thanks to him, had a very illuminating journey, and would carry away a pleasing impression of his encyclopaedic range. He was obviously a well- intentioned person. The thing that was wrong with him was that he had not the social sense. He was not a ‘clubbable man’.

4 A reasonable consideration for the rights or feelings of others is the foundation of social conduct. It is commonly alleged against women that in this respect they are less civilized than men, and I am bound to confess that in my experience it is the woman— the well-dressed woman—who thrusts herself in front of you at the ticket office. The man would not attempt it, partly because he knows the thing would not be tolerated from him, but also because he has been better drilled in the small give and take of social relationships. He has lived more in the broad current of the world, where you have to learn to accommodate yourself to the general standard of conduct, and his school-life, and his games have in this respect given him a training that women are only now beginning to enjoy….

5 I suppose the fact is that we can be neither complete anarchists nor complete socialists in this complex world—or rather we must be a judicious mixture of both. We have both liberties to preserve—our individual liberty and our social liberty. (501 words)


Read the given passage and answer the questions that follows choosing the correct options from the ones given below each question:

Question 1.
The author was able to read
(a) well
(b) very well
(c) not well
(d) speedily

Question 2.
The author was travelling by
(a) a railway train
(b) a plane
(c) a car
(d) a ship

Question 3.
The man who spoke much was
(a) good
(b) bad
(c) well-intentioned
(d) evil-intentioned

Question 4.
The author kept quiet for fear of being considered a
(a) decent man
(b) rude person
(c) well-intentioned man
(d) none of the three

Question 5.
According to the author the talkative man needed some
(a) intelligence
(b) food
(c) wit
(d) social sense

Question 6.
‘Liberty’ (Para 5) means the same as
(a) libertine
(b) freedom
(c) liberate
(d) libra

Question 7.
The word ‘drilled’ (Para 4) means the same as
(a) beaten
(b) dug
(c) scolded
(d) trained

Question 8.
The verb from ‘consideration’ (Para 4) will be
(a) considerate
(b) consider
(c) considering
(d) considered

Answers:
1. (c) 2. (a) 3. (c) 4. (b) 5. (d) 6. (b) 7. (d) 8. (b).

II. Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow :
Questions
1. Why was the author not able to read ?
2. What was the author reading ?
3. Why did the author not ask the man to speak in a lower tone ?
4. What did the man speaking a lot and in a loud tone not understand ?
5. With what impression did he leave the carriage ?
6. Why is the man more civilized in his behaviour than the women ?
7. Which word in para 5 means ‘freedom’ ?
8. What is the adjective form of ‘consideration’ ?
Answers
1. The author was not able to read because of the noise.
2. The author was reading the Blue Book.
3. The author feared that the man would consider him a rude person.
4. He did not understand that his listeners could have something better to do than to listen to him.
5. He left the carriage with the impression that the people in the carriage were very pleased by what he talked.
6. Man is generally better-trained in social relationship compared to women.
7. liberty.
8. considerate.

Passage 7

1 Being a woman in any other century must have been bad enough. Try being ill. There were no antibiotics until the 1930s, and a patient in a Victorian hospital was probably only marginally better off than if he’d stayed at home. Last century saw large parts of the world finally rid themselves of the plagues that periodically wiped out single and even double figure percentages of entire populations. Cholera and other epidemics ravaged European cities throughout the 19th century.

2 Global warming is perhaps the most serious part of the mindset that says things are getting inexorably worse. Most scientists, though not all, agree that something is going on. Yet there is little evidence to support the most outlandish predictions of doom.

3 Of course our world has new horrors: drug addiction, global terrorism, and in particular the conflict between wildlife and people that will almost certainly lead to the extinction of several of what biologists call the “charismatic megafauna” by the end of this century. It will be sad to live in a world without pandas or tigers, but we may have to.

4 There is a crisis of confidence among many people, especially the young, in the West. While our material needs have, for the most part, been accommodated, our psychological welfare has been given some severe knocks. In the new century, the seemingly global epidemics of anxiety, depression and stress wifi need to be addressed with as much vigour as TB and malaria were in the last. Then there’s AIDS, of course proving that the old spectre of infectious diseases is very much with us.

5 It is possible that something may come out of the blue and get us. It seems that nuclear war remains the most plausible short-term threat to our civilization, but we cannot discount the possibility of a terrifying genetically mutated viral plague wiping us out in weeks; or of some particle physics experiment going terribly wrong. Clearly we need to be on our guard.

6 Why do we persist in believing that things are getting worse ? It has always been thus, and we always forget the previous, failed merchants of doom : Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 prophecy that a population explosion would lead to starvation in America by the 1980s ; all those silly pundits claiming that the world would end on January 1, 2000, as the millennium bug struck.

7 Today is good; we live in the freest, healthiest, most peaceful and longest lived era in
human history. The future barring some calamitous accident, will be better. The past truly is a different country—a hungry, violent, bigoted place. They did things differently there. Good riddance to them. (438 words)

 

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow choosing the correct options from the ones given below each question :
Question 1.
Antibiotics were discovered in
(a) 1980’s
(b) 1930’s
(c) Eighteenth century
(d) nineteenth century

Question 2.
The author believes that global warming is
(a) no threat
(b) an imaginary threat
(c) not as big a threat as some scientists believe
(d) a good thing for humanity

Question 3.
The disease which reminds the author of old infectious diseases is
(a) drug addiction
(b) anxiety
(c) depression
(d) AIDS

Question 4.
The author believes that our world, compared to the previous ages, is
(a) worse
(b) better
(c) same
(d) more horrible

Question 5.
The author believes that future will be
(a) worse
(b) better
(c) same
(d) more horrible

Question 6.
The word ‘mindset’ (Para 2) means the same as
(a) mindless
(b) mindful
(c) idea
(d) ideal

Question 7.
The word ‘outlandish’ (Para 2) is the opposite of
(a) inland
(b) inside land
(c) attractive
(d) fearful

Question 8.
The phrase ‘out of the blue’ (Para 5) means
(a) of blue colour
(b) without blue colour
(c) from water
(d) from sky.

Answers:
1. (b) 2. (c) 3. (d) 4. (b) 5. (b) 6. (c) 7. (c) 8. (d).

Passage 8

1 They didn’t hear the two people coming down the gully path, Dad and the pretty girl with the hard, bright face like a China doll’s. But they heard her laugh, right by the porch, and the tune stopped on a wrong, high, startled note. Dad didn’t say anything, but the girl came forward and spoke to Granddad prettily, “I’ll not be seeing you leave in the morning, so I came over to say goodbye.”

2 “It’s kind of you,” said Granddad, with his eyes cast down ; and then, seeing the blanket at his feet, he stooped to pick it up. “And will you look at this,” he said in embarrassment, “the fine blanket my son has given me to go away with !”

3 “Yes,” she said, “it’s a fine blanket.” She felt the wool, and repeated in surprise, “A fine blanket—I’ll say it is !” She turned to Dad and said to him coldly, “It cost something, didn’t it ?”

4 He cleared his throat, and said defensively, “I wanted him to have the best…”

5 The boy went abruptly into the shanty. He was looking for something. He could hear the girl reproaching Dad, and Dad becoming angry in his slow way. And now she was suddenly going away in a huff… As Petey came out, she turned and called back, “All the same, he doesn’t need a double blanket!” And she ran up the gully path.

6 “Oh, she’s right,” said the body coldly. “Here, Dad”—and he held out a pair of scissors. “Cut the blanket in two.”

7 Both of them stared at the boy, startled. “Cut it in two, I tell you, Dad!” he cried out. “And keep the other half!”

8 “That’s not a bad idea,” said Granddad gently. “I don’t need so much of a blanket.”

9 “Yes,” said the boy harshly, “a single blanket’s enough for an old man when he’s sent away. We’ll save the other half, Dad, it will come in handy later.”

10 “Now what do you mean by that ?” asked Dad.

11 “I mean,” said the boy slowly, “that I’ll give it to you, Dad—when you’re old and I’m sending you away.”

12 There was a silence, and then Dad went over to Granddad and stood before him, not speaking. But Granddad understood. Petey was watching them. And he heard Granddad whisper, for he put out a hand and laid it on Dad’s shoulder. “It’s all right, son—I know you didn’t mean it…” And then Petey cried.

13 But it didn’t matter—because they were all three crying together. (418 words)

 

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow choosing the correct options from, the ones given below each question :

Question 1.
‘They’ in the first line refers to
(a) Dad and the girl
(b) Dad and Grand-dad
(c) the child and Grand-dad
(d) the girl and the child

Question 2.
The girl’s feelings at seeing the blanket were of
(a) happiness
(b) surprise
(c) anger
(d) shock

Question 3.
The girl’s reaction was what
(a) Dad had expected
(b) Dad never expected
(c) made the Dad angry
(d) shocked Dad

Question 4.
Petey, really, wanted
(a) to cut the blanket
(b) to give the whole blanket to Grand-dad
(c) to teach his father a lesson
(d) to go with his Grand-dad

Question 5.
At the end of the story Dad was crying
(a) because his father was leaving him
(b) because his son had asked him to cut the blanket in two
(c) at his own helplessness
(d) because Petey and Grand-dad were crying.

Question 6.
The word ‘Gully’ means the same as
(a) grade
(b) small grain
(c) narrow path
(d) small graft

Question 7.
The verb form of ‘embarrassment’ is
(a) embar
(b) embarras
(c) embark
(d) em barrassing

Answers:
1. (c) 2. (d) 3. (a) 4. (c) 5. (c) 6. (c) 7. (b).

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