English Reading Comprehension

Directions: The short passage below is followed by a question based on its content. Answer the question on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.

Most people do not know that Juliette Gordon Low, the founder of the Girl Scouts of America, was deaf. She began to lose her hearing when she was 17, and became almost totally deaf in her adulthood. Juliette married William Mackay Low and they went to England to live. Juliette became interested in the Girl Guides Association there. Juliette organized several Girl Guides troops in both England and Scotland. Since she could not do all the work herself, she had to ask other women to help her. Sometimes the women were reluctant to give their time due to family responsibilities. However, Juliette was a very determined woman. When the women refused, she would pretend that she didn't understand what they said. As a result, the women helped her in spite of being busy. When Juliette came back to America for a visit, she started the first Girl Guides troop in the country in her home town, Savannah. By the time she went back to England six months later, there were six Girl Guide troops in Savannah. At that time, the girls each made their own uniforms. In 1913, the Girl Guides changed its name to the Girl Scouts. Juliette Low came back to Savannah that same year.

The main idea of this passage can best be stated as

Directions: Select the two answer choices that, when used to complete the sentence, fit the meaning of the sentence as a whole and produce completed sentences that are alike in meaning.

From the moment Kael began as a film critic at The New Yorker, at the start of 1968, she presided over the movies in the manner of Béla Károlyi watching a gymnast on the balance beam-shouting directives, ________ every flub, and cheering uncontrollably when a filmmaker stuck his landing.

Directions: Select the two answer choices that, when used to complete the sentence, fit the meaning of the sentence as a whole and produce completed sentences that are alike in meaning.

This is a more than usually germane point since the Tolstoy estate stretches away in all directions around us: heavily wooded and undulating with scattered, scruffy villages and sudden long-grassed fields that put me in mind of those scenes in Anna Karenina when Levin goes out scything crops with his serfs and resolves to eschew all human falsity in favour of a sweat-drenched ________ redemption.

For the following question, consider each of the choices separately and select all that apply.

Which of the following are true as per the passage?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

In the eighteenth century, the relationship between a writer and his publisher could hardly be called a monochromatic one. The two were dependent upon each other for not only for their livelihood, but also for survival, almost in the most literal manner. Charles Baudelaire, whose poem- Les Fleur du Mal (Flowers of Evil) was banned in France because of its references to drugs, sex, and satan, is just one of the examples of how the lives of two were interconnected to an almost masochistic level. He and his publisher were both successfully prosecuted for printing a poem that allegedly offended public sentiments. Queen Mab, a controversial poem by Percy Shelley, which promoted the idea of a utopian world, un-marred by violent and bloody revolutions like the French Revolution, was deemed illegal in England. Though un-printed, the poem became the cause of the imprisonment of both Percy and William Clark, in whose bookstore a few of the copies of the poem were stored. Although the poem was meant for private circulation only, just the fact that the poem was stolen, pirated, and sold in the market by an unscrupulous shopkeeper, was enough to put both the men behind bars.
Today, the poet and the publisher are a part of a bigger system, small cogs in a big machine. Though persecution of a poet or a writer for ‘felt’ blasphemy is not unheard of- a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie for sacrilege is a prime example- the very fact that they are both a part of a system that runs on money gives them certain immunity at the cost of taking away some of the liberty they enjoyed. As long as they need the money, they would stay close at heels, seemingly nipping at them, but not quite.

The author's period of origination and existence is easily decipherable from the passage.

Directions: Answer the question based on the following passage.

Those of us who grew up in the fifties believed in the permanency of our American-history textbooks. To us as children, those texts were the truth; of things: they were American history. It was not just that we read them before we understood that not everything that is printed is the truth, or the whole truth. It was that they, much more than other books, had the demeanor and tracings of authority. They were weighty volumes. They spoke in measured cadences: imperturbable, humorless, and as distant as Chinese emperors. Our teachers treated them with respect, and we paid them abject homage by memorising a chapter a week. But now the textbook histories have changed, some of them to such an extent that an adult would find them unrecognisable.

One current junior-high-school American history begins with a story about a Negro cowboy called George McJunkin. It appears that when McJunkin was riding down a lonely trail in New Mexico one cold spring morning in 1925 he discovered a mound containing bones and stone implements, which scientists later proved belonged to an Indian civilisation ten thousand year old. The book goes on to say that scientists now believe there were people in the Americas at least twenty thousand years ago. It discusses the Aztec, Mayan and Incan civilisations and the meaning of the word "culture" before introducing the European explorers.

Another history text - this one for the fifth grade - begins with the story of how Henry B. Gonzalez, who is a member of Congress from Texas, learned about his own nationality. When he was ten years old, his teacher told him he was an American because he was born in the United States. His grandmother, however, said, "The cat was born in the oven. Does that make him bread?" After reporting that Mr. Gonzalez eventually went to college and law school, the book explains that "the melting pot idea hasn't worked out as some thought it would, and that now "some people say that the people of the United States are more like a salad bowl than a melting pot".

Poor Columbus! He is a minor character now, a walk-on in the middle of American history. Even those books that have not replaced his picture with a Mayan temple or an Iroquois mask do not credit him with discovering America- even for the Europeans. The Vikings, they say, preceded him to the New World, and after that the Europeans, having lost or forgotten their maps, simply neglected to cross the ocean again for five hundred years. Columbus is far from being the only personage to have suffered from time and revision. Captain John Smith, Daniel Boone, and Wild Bill Hickok - the great self-promoters of American history-have all but disappeared, taking with them a good deal of the romance of the American frontier. General Custer has given way to Chief Crazy Horse; General Eisenhower no longer liberates Europe single-handed: and, indeed, most generals, even to Washington, and Lee, have faded away, as old soldiers do, giving place to social reformers such as William Lloyd Garrison and Jacob Riis. A number of black Americans have risen to prominence: not only George Washington Carver but Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois now invariably accompany Booker T. Washington. In addition, there is a mystery man called Crispus Attucks, a fugitive slave about whom nothing seems to be known for certain except that he was a victim of the Boston Massacre and thus became one of the first casualties of the American Revolution. Thaddeus Stevens had been reconstructed - his character changed, as it were, from black to white, from cruel and vindictive to persistent and sincere. As for Teddy Roosevelt, he now champions the issue of conservation instead of charging up San Juan Hill. No single President really stands out as a hero, but all Presidents - except certain unmentionables in the second half of the nineteenth century- seem to have done as well as could be expected, given difficult circumstances.

Of course, when one thinks about it, it is hardly surprising that modem scholarship and modern perspectives have found their way into children's books. Yet the changes remain shocking. Those who in the sixties complained of the bland optimism, the chauvinism, and the materialism of their old civics texts did so in the belief that, for all their protests, the texts would never change. The thought must have had something reassuring about it. For that generation never notices when its complaints began to take effect and the songs about radioactive rainfall and houses made of ticky-tacky began to appear in the text books/But this is what happened.

The history texts now hint at a certain level of unpleasantness in American history. Several books, for instance, tell the story of Ishi, the last "wild" Indian in the continental United States, who, captured in 1911 after the massacre of his tribe, spent the final four and half years of his life in the University of California's museum of anthropology, in San Francisco. At least three books show the same stunning picture of the breaker boys, the child coal miners of Pennsylvania- ancient children with deformed bodies and blackened faces who stare stupidly out from the entrance to a mine. One book quotes a soldier on the use of torture in the American campaign to pacify the Philippines at the beginning of the century. A number of books say that during the American Revolution the patriots tarred and feathered those who did not support them, and drove many of the loyalists from the country. Almost all the present-day history books note that the United States-interned Japanese-Americans in detention camps during the Second World War.

Ideologically speaking, the histories of the fifties were implacable, seamless. Inside their covers, America was perfect: the greatest nation in the world, and the embodiment of democracy, freedom, and technological progress. For them, the country never changed in any important way: its values audits political institutions remained constant from the time of the American Revolution. To my generation - the children of the fifties - these texts appeared permanent just because they were so self-contained. Their orthodoxy, it seemed, left no hand-holds for attack, no lodging for decay. Who, after all, would dispute the wonders of technology or the superiority of the English colonists over the Spanish? Who would find fault with the pastorals of the West or the Old South? Who would question the anti-Communist crusade? There was, it seemed, no point in comparing these visions with reality, since they were the public truth and were thus quite irrelevant to what existed and to what anyone privately believed. They were- or so it seemed - the permanent expression of mass culture in America.

But now the texts have changed, and with them the country that American children are growing up into. The society that was once uniform is now a patchwork of rich and poor, old and young, men and women, blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Indians. The system that ran so smoothly by means of the Constitution under the guidance of benevolent conductor. President is now a rattletrap affair. The past is no highway to the present; it is a collection of issues and events that do not fit together and that lead in no single direction. The word "progress" has been replaced by the word "change". Children, the modern texts insist, should learn history so that they can adapt to the rapid changes taking place around them. History is proceeding in spite of us. The present, which was once portrayed in the concluding chapters as a peaceful haven of scientific advances and Presidential inaugurations, is now a tangle of problems: race problems, urban problems, foreign-policy problems, problems of pollution, poverty, energy depletion, youthful rebellion, assassination, and drugs. Some books illustrate these problems dramatically. One, for instance, contains a picture of a doll half buried in a mass of untreated sewage: the caption reads, "Are we in danger of being overwhelmed by the products of our society and wastage created by their production?". Would you agree with this photographer's interpretation? Two books show the same picture of an old black woman sitting in a straight chair in a dingy room, her hands folded in graceful resignation: the surrounding text discusses the problems faced by the urban poor and by the aged who depend on Social Security. Other books present current problems less starkly. One of the texts concludes sagely: Such passages have a familiar ring. Amid all the problems, the deus ex machina of science still dodders around in the gloaming of pious hope.

Even more surprising than the emergence of problems is the discovery that the great unity of the text has broken. Whereas in the fifties all texts represented the same political view, current texts follow no pattern of orthodoxy. Some books, for instance, portray civil-rights legislation as a series of actions taken by a wise paternal government; others convey some suggestion of the social upheaval involved and make mention of such people as Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X. In some books, the Cold War has ended; in others, it continues with Communism threatening the free nations of the earth.

That repartee is best which leaves the addressee _________.

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage.

The essential quality of repartee, according to the author, is _______.

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage.

The humorist aiming his repartee at rank and might has to be careful because _________.

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage.

Which of the following options is true?

Directions: Answer the question based on the following passage.

My parents were atto rneys: my father, a criminal lawyer and my mother, a negligence lawyer. They were the perfect left–brain/right–brain combination, my father was intuitive and my mother, all reason – qualities that, when balanced, matter the most in business.

The first five years of my life, we lived in Shanghai, China (my father was then in Army Intelligence). My clearest memories are of riding around in a rickshaw with my amah (nanny) and “grazing” at street food stalls (much to my mother’s horror). Because life was so dangerous then (fear of being “shanghai’d”), I was sent off to Sacred Heart Convent day school (much to my Orthodox Jewish grandmother’s horror).

When we fled the closing Red Curtain (the last plane out), we moved back to our apartment on Eleventh Street, between First and Second avenues in Manhattan. In the years dominated by the middle–class flight to the suburbs, I was the quintessential city kid. I’ve since wondered whether being outside the mainstream later helped me view mainstream America with a more objective eye.

Growing up, I spent more time with my maternal grandparents than I did at home. My grandmother was born in America, while my grandfather had come from Russia (claiming, convincingly, that he’d escaped on a horse). They lived a few blocks away from us, where they owned some tenements. My grandfather’s maxim was: If you can’t watch it, don’t’ buy it. So I’d sit out with him on Second Avenue in bentwood chairs to help him “watch” their buildings.

And that’s where I began to learn about marketing.

He had a haberdashery store and together we would decorate the front windows. Then we’d take our chairs back outside and wait. Few customers walked by without being hooked by our display, we’d pick up our chairs and go inside again to re–do the window. Repositioning a tie at a jauntier angle or changing the colour of a shirt, I learned, could convey a different message.

Meanwhile, my grandmother was upstairs in their apartment above the store, keeping the books. Every noontime, like clock–work, she’d take over running the store from my grandfather and they’d pass one another on the stairs, rarely exchanging a word–a marvelous business shorthand. After lunch, they’d again slip by each other in virtual silence, as they returned to their respective posts. I often think of them when I give my TrendView seminars and mention the trend of Cashing Out: theirs was the perfect Mom–and–Pop business, honest and human–scale, a business that ran so well it transcended language.

It was also my grandmother’s job to collect the monthly rents; I’d “help” her with that, too. On the first day of the month, the tenants would drop by to pay their rents – all of eight, twelve, twenty dollars a month. She’d sit at the mahogany table in her dining room, and chat with them in Yiddish, Russian, some German, and Ukrainian.

The business worked. It was personal and hands–on, incorporating family and an occasional friend. There was built–in–child care for my sister Mechele and me. Family dinner conversations centered around daily problems and solutions – work was never something that stopped at 5 p.m. We talked about the real estate business, the store, my parents’ legal cases. Everybody knew everything, and we all helped out where we could. The objective was deceptively simple: get the work done and appreciate the process.

Years later, when I started to formulate the blueprint for BrainReserve, I structured it instinctively around what I had learned from my family. I began my filling up the ranks of the company with my sister and her friends and my friends. Many of my former colleagues were horrified. If you want to be a marketing consultant, act like one, they told me. Give your staff important–sounding titles. Develop a scientific approach [cut–and–dried) to what you’re doing. Don’t share any information with outsiders. And you must hire some M.B.A.’s.

Instead, I hired my best friend, Lys Marigold, a journalist, who turned out to be a genius at generating Big Ideas, at knowing something about everything, and at translating marketing into English. She worked with us for ten years, always claiming that she was only there “temporarily,” and when she left to spend more time in Europe, we were all devastated. It has turned out fine though – we just fax her in Amsterdam with questions and drag her back into the office whenever she comes home. She came home to work on this book.

My sister, Mechele Flaum, now manages BrainReserve – she runs operations, does strategic planning, and oversees client contentment. Plus, following the family heritage, she’s still watching over our grandparents’ buildings.

The point is that I never wanted a traditional corporation, with each employee sitting robotically in his or her office. I tried to create a community for thinking – for I believe what inspires productivity the most is freedom –and freedom begets creativity. Having a free and flexible environment provides a place where people can work together to focus on the future.

What is the author's view about marketing communication?

Directions: Answer the question based on the following passage.

My parents were atto rneys: my father, a criminal lawyer and my mother, a negligence lawyer. They were the perfect left–brain/right–brain combination, my father was intuitive and my mother, all reason – qualities that, when balanced, matter the most in business.

The first five years of my life, we lived in Shanghai, China (my father was then in Army Intelligence). My clearest memories are of riding around in a rickshaw with my amah (nanny) and “grazing” at street food stalls (much to my mother’s horror). Because life was so dangerous then (fear of being “shanghai’d”), I was sent off to Sacred Heart Convent day school (much to my Orthodox Jewish grandmother’s horror).

When we fled the closing Red Curtain (the last plane out), we moved back to our apartment on Eleventh Street, between First and Second avenues in Manhattan. In the years dominated by the middle–class flight to the suburbs, I was the quintessential city kid. I’ve since wondered whether being outside the mainstream later helped me view mainstream America with a more objective eye.

Growing up, I spent more time with my maternal grandparents than I did at home. My grandmother was born in America, while my grandfather had come from Russia (claiming, convincingly, that he’d escaped on a horse). They lived a few blocks away from us, where they owned some tenements. My grandfather’s maxim was: If you can’t watch it, don’t’ buy it. So I’d sit out with him on Second Avenue in bentwood chairs to help him “watch” their buildings.

And that’s where I began to learn about marketing.

He had a haberdashery store and together we would decorate the front windows. Then we’d take our chairs back outside and wait. Few customers walked by without being hooked by our display, we’d pick up our chairs and go inside again to re–do the window. Repositioning a tie at a jauntier angle or changing the colour of a shirt, I learned, could convey a different message.

Meanwhile, my grandmother was upstairs in their apartment above the store, keeping the books. Every noontime, like clock–work, she’d take over running the store from my grandfather and they’d pass one another on the stairs, rarely exchanging a word–a marvelous business shorthand. After lunch, they’d again slip by each other in virtual silence, as they returned to their respective posts. I often think of them when I give my TrendView seminars and mention the trend of Cashing Out: theirs was the perfect Mom–and–Pop business, honest and human–scale, a business that ran so well it transcended language.

It was also my grandmother’s job to collect the monthly rents; I’d “help” her with that, too. On the first day of the month, the tenants would drop by to pay their rents – all of eight, twelve, twenty dollars a month. She’d sit at the mahogany table in her dining room, and chat with them in Yiddish, Russian, some German, and Ukrainian.

The business worked. It was personal and hands–on, incorporating family and an occasional friend. There was built–in–child care for my sister Mechele and me. Family dinner conversations centered around daily problems and solutions – work was never something that stopped at 5 p.m. We talked about the real estate business, the store, my parents’ legal cases. Everybody knew everything, and we all helped out where we could. The objective was deceptively simple: get the work done and appreciate the process.

Years later, when I started to formulate the blueprint for BrainReserve, I structured it instinctively around what I had learned from my family. I began my filling up the ranks of the company with my sister and her friends and my friends. Many of my former colleagues were horrified. If you want to be a marketing consultant, act like one, they told me. Give your staff important–sounding titles. Develop a scientific approach [cut–and–dried) to what you’re doing. Don’t share any information with outsiders. And you must hire some M.B.A.’s.

Instead, I hired my best friend, Lys Marigold, a journalist, who turned out to be a genius at generating Big Ideas, at knowing something about everything, and at translating marketing into English. She worked with us for ten years, always claiming that she was only there “temporarily,” and when she left to spend more time in Europe, we were all devastated. It has turned out fine though – we just fax her in Amsterdam with questions and drag her back into the office whenever she comes home. She came home to work on this book.

My sister, Mechele Flaum, now manages BrainReserve – she runs operations, does strategic planning, and oversees client contentment. Plus, following the family heritage, she’s still watching over our grandparents’ buildings.

The point is that I never wanted a traditional corporation, with each employee sitting robotically in his or her office. I tried to create a community for thinking – for I believe what inspires productivity the most is freedom –and freedom begets creativity. Having a free and flexible environment provides a place where people can work together to focus on the future.

Which of the following options do you think is true?

Directions: Answer the question based on the following passage.

My parents were atto rneys: my father, a criminal lawyer and my mother, a negligence lawyer. They were the perfect left–brain/right–brain combination, my father was intuitive and my mother, all reason – qualities that, when balanced, matter the most in business.

The first five years of my life, we lived in Shanghai, China (my father was then in Army Intelligence). My clearest memories are of riding around in a rickshaw with my amah (nanny) and “grazing” at street food stalls (much to my mother’s horror). Because life was so dangerous then (fear of being “shanghai’d”), I was sent off to Sacred Heart Convent day school (much to my Orthodox Jewish grandmother’s horror).

When we fled the closing Red Curtain (the last plane out), we moved back to our apartment on Eleventh Street, between First and Second avenues in Manhattan. In the years dominated by the middle–class flight to the suburbs, I was the quintessential city kid. I’ve since wondered whether being outside the mainstream later helped me view mainstream America with a more objective eye.

Growing up, I spent more time with my maternal grandparents than I did at home. My grandmother was born in America, while my grandfather had come from Russia (claiming, convincingly, that he’d escaped on a horse). They lived a few blocks away from us, where they owned some tenements. My grandfather’s maxim was: If you can’t watch it, don’t’ buy it. So I’d sit out with him on Second Avenue in bentwood chairs to help him “watch” their buildings.

And that’s where I began to learn about marketing.

He had a haberdashery store and together we would decorate the front windows. Then we’d take our chairs back outside and wait. Few customers walked by without being hooked by our display, we’d pick up our chairs and go inside again to re–do the window. Repositioning a tie at a jauntier angle or changing the colour of a shirt, I learned, could convey a different message.

Meanwhile, my grandmother was upstairs in their apartment above the store, keeping the books. Every noontime, like clock–work, she’d take over running the store from my grandfather and they’d pass one another on the stairs, rarely exchanging a word–a marvelous business shorthand. After lunch, they’d again slip by each other in virtual silence, as they returned to their respective posts. I often think of them when I give my TrendView seminars and mention the trend of Cashing Out: theirs was the perfect Mom–and–Pop business, honest and human–scale, a business that ran so well it transcended language.

It was also my grandmother’s job to collect the monthly rents; I’d “help” her with that, too. On the first day of the month, the tenants would drop by to pay their rents – all of eight, twelve, twenty dollars a month. She’d sit at the mahogany table in her dining room, and chat with them in Yiddish, Russian, some German, and Ukrainian.

The business worked. It was personal and hands–on, incorporating family and an occasional friend. There was built–in–child care for my sister Mechele and me. Family dinner conversations centered around daily problems and solutions – work was never something that stopped at 5 p.m. We talked about the real estate business, the store, my parents’ legal cases. Everybody knew everything, and we all helped out where we could. The objective was deceptively simple: get the work done and appreciate the process.

Years later, when I started to formulate the blueprint for BrainReserve, I structured it instinctively around what I had learned from my family. I began my filling up the ranks of the company with my sister and her friends and my friends. Many of my former colleagues were horrified. If you want to be a marketing consultant, act like one, they told me. Give your staff important–sounding titles. Develop a scientific approach [cut–and–dried) to what you’re doing. Don’t share any information with outsiders. And you must hire some M.B.A.’s.

Instead, I hired my best friend, Lys Marigold, a journalist, who turned out to be a genius at generating Big Ideas, at knowing something about everything, and at translating marketing into English. She worked with us for ten years, always claiming that she was only there “temporarily,” and when she left to spend more time in Europe, we were all devastated. It has turned out fine though – we just fax her in Amsterdam with questions and drag her back into the office whenever she comes home. She came home to work on this book.

My sister, Mechele Flaum, now manages BrainReserve – she runs operations, does strategic planning, and oversees client contentment. Plus, following the family heritage, she’s still watching over our grandparents’ buildings.

The point is that I never wanted a traditional corporation, with each employee sitting robotically in his or her office. I tried to create a community for thinking – for I believe what inspires productivity the most is freedom –and freedom begets creativity. Having a free and flexible environment provides a place where people can work together to focus on the future.

Explain: 'a creature of the shadows and silence'.

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage.

Now, let us speak of one of the most prolific writers of her time, Anne Silvia Spencer. Her writings and pieces of work very aptly reflect not only the social set–up of that age but also what she thought about the same. Her writings give us a clear view of what kind of a human being she was. The most famous of her works, her autobiography, “The story of a simple girl” presents to us the way she acquired great heights as an author.

Her father, Charles Spencer, was, as Anne later wrote, a very peculiar person. Heir to a fortune, educated at Harrow and Cambridge, he was nevertheless a complete domestic tyrant. After bearing him ten children, his gentle wife had little strength left for struggle against him, and the children never dared oppose his wishes.

Yet Anne’s childhood was happy. She romped and studied with her eldest brother, learnt Greek and French, read widely and wrote poetic tragedies. Her own tragedy began at fifteen with a cough and an injury to her back, which resulted in increasingly bad health. Then her mother died. Four years later, her father decided to sell the country home. The large family moved from house to house until her father bought No. 72 Deer Haven. There Anne's health grew worse, and she became a creature of the shadows and silence.

As the years passed, the family grew used to her withdrawn life. She had a certain independence, for an uncle had left her a small income. But her brothers and sisters were at the mercy of Mr. Spencer's harsh rules, which hung over the household like thunder in heavy weather. Chief among them was the absolute refusal to let his daughters marry. He prevented the marriage of Anne’s gay, dance–loving sister, Helena, and the scenes that followed broke Anne’s heart. Yet she remained devoted to her father. It was devotion that served to strengthen the walls of her prison.

She didn’t talk much to her siblings and definitely not to her father. Irrespective of her solitary existence, she was pretty fond of her brothers and siblings. As per her feelings for her father, she herself could not decide (as she writes in her autobiography) whether she had a feeling of loathe or veneration for her father.

What broke Anne's heart?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage.

Now, let us speak of one of the most prolific writers of her time, Anne Silvia Spencer. Her writings and pieces of work very aptly reflect not only the social set–up of that age but also what she thought about the same. Her writings give us a clear view of what kind of a human being she was. The most famous of her works, her autobiography, “The story of a simple girl” presents to us the way she acquired great heights as an author.

Her father, Charles Spencer, was, as Anne later wrote, a very peculiar person. Heir to a fortune, educated at Harrow and Cambridge, he was nevertheless a complete domestic tyrant. After bearing him ten children, his gentle wife had little strength left for struggle against him, and the children never dared oppose his wishes.

Yet Anne’s childhood was happy. She romped and studied with her eldest brother, learnt Greek and French, read widely and wrote poetic tragedies. Her own tragedy began at fifteen with a cough and an injury to her back, which resulted in increasingly bad health. Then her mother died. Four years later, her father decided to sell the country home. The large family moved from house to house until her father bought No. 72 Deer Haven. There Anne's health grew worse, and she became a creature of the shadows and silence.

As the years passed, the family grew used to her withdrawn life. She had a certain independence, for an uncle had left her a small income. But her brothers and sisters were at the mercy of Mr. Spencer's harsh rules, which hung over the household like thunder in heavy weather. Chief among them was the absolute refusal to let his daughters marry. He prevented the marriage of Anne’s gay, dance–loving sister, Helena, and the scenes that followed broke Anne’s heart. Yet she remained devoted to her father. It was devotion that served to strengthen the walls of her prison.

She didn’t talk much to her siblings and definitely not to her father. Irrespective of her solitary existence, she was pretty fond of her brothers and siblings. As per her feelings for her father, she herself could not decide (as she writes in her autobiography) whether she had a feeling of loathe or veneration for her father.

Anne's father was 'a complete domestic tyrant'. It implies that ______.

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage.

Now, let us speak of one of the most prolific writers of her time, Anne Silvia Spencer. Her writings and pieces of work very aptly reflect not only the social set–up of that age but also what she thought about the same. Her writings give us a clear view of what kind of a human being she was. The most famous of her works, her autobiography, “The story of a simple girl” presents to us the way she acquired great heights as an author.

Her father, Charles Spencer, was, as Anne later wrote, a very peculiar person. Heir to a fortune, educated at Harrow and Cambridge, he was nevertheless a complete domestic tyrant. After bearing him ten children, his gentle wife had little strength left for struggle against him, and the children never dared oppose his wishes.

Yet Anne’s childhood was happy. She romped and studied with her eldest brother, learnt Greek and French, read widely and wrote poetic tragedies. Her own tragedy began at fifteen with a cough and an injury to her back, which resulted in increasingly bad health. Then her mother died. Four years later, her father decided to sell the country home. The large family moved from house to house until her father bought No. 72 Deer Haven. There Anne's health grew worse, and she became a creature of the shadows and silence.

As the years passed, the family grew used to her withdrawn life. She had a certain independence, for an uncle had left her a small income. But her brothers and sisters were at the mercy of Mr. Spencer's harsh rules, which hung over the household like thunder in heavy weather. Chief among them was the absolute refusal to let his daughters marry. He prevented the marriage of Anne’s gay, dance–loving sister, Helena, and the scenes that followed broke Anne’s heart. Yet she remained devoted to her father. It was devotion that served to strengthen the walls of her prison.

She didn’t talk much to her siblings and definitely not to her father. Irrespective of her solitary existence, she was pretty fond of her brothers and siblings. As per her feelings for her father, she herself could not decide (as she writes in her autobiography) whether she had a feeling of loathe or veneration for her father.

What does the last sentence of the passage imply?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage.

Now, let us speak of one of the most prolific writers of her time, Anne Silvia Spencer. Her writings and pieces of work very aptly reflect not only the social set–up of that age but also what she thought about the same. Her writings give us a clear view of what kind of a human being she was. The most famous of her works, her autobiography, “The story of a simple girl” presents to us the way she acquired great heights as an author.

Her father, Charles Spencer, was, as Anne later wrote, a very peculiar person. Heir to a fortune, educated at Harrow and Cambridge, he was nevertheless a complete domestic tyrant. After bearing him ten children, his gentle wife had little strength left for struggle against him, and the children never dared oppose his wishes.

Yet Anne’s childhood was happy. She romped and studied with her eldest brother, learnt Greek and French, read widely and wrote poetic tragedies. Her own tragedy began at fifteen with a cough and an injury to her back, which resulted in increasingly bad health. Then her mother died. Four years later, her father decided to sell the country home. The large family moved from house to house until her father bought No. 72 Deer Haven. There Anne's health grew worse, and she became a creature of the shadows and silence.

As the years passed, the family grew used to her withdrawn life. She had a certain independence, for an uncle had left her a small income. But her brothers and sisters were at the mercy of Mr. Spencer's harsh rules, which hung over the household like thunder in heavy weather. Chief among them was the absolute refusal to let his daughters marry. He prevented the marriage of Anne’s gay, dance–loving sister, Helena, and the scenes that followed broke Anne’s heart. Yet she remained devoted to her father. It was devotion that served to strengthen the walls of her prison.

She didn’t talk much to her siblings and definitely not to her father. Irrespective of her solitary existence, she was pretty fond of her brothers and siblings. As per her feelings for her father, she herself could not decide (as she writes in her autobiography) whether she had a feeling of loathe or veneration for her father.