English Reading Comprehension

What happened to Albert's fingers while he was working in the mines?

Directions: Read the passage and answer the following question:

Even though the story is fiction, I hope the intent of the story is appreciated, whether true or not.
Back in the fifteenth century, in a tiny village near Nuremberg, lived a family with eighteen children. Eighteen! In order merely to keep food on the table for this mob, the father and head of the household, a goldsmith by profession, worked almost eighteen hours a day at his trade and any other paying chore he could find in the neighbourhood. Despite their seemingly hopeless condition, two of Albrecht Durer the Elder's children had a dream. They both wanted to pursue their talent for art, but they knew fully well that their father would never be financially able to send either of them to Nuremberg to study at the Academy.
        After many long discussions at night in their crowded bed, the two boys finally worked out a pact. They would toss a coin. The loser would go down into the nearby mines and, with his earnings, support his brother while he attended the academy. Then, when that brother who won the toss completed his studies, in four years, he would support the other brother at the academy, either with sales of his artwork or, if necessary, also by laboring in the mines.
        They tossed a coin on a Sunday morning after church. Albrecht Durer won the toss and went off to Nuremberg. Albert went down into the dangerous mines and for the next four years, financed his brother, whose work at the academy was almost an immediate sensation. Albrecht's etchings, his woodcuts, and his oils were far better than those of most of his professors, and by the time he graduated, he was beginning to earn considerable fees for his commissioned works.
        When the young artist returned to his village, the Durer family held a festive dinner on their lawn to celebrate Albrecht's triumphant homecoming. After a long and memorable meal, punctuated with music and laughter, Albrecht rose from his honored position at the head of the table to drink a toast to his beloved brother for the years of sacrifice that had enabled Albrecht to fulfill his ambition. His closing words were, "And now, Albert, blessed brother of mine, now it is your turn. Now you can go to Nuremberg to pursue your dream, and I will take care of you." 
        All heads turned in eager expectation to the far end of the table where Albert sat, tears streaming down his pale face, shaking his lowered head from side to side while he sobbed and repeated, over and over, No ...no ...no ...no.
        Finally, Albert rose and wiped the tears from his cheeks. He glanced down the long table at the faces he loved and then holding  his hands close to his right cheek, he said softly, "No, brother. I cannot go to Nuremberg. It is too late for me. Look ... look what four years in the mines have done to my hands! The bones in every finger have been smashed at least once, and lately I have been suffering from arthritis so badly in my right hand that I cannot even hold a glass to return your toast, much less make delicate lines on parchment or canvas with a pen or a brush. No, brother ... for me it is too late." 
        More than 450 years have passed. By now, Albrecht Durer's hundreds of masterful portraits, pen and silver-point sketches, watercolours, charcoals, woodcuts, and copper engravings hang in every great museum in the world, but the odds are great that you, like most people, are familiar with only one of Albrecht Durer's works. More than merely being familiar with it, you very well may have a reproduction hanging in your home or office.
        One day, to pay homage to Albert for all that he had sacrificed, Albrecht Durer painstakingly drew his brother's abused hands with palms together and thin fingers stretched skyward. He called his powerful drawing simply Hands, but the entire world almost immediately opened their hearts to his great masterpiece and renamed his tribute of love The Praying Hands.

      The next time you see a copy of that touching creation, take a second look. Let it be your reminder, if you still need one, that no one - no one - - ever makes it alone!

What did the entire world do to this painting?

Directions: Read the passage and answer the following question:

Even though the story is fiction, I hope the intent of the story is appreciated, whether true or not.
Back in the fifteenth century, in a tiny village near Nuremberg, lived a family with eighteen children. Eighteen! In order merely to keep food on the table for this mob, the father and head of the household, a goldsmith by profession, worked almost eighteen hours a day at his trade and any other paying chore he could find in the neighbourhood. Despite their seemingly hopeless condition, two of Albrecht Durer the Elder's children had a dream. They both wanted to pursue their talent for art, but they knew fully well that their father would never be financially able to send either of them to Nuremberg to study at the Academy.
        After many long discussions at night in their crowded bed, the two boys finally worked out a pact. They would toss a coin. The loser would go down into the nearby mines and, with his earnings, support his brother while he attended the academy. Then, when that brother who won the toss completed his studies, in four years, he would support the other brother at the academy, either with sales of his artwork or, if necessary, also by laboring in the mines.
        They tossed a coin on a Sunday morning after church. Albrecht Durer won the toss and went off to Nuremberg. Albert went down into the dangerous mines and for the next four years, financed his brother, whose work at the academy was almost an immediate sensation. Albrecht's etchings, his woodcuts, and his oils were far better than those of most of his professors, and by the time he graduated, he was beginning to earn considerable fees for his commissioned works.
        When the young artist returned to his village, the Durer family held a festive dinner on their lawn to celebrate Albrecht's triumphant homecoming. After a long and memorable meal, punctuated with music and laughter, Albrecht rose from his honored position at the head of the table to drink a toast to his beloved brother for the years of sacrifice that had enabled Albrecht to fulfill his ambition. His closing words were, "And now, Albert, blessed brother of mine, now it is your turn. Now you can go to Nuremberg to pursue your dream, and I will take care of you." 
        All heads turned in eager expectation to the far end of the table where Albert sat, tears streaming down his pale face, shaking his lowered head from side to side while he sobbed and repeated, over and over, No ...no ...no ...no.
        Finally, Albert rose and wiped the tears from his cheeks. He glanced down the long table at the faces he loved and then holding  his hands close to his right cheek, he said softly, "No, brother. I cannot go to Nuremberg. It is too late for me. Look ... look what four years in the mines have done to my hands! The bones in every finger have been smashed at least once, and lately I have been suffering from arthritis so badly in my right hand that I cannot even hold a glass to return your toast, much less make delicate lines on parchment or canvas with a pen or a brush. No, brother ... for me it is too late." 
        More than 450 years have passed. By now, Albrecht Durer's hundreds of masterful portraits, pen and silver-point sketches, watercolours, charcoals, woodcuts, and copper engravings hang in every great museum in the world, but the odds are great that you, like most people, are familiar with only one of Albrecht Durer's works. More than merely being familiar with it, you very well may have a reproduction hanging in your home or office.
        One day, to pay homage to Albert for all that he had sacrificed, Albrecht Durer painstakingly drew his brother's abused hands with palms together and thin fingers stretched skyward. He called his powerful drawing simply Hands, but the entire world almost immediately opened their hearts to his great masterpiece and renamed his tribute of love The Praying Hands.

      The next time you see a copy of that touching creation, take a second look. Let it be your reminder, if you still need one, that no one - no one - - ever makes it alone!

What is the meaning of violence?

Then came quarrels, a complete separation, not apparent, but real; next, her husband showed himself aggressive, suspicious and violent. Now, he was jealous, jealous of Jacques, and this day even, after a scene, he had struck her.
       She added with decision: “I will not go back to him. Do with me what you like.”
Jacques sat down opposite to her, their knees touching each other. He caught hold of her hands:
 “My dear love, you are going to commit a gross, an irreparable folly. If you want to quit your husband, put wrongs on one side, so that your situation as a woman of the world may be saved.”

 She asked, as she cast at him, restless glance:
“Then, what do you advise me?”
“To go back home, and put up with your life there, till the day when you can obtain either a separation or a divorcé, with the honors of war.”
“Is not this thing which you advise me to do a little cowardly?”
“No: it is wise and reasonable. You have a high position, a reputation to safe guard, friends to preserve, and relations to deal with. You must not lose all these through mere caprice.”
 She rose up, and said with violence:
“Well, no! I cannot have any more of it! It is at an end! It is at an end!”
Then placing her two hands on her lover’s shoulders and looking at him straight in the face, she asked:
 “Do you love me?”
 “Yes.”
“Really and truly.”
“Yes.”
“Then keep me.”
He exclaimed:
“Keep you? In my house? Here? Why, you are mad. It would mean losing you forever; losing you beyond hope of recall! You are mad!”
She replied, slowly and seriously, like a woman who feels the weight of her words:
“Listen, Jacques. He has forbidden me to see you again, and I will not play this comedy of coming secretly to your house. You must either lose me or take me.”
“My dear Irene, in that case, obtain your divorcé, and I will marry you.”
“Yes, you will marry me in – two years at the soonest. Yours is a patient love.”
“ Look here! Reflect! If you remain here, he’ll come tomorrow to take you away, seeing that he is your husband, seeing that he has a right and law on his side.”
“ I did not ask you to keep me in your house, Jacques, but to take me anywhere you like. I thought you loved me enough to do that. I have made a mistake. Good-bye.”
She turned around, and went toward the door so quickly that he was not able to catch hold of her when she had gone outside the room
“Listen Irene.”
She struggled, and did not want to listen to him any longer her eyes full of tears, and with these words only on her lips:
“Let me alone! Let me alone! Let me alone!”
 He made her sit down by force, and falling once more on his knees at her feet, he now brought forward number of arguments and counsels to make her understand the folly and terrible risk of her project. He omitted nothing which he deemed if necessary to say to convince her, finding in his very affection for her strong motives of persuasion.
  As she remained silent and cold, he begged of her, implored of her to listen to him, to trust him, to follow his advice.
 When he had finished speaking, she only replied:
“Are you disposed to let me go away now? Take away your hands, so that I may rise up.”
“Look here, Irene.”
“Will you let go.”
“Irene – is your resolution irrevocable?”
“Do let me go.”
“Tell me only whether this resolution, this foolish resolution of yours, which you will bitterly regret, is irrevocable?”
“Yes: let me go!”
“Then stay. You know well that you are at home here. We shall go away tomorrow morning.”
She rose up, in spite of him, and said in a hard tone:
“No. It is too late. I do not want sacrifice: I want devotion.”
“Stay! I have done what I ought to do: I have said what I ought to say. I have no further responsibility on your behalf. My conscience is at peace. Tell me what you want me to do, and I will obey.”
She resumed her seat, looked at him for a long time, and then asked, in a very calm voice:
“Explain then.”
“How is that? What do you wish me to explain?”
“Everything – everything that you thought about before coming to this resolution. Then I will see what I ought to do.”
“But I have thought about nothing at all. I ought to warn you that you are going to accomplish an act of folly. You persist; and then I ask to share in this act of folly, and I even insist on it.”
“It is not natural to change one’s opinion so quickly.”
“Listen, my dear love. It is not a question here of sacrifice or devotion. On the day when I realized that I love you, I said this to myself, which every lover ought to say to himself in the same case: The man who loves a woman, who makes an effort to win her, who gets her and who takes her contracts so far as he is himself and so far as she is concerned, a sacred engagement.’ It is mark you, a question of dealing with a woman like you, and not with a woman of an impulsive and yielding disposition.
 “Marriage, which has a great social value, a great legal value, possesses in my eyes only a slight moral value, taking into account the conditions under which it generally takes place.
  “Therefore, when a woman, united by this lawful bond, but having no attachment to a husband whom she cannot love, a woman whose heart is free, meets a man whom she cares, and gives herself to him, when a man who has no other tie takes a woman in this way, I say that they pledge themselves toward each other by this mutual and free agreement much more than by the ‘Yes’ uttered in the presence of the mayor".
 “I say that, if they are both honorable persons, their union must be more intimate, more real, more healthy than if all the sacraments had consecrated it."
 “This woman risks everything. And it is exactly because she knows it, because she gives everything, her heart, her body, her soul, her honor, her life, because she has foreseen all miseries, all dangers, all catastrophes, because she dares to do a bold act, an intrepid act, because she is prepared,determined to brave everything – her husband who might kill her, and society which may cast her out. This is why she is heroic in her conjugal infidelity; this is why her lover is taking her must also have foreseen everything, and preferred her to everything, whatever might happen. I have nothing more to say. I spoke in the beginning like a man of sense whose duty was to warn you; and now there is left in me only a man – the man who loves you. Say, then, what I am to do!”
  Radiant, she closed his mouth with her lips, and said to him in a low tone:

What is the meaning of monde?

Directions: Read the passage and answer the following question

Jacques De Randal, having dined at home alone, told his valet he might go, and then sat
down at a table to write his letters.
        He finished out every year by writing and dreaming, making for himself a sort of review of things that had happened since last New Year’s Day, things that were now all over and dead: and, in proportion as the faces of his friends rose up before his eyes, he wrote them a few lines, a cordial ”Good morning” on the first of January.
       So he sat down, opened a drawer, took out of it a woman’s photograph, gazed at it a few moments, and kissed it. Then, having laid it beside a sheet of notepaper, he began:
  “My Dear Irene:
  You must have by this time the little souvenir, which I sent you. I have shut myself up this evening in order to tell you –”
The pen here ceased to move. Jacques rose up and began walking up and down the room.
      For the last six months, he had a mistress, not a mistress like the others, a woman with whom engages in a passing intrigue, of the theatrical world or the demi-monde, but a woman whom he loved and won. He was no longer a young man, although still comparatively young, and he looked on life seriously in a positive and practical spirit.
      Accordingly, he drew up the balance sheet of his passion, as he drew up every year the balance sheet of friendships that were ended or freshly contracted, of circumstances and persons that had entered his life. His first ardor of love having grown calmer, he asked himself, with the precision of a merchant making a calculation, what was the state of his heart with regard to her, and tried to form an idea of what it would be in the future. He found there a great and deep affection, made up of tenderness, gratitude, and the thousand subtleties, which gave birth to long and powerful attachments.
       A ring of the bell made him start. He hesitated. Should he open? But he deemed it was his duty to open, on this New Year’s night, to the Unknown who knocks while passing, no matter whom it may be.
    So he took a wax-candle, passed through the ante-chamber, removed the bolts, turned the key, drew the door back, and saw his mistress standing pale as a corpse leaning against the wall.
      He stammered: “What is the matter with you?”
      She replied: “Are you alone?”
      “Yes.”
       “Without servants?”
       “Yes.”
       “You are not going out?”
       “No.”
       She entered with the air of a woman who knew the house. As soon as she was in the drawing room, she sank into the sofa, and, covering her face with her hands, began to weep dreadfully.
       He kneeled down at her feet, seized hold of her hands to remove them from her eyes, so that he might look at them, and exclaimed

“Irene, Irene, what is the matter with you? I implore of you to tell me what is the matter with you?”
          Then in the midst of her sobs she murmured:  “I can no longer live like this.”
         He did not understand.
         “Like this? What do you mean?”
          “Yes. I can no longer live like this. I have endured so much. He struck me this afternoon.”
          “Who – your husband?”
          “Yes – my husband?”
          “Ha!”
        He was astonished, having never suspected that her husband could be brutal. He was a man of the world, of the better class, a clubman, a lover of horses, a theater-goer and an expert swordsman; he was known, talked about, appreciated everywhere, having an absence of education and of the real culture needed in order to think like all well-bred people, and finally a respect for all conventional prejudices.
       He appeared to devote himself to his wife, as a man ought to do in the case of wealthy and well-bred people. He displayed enough anxiety about her wishes, her health, her dresses, and, beyond that, left perfectly free.
       Randal, having become Irene’s friend, had a right to the affectionate handclasp which every husband endowed with good manners owes to his wife’s intimate acquaintances.Then, when Jacques, after having been for some time the friend, became the lover, his relations with the husband were even more cordial.
       Jacques had never dreamed that there were storms in this household, and he was scared at this unexpected revelation.
        He asked.
        “How did it happen?Tell me.”

The word “sunk” (Paragraph 5) in the passage conveys the degree to which Ward

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question.

In this passage from a novel, the narrator has been reading letters of his grandmother. Susan Ward was a young woman, a writer and a mother, whose husband Oliver was working as a mining engineer in Leadville, in the West. Here, the narrator imagines Susan Ward as she spends the winter with her family in Milton, New York, before rejoining her husband in the spring.
From the parental burrow, Leadville seemed so far away that it was only half - real. Unwrapping her apple cheeked son after a sleigh ride down the lane, she had a difficulty in believing that she had ever lived anywhere but here in Milton.
She felt how the placid industry of her days matched the placid industry of all the days that had passed over that farm through six generations. Present and past were less continuous than synonymous. She did not have to come at her grandparents through a time machine. Her own life and that of the grandfather she was writing about showed her similar figures in an identical landscape. At the milldam where she had learned to skate she pulled her little boy on his sled, and they watched a weasel, snow - white for winter, flirt his black - tripped tail in and out of the mill’s timbers. She might have been watching with her grandfather’s eyes. Watching a wintry sky die out beyond black elms, she could not make her mind restore the sight of the western mountains at sunset from her cabin door, or the cabin itself, or Oliver, or their friends. Who were those glittering people intent on raiding the continent for money or for scientific knowledge? What illusion was it that she bridged between this world and that? She paused sometimes; cleaning the room she had always called Grandma’s Room, and thought with astonishment of the memory of Oliver’s great revolver lying on the dresser when he, already a thoroughing Westerner, had come to the house to court her. The town of Milton was dim and gentle, moulded by gentle lives, the current of change as slow through it, as the seep of water through a bog. More than once she thought how wrong those women in San Francisco had been, convinced that their old homes did not welcome them on their return. Last year when Oliver’s professional future was uncertain, she would have agreed. Now, with the future assured in the form of Oliver’s appointment as manager of the Adelaide mine in Leadville, the comfortable past asserted itself unchanged. Need for her husband, like worry over him, was turned low. Absorbed in her child and in the writing of her book, she was sunk in her affection for home. Even the signs of mutability that sometimes jolted her — the whiteness of her mother’s hair, the worn patience of her sister’s face, the morose silences of her brother - in - law,
now so long and black that the women worried about him in low voices - could not more than briefly interrupt the deep security and peace. I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to. It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transpiration, we have lived too shallowly in too many places. I doubt that any one of my son’s generation could comprehend the home feelings of someone like Susan Ward. Despite her unwillingness to live separately from her husband, she could probably have stayed on indefinitely in Milton, visited only occasionally by an asteroid husband. Or she would have picked up the old home and remade it in a new place. What she resisted was being a woman with no real home.
When frontier historians theorise about the uprooted, the lawless, the purseless, and the socially cut - off who emigrated to the West, they are not talking about people like my grandmother, so much that was cherished and loved, women like her had to give up; and the more they gave it up, the more they carried it helplessly with them. It was a process like ionization: what was subtracted from one pole was added to the other. For that sort of pioneer, the west was not a new country being created, but an old one being reproduced; in that sense our pioneer women were always more realistic than our pioneer men. The moderns, carrying little baggage of the cultural kind, not even living in traditional air, but breathing in to their space helmets, a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that ) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no domestic sentiment; they have had their empathy removed. Their computers have no ghostly feedback of home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!

It can be said that Ward “did not have to come at her grandparents through a time machine” because

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question.

In this passage from a novel, the narrator has been reading letters of his grandmother. Susan Ward was a young woman, a writer and a mother, whose husband Oliver was working as a mining engineer in Leadville, in the West. Here, the narrator imagines Susan Ward as she spends the winter with her family in Milton, New York, before rejoining her husband in the spring.
From the parental burrow, Leadville seemed so far away that it was only half - real. Unwrapping her apple cheeked son after a sleigh ride down the lane, she had a difficulty in believing that she had ever lived anywhere but here in Milton.
She felt how the placid industry of her days matched the placid industry of all the days that had passed over that farm through six generations. Present and past were less continuous than synonymous. She did not have to come at her grandparents through a time machine. Her own life and that of the grandfather she was writing about showed her similar figures in an identical landscape. At the milldam where she had learned to skate she pulled her little boy on his sled, and they watched a weasel, snow - white for winter, flirt his black - tripped tail in and out of the mill’s timbers. She might have been watching with her grandfather’s eyes. Watching a wintry sky die out beyond black elms, she could not make her mind restore the sight of the western mountains at sunset from her cabin door, or the cabin itself, or Oliver, or their friends. Who were those glittering people intent on raiding the continent for money or for scientific knowledge? What illusion was it that she bridged between this world and that? She paused sometimes; cleaning the room she had always called Grandma’s Room, and thought with astonishment of the memory of Oliver’s great revolver lying on the dresser when he, already a thoroughing Westerner, had come to the house to court her. The town of Milton was dim and gentle, moulded by gentle lives, the current of change as slow through it, as the seep of water through a bog. More than once she thought how wrong those women in San Francisco had been, convinced that their old homes did not welcome them on their return. Last year when Oliver’s professional future was uncertain, she would have agreed. Now, with the future assured in the form of Oliver’s appointment as manager of the Adelaide mine in Leadville, the comfortable past asserted itself unchanged. Need for her husband, like worry over him, was turned low. Absorbed in her child and in the writing of her book, she was sunk in her affection for home. Even the signs of mutability that sometimes jolted her — the whiteness of her mother’s hair, the worn patience of her sister’s face, the morose silences of her brother - in - law,
now so long and black that the women worried about him in low voices - could not more than briefly interrupt the deep security and peace. I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to. It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transpiration, we have lived too shallowly in too many places. I doubt that any one of my son’s generation could comprehend the home feelings of someone like Susan Ward. Despite her unwillingness to live separately from her husband, she could probably have stayed on indefinitely in Milton, visited only occasionally by an asteroid husband. Or she would have picked up the old home and remade it in a new place. What she resisted was being a woman with no real home.
When frontier historians theorise about the uprooted, the lawless, the purseless, and the socially cut - off who emigrated to the West, they are not talking about people like my grandmother, so much that was cherished and loved, women like her had to give up; and the more they gave it up, the more they carried it helplessly with them. It was a process like ionization: what was subtracted from one pole was added to the other. For that sort of pioneer, the west was not a new country being created, but an old one being reproduced; in that sense our pioneer women were always more realistic than our pioneer men. The moderns, carrying little baggage of the cultural kind, not even living in traditional air, but breathing in to their space helmets, a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that ) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no domestic sentiment; they have had their empathy removed. Their computers have no ghostly feedback of home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!

The reference to the grandfather’s eyes at the end of the second paragraph indicates that Ward

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question.

In this passage from a novel, the narrator has been reading letters of his grandmother. Susan Ward was a young woman, a writer and a mother, whose husband Oliver was working as a mining engineer in Leadville, in the West. Here, the narrator imagines Susan Ward as she spends the winter with her family in Milton, New York, before rejoining her husband in the spring.
From the parental burrow, Leadville seemed so far away that it was only half - real. Unwrapping her apple cheeked son after a sleigh ride down the lane, she had a difficulty in believing that she had ever lived anywhere but here in Milton.
She felt how the placid industry of her days matched the placid industry of all the days that had passed over that farm through six generations. Present and past were less continuous than synonymous. She did not have to come at her grandparents through a time machine. Her own life and that of the grandfather she was writing about showed her similar figures in an identical landscape. At the milldam where she had learned to skate she pulled her little boy on his sled, and they watched a weasel, snow - white for winter, flirt his black - tripped tail in and out of the mill’s timbers. She might have been watching with her grandfather’s eyes. Watching a wintry sky die out beyond black elms, she could not make her mind restore the sight of the western mountains at sunset from her cabin door, or the cabin itself, or Oliver, or their friends. Who were those glittering people intent on raiding the continent for money or for scientific knowledge? What illusion was it that she bridged between this world and that? She paused sometimes; cleaning the room she had always called Grandma’s Room, and thought with astonishment of the memory of Oliver’s great revolver lying on the dresser when he, already a thoroughing Westerner, had come to the house to court her. The town of Milton was dim and gentle, moulded by gentle lives, the current of change as slow through it, as the seep of water through a bog. More than once she thought how wrong those women in San Francisco had been, convinced that their old homes did not welcome them on their return. Last year when Oliver’s professional future was uncertain, she would have agreed. Now, with the future assured in the form of Oliver’s appointment as manager of the Adelaide mine in Leadville, the comfortable past asserted itself unchanged. Need for her husband, like worry over him, was turned low. Absorbed in her child and in the writing of her book, she was sunk in her affection for home. Even the signs of mutability that sometimes jolted her — the whiteness of her mother’s hair, the worn patience of her sister’s face, the morose silences of her brother - in - law,
now so long and black that the women worried about him in low voices - could not more than briefly interrupt the deep security and peace. I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to. It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transpiration, we have lived too shallowly in too many places. I doubt that any one of my son’s generation could comprehend the home feelings of someone like Susan Ward. Despite her unwillingness to live separately from her husband, she could probably have stayed on indefinitely in Milton, visited only occasionally by an asteroid husband. Or she would have picked up the old home and remade it in a new place. What she resisted was being a woman with no real home.
When frontier historians theorise about the uprooted, the lawless, the purseless, and the socially cut - off who emigrated to the West, they are not talking about people like my grandmother, so much that was cherished and loved, women like her had to give up; and the more they gave it up, the more they carried it helplessly with them. It was a process like ionization: what was subtracted from one pole was added to the other. For that sort of pioneer, the west was not a new country being created, but an old one being reproduced; in that sense our pioneer women were always more realistic than our pioneer men. The moderns, carrying little baggage of the cultural kind, not even living in traditional air, but breathing in to their space helmets, a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that ) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no domestic sentiment; they have had their empathy removed. Their computers have no ghostly feedback of home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!

The author points out the coexistence of romanticism and realism most probably in order to show that

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question.

In the past century Irish painting has changed from a British - influenced lyrical tradition to an art that evokes the ruggedness and roots of an Irish Celtic past. At the turn of the twentieth century Irish painters, including notables Walter Frederick Osborne and Sir - William Orpen, looked elsewhere for influence.
Osborne’s exposure to “Plein Air” painting deeply impacted his stylistic development; and Orpen allied himself with a group of English artists, while at the same time participating in the French avant - garde experiment, both as painter and teacher.
However nationalist energies were beginning to coalesce, reviving interest in Irish culture and Irish visual arts. Beatrice Elvery’s Aire (1907), a landmark achievement, merged the devotional simplicity of fifteenth - century Italian painting with the iconography of Ireland’s Celtic past, linking the history of Irish Catholicism with the still - nascent Irish republic. And, although also captivated by the French Plein Air school, Sir John Lavery invoked the mythology of his native land for a 1928 commission to paint the central figure for the bank note of the new Irish Free State. Lavery chose as this figure Aire, with her arm on a Celtic harp, the national symbol of independent Ireland. In Irish painting from about 1910, memories of Edwardian romanticism coexisted with a new sense of realism, exemplified by the paintings of Paul Henry and Sean Keating, a student of Orpen’s realism also crept in to the work of Edwardian’s Lavery and Orpen, both of whom made paintings depicting World War I, Lavery with a distanced Victorian nobility, Orpen closer to the front, revealing a more sinister and realistic vision. Meanwhile, counterpoint to the Edwardians and realists came Jack B. Yeats, whose travels throughout the rugged and more authentically Irish west led him to depict subjects ranging from street scenes in Dublin to boxing matches and funerals. Fusing close observations of Irish life and icons with an Irish identity in a new way, Yeats changed the face of Irish painting and became the most important Irish artist of his century.

Ward came to feel differently from “those women in San Francisco” because

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question.

In this passage from a novel, the narrator has been reading letters of his grandmother. Susan Ward was a young woman, a writer and a mother, whose husband Oliver was working as a mining engineer in Leadville, in the West. Here, the narrator imagines Susan Ward as she spends the winter with her family in Milton, New York, before rejoining her husband in the spring.
From the parental burrow, Leadville seemed so far away that it was only half - real. Unwrapping her apple cheeked son after a sleigh ride down the lane, she had a difficulty in believing that she had ever lived anywhere but here in Milton.
She felt how the placid industry of her days matched the placid industry of all the days that had passed over that farm through six generations. Present and past were less continuous than synonymous. She did not have to come at her grandparents through a time machine. Her own life and that of the grandfather she was writing about showed her similar figures in an identical landscape. At the milldam where she had learned to skate she pulled her little boy on his sled, and they watched a weasel, snow - white for winter, flirt his black - tripped tail in and out of the mill’s timbers. She might have been watching with her grandfather’s eyes. Watching a wintry sky die out beyond black elms, she could not make her mind restore the sight of the western mountains at sunset from her cabin door, or the cabin itself, or Oliver, or their friends. Who were those glittering people intent on raiding the continent for money or for scientific knowledge? What illusion was it that she bridged between this world and that? She paused sometimes; cleaning the room she had always called Grandma’s Room, and thought with astonishment of the memory of Oliver’s great revolver lying on the dresser when he, already a thoroughing Westerner, had come to the house to court her. The town of Milton was dim and gentle, moulded by gentle lives, the current of change as slow through it, as the seep of water through a bog. More than once she thought how wrong those women in San Francisco had been, convinced that their old homes did not welcome them on their return. Last year when Oliver’s professional future was uncertain, she would have agreed. Now, with the future assured in the form of Oliver’s appointment as manager of the Adelaide mine in Leadville, the comfortable past asserted itself unchanged. Need for her husband, like worry over him, was turned low. Absorbed in her child and in the writing of her book, she was sunk in her affection for home. Even the signs of mutability that sometimes jolted her — the whiteness of her mother’s hair, the worn patience of her sister’s face, the morose silences of her brother - in - law,
now so long and black that the women worried about him in low voices - could not more than briefly interrupt the deep security and peace. I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to. It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transpiration, we have lived too shallowly in too many places. I doubt that any one of my son’s generation could comprehend the home feelings of someone like Susan Ward. Despite her unwillingness to live separately from her husband, she could probably have stayed on indefinitely in Milton, visited only occasionally by an asteroid husband. Or she would have picked up the old home and remade it in a new place. What she resisted was being a woman with no real home.
When frontier historians theorise about the uprooted, the lawless, the purseless, and the socially cut - off who emigrated to the West, they are not talking about people like my grandmother, so much that was cherished and loved, women like her had to give up; and the more they gave it up, the more they carried it helplessly with them. It was a process like ionization: what was subtracted from one pole was added to the other. For that sort of pioneer, the west was not a new country being created, but an old one being reproduced; in that sense our pioneer women were always more realistic than our pioneer men. The moderns, carrying little baggage of the cultural kind, not even living in traditional air, but breathing in to their space helmets, a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that ) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no domestic sentiment; they have had their empathy removed. Their computers have no ghostly feedback of home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!

In the beginning of the first paragraph, the phrase “parental burrow” suggests

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question.

In this passage from a novel, the narrator has been reading letters of his grandmother. Susan Ward was a young woman, a writer and a mother, whose husband Oliver was working as a mining engineer in Leadville, in the West. Here, the narrator imagines Susan Ward as she spends the winter with her family in Milton, New York, before rejoining her husband in the spring.
From the parental burrow, Leadville seemed so far away that it was only half - real. Unwrapping her apple cheeked son after a sleigh ride down the lane, she had a difficulty in believing that she had ever lived anywhere but here in Milton.
She felt how the placid industry of her days matched the placid industry of all the days that had passed over that farm through six generations. Present and past were less continuous than synonymous. She did not have to come at her grandparents through a time machine. Her own life and that of the grandfather she was writing about showed her similar figures in an identical landscape. At the milldam where she had learned to skate she pulled her little boy on his sled, and they watched a weasel, snow - white for winter, flirt his black - tripped tail in and out of the mill’s timbers. She might have been watching with her grandfather’s eyes. Watching a wintry sky die out beyond black elms, she could not make her mind restore the sight of the western mountains at sunset from her cabin door, or the cabin itself, or Oliver, or their friends. Who were those glittering people intent on raiding the continent for money or for scientific knowledge? What illusion was it that she bridged between this world and that? She paused sometimes; cleaning the room she had always called Grandma’s Room, and thought with astonishment of the memory of Oliver’s great revolver lying on the dresser when he, already a thoroughing Westerner, had come to the house to court her. The town of Milton was dim and gentle, moulded by gentle lives, the current of change as slow through it, as the seep of water through a bog. More than once she thought how wrong those women in San Francisco had been, convinced that their old homes did not welcome them on their return. Last year when Oliver’s professional future was uncertain, she would have agreed. Now, with the future assured in the form of Oliver’s appointment as manager of the Adelaide mine in Leadville, the comfortable past asserted itself unchanged. Need for her husband, like worry over him, was turned low. Absorbed in her child and in the writing of her book, she was sunk in her affection for home. Even the signs of mutability that sometimes jolted her — the whiteness of her mother’s hair, the worn patience of her sister’s face, the morose silences of her brother - in - law,
now so long and black that the women worried about him in low voices - could not more than briefly interrupt the deep security and peace. I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to. It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transpiration, we have lived too shallowly in too many places. I doubt that any one of my son’s generation could comprehend the home feelings of someone like Susan Ward. Despite her unwillingness to live separately from her husband, she could probably have stayed on indefinitely in Milton, visited only occasionally by an asteroid husband. Or she would have picked up the old home and remade it in a new place. What she resisted was being a woman with no real home.
When frontier historians theorise about the uprooted, the lawless, the purseless, and the socially cut - off who emigrated to the West, they are not talking about people like my grandmother, so much that was cherished and loved, women like her had to give up; and the more they gave it up, the more they carried it helplessly with them. It was a process like ionization: what was subtracted from one pole was added to the other. For that sort of pioneer, the west was not a new country being created, but an old one being reproduced; in that sense our pioneer women were always more realistic than our pioneer men. The moderns, carrying little baggage of the cultural kind, not even living in traditional air, but breathing in to their space helmets, a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that ) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no domestic sentiment; they have had their empathy removed. Their computers have no ghostly feedback of home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!

The reference to a bog in the first part of the fifth paragraph serves to convey a sense of the

Directions: Read the passage and answer the question.

In this passage from a novel, the narrator has been reading letters of his grandmother. Susan Ward was a young woman, a writer and a mother, whose husband Oliver was working as a mining engineer in Leadville, in the West. Here, the narrator imagines Susan Ward as she spends the winter with her family in Milton, New York, before rejoining her husband in the spring.
From the parental burrow, Leadville seemed so far away that it was only half - real. Unwrapping her apple cheeked son after a sleigh ride down the lane, she had a difficulty in believing that she had ever lived anywhere but here in Milton.
She felt how the placid industry of her days matched the placid industry of all the days that had passed over that farm through six generations. Present and past were less continuous than synonymous. She did not have to come at her grandparents through a time machine. Her own life and that of the grandfather she was writing about showed her similar figures in an identical landscape. At the milldam where she had learned to skate she pulled her little boy on his sled, and they watched a weasel, snow - white for winter, flirt his black - tripped tail in and out of the mill’s timbers. She might have been watching with her grandfather’s eyes. Watching a wintry sky die out beyond black elms, she could not make her mind restore the sight of the western mountains at sunset from her cabin door, or the cabin itself, or Oliver, or their friends. Who were those glittering people intent on raiding the continent for money or for scientific knowledge? What illusion was it that she bridged between this world and that? She paused sometimes; cleaning the room she had always called Grandma’s Room, and thought with astonishment of the memory of Oliver’s great revolver lying on the dresser when he, already a thoroughing Westerner, had come to the house to court her. The town of Milton was dim and gentle, moulded by gentle lives, the current of change as slow through it, as the seep of water through a bog. More than once she thought how wrong those women in San Francisco had been, convinced that their old homes did not welcome them on their return. Last year when Oliver’s professional future was uncertain, she would have agreed. Now, with the future assured in the form of Oliver’s appointment as manager of the Adelaide mine in Leadville, the comfortable past asserted itself unchanged. Need for her husband, like worry over him, was turned low. Absorbed in her child and in the writing of her book, she was sunk in her affection for home. Even the signs of mutability that sometimes jolted her — the whiteness of her mother’s hair, the worn patience of her sister’s face, the morose silences of her brother - in - law,
now so long and black that the women worried about him in low voices - could not more than briefly interrupt the deep security and peace. I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to. It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transpiration, we have lived too shallowly in too many places. I doubt that any one of my son’s generation could comprehend the home feelings of someone like Susan Ward. Despite her unwillingness to live separately from her husband, she could probably have stayed on indefinitely in Milton, visited only occasionally by an asteroid husband. Or she would have picked up the old home and remade it in a new place. What she resisted was being a woman with no real home.
When frontier historians theorise about the uprooted, the lawless, the purseless, and the socially cut - off who emigrated to the West, they are not talking about people like my grandmother, so much that was cherished and loved, women like her had to give up; and the more they gave it up, the more they carried it helplessly with them. It was a process like ionization: what was subtracted from one pole was added to the other. For that sort of pioneer, the west was not a new country being created, but an old one being reproduced; in that sense our pioneer women were always more realistic than our pioneer men. The moderns, carrying little baggage of the cultural kind, not even living in traditional air, but breathing in to their space helmets, a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that ) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no domestic sentiment; they have had their empathy removed. Their computers have no ghostly feedback of home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!

The text highlights the importance of

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows:

It is obvious that, in recent years, there has been a vast change in the attitude of parents towards children and perhaps an even greater change in the attitude of children towards parents.
Nowadays the rod is used very sparingly. Among families of education and refinement, a child may still be thrashed by the mother or the father, but not very often. The significance of the happening is not very great, and half of the time the spanking is marked by the irritable nervous condition of the parent rather than the act of the child.
A child may sometimes be mildly slapped by a teacher, usually when the teacher is irritated and short-tempered. But in nearly all cases, if a teacher dared to beat a child, or cause it real pain, the child would only have to tell its parents and the teacher would be discharged.

What conclusion can be drawn from the first scenario?

Directions: Read the following two scenarios and answer the question that follows:

Scenario-1
Kavita knows that it is her brother Rohit who has stolen the money from her mother’s purse. Their mother unknowingly, doubts the servant of being the thief and decides to fire him from the job. Kavita later tells her mother the truth. The mother feels guilty for suspecting the poor servant and applauds Kavita for not showing any undue favour towards her younger brother.

Scenario-2

What conclusion can be drawn from the first scenario?

Directions: Read the following two scenarios and answer the question that follows:

Scenario-1
The financial condition of Sumit’s family is not very good. His teacher announces in the class, trip to a city orphanage and asks the students to bring clothes for donation. All the students, except Sumit, bring generous donations in cash and kind for the orphans. Some of his classmates think of him as being heartless for showing a callous attitude towards a noble cause.

Scenario-2