Reading Skill Worksheet 7
Read the following passages and answer the questions that follow.
Q1. Read the passage given below and complete the statements that follow with the help of given options :
Immaculately dressed as always, she arrives at our flat at 5.45 p.m. ,seven days a week. If we aren't in, we trust her completely as she has a spare key. Her gentle mannerisms and stylish attire make us believe the fact that she gets very little sleep and has been working at other houses and her own, since 5.30 a.m.
Walking in , Archana Chakravarthy , 40 , homemaker and mother of two , surveys the fridge before deciding what to prepare. Although she offers suggestions , but mostly she makes what my wife , Geeta , asks for. Archana is a Bengali, but we are South Indians and yet she makes excellent sambhar after Geeta showed her how to. I like learning new recipes, says Archana with professional pride. Different families have different tastes. Some like deep fried things, others dislike oil. Some want spicy food, others bland. One person wants Dal mashed , others like to see its grains on their plate. No problem, she says.
Mostly people take cooks for granted as long as they are good. But it's nice when someone compliments the cooking. She even dresses well so that families feel comfortable having her in their kitchen. While she makes every effort to please her employers, her own life has been hard. Archana's father , a poor farmer, couldn't send her to school. Being the eldest of six sisters, she was married off at 13, and with her earnings now about Rs. 5,000 monthly, she managed to get her five sisters married. Her husband is a casual factory worker, in and out of jobs. She takes all her troubles in her stride, slogging 17 hours a day to support her two school going sons. Too busy to realize the difference she is making, Archana is one of the countless Indian women who labour hard to keep their families together.
(a) Archana is dependable because she __________.
(i) dresses immaculately
(ii) works in an other's house as in her own
(iii) can be trusted with the house key
(iv) has gentle manners and comes early.
(b) Archana is one who takes pride in __________.
(i) dressing well
(ii) cooking well
(iii) adjusting well
(iv) learning well
(c) She pleases her employers by __________.
(i) cooking well with spices
(ii) doing what they expect in taste
(iii) dressing well and fashionably
(iv) being cleanly dressed and learning new recipes
(d) Archana is a pillar of strength as she __________.
(i) support her sons
(ii) helped her father get money for her sisters
(iii) has steady earnings while her husband does not have
(iv) all of the above.
(e) ''No problem‟ as said by Archana means that __________.
(i) she is casual
(ii) she doesn't care about troubles
(iii) she can manage some situations
(iv) she solves all problems as a hobby.
Q2. Read the following poem carefully and select the most suitable option as your answer.
(a) The title of the poem shows that the poet is looking for -------------.
(i) a friend who can help him in his hour of need
(ii) a friend as he is a loner
(iii) a friend who has godlike qualities
(iv) an alien friend from the extra terrestrial world
(b) The narrow road indicated in the fourth stanza is/ are -------------
(i) a narrow lane in one of the big cities
(ii) a narrow path which leads up the hill
(iii) negative thoughts which lead us to make wrong decisions
(iv) pride and high headedness
(c) To catch a fall means to ---------------
(i) catch a falling object
(ii) make the best use of end of season sales
(iii) rescue a defeated soldier
(iv) prevent a person from coming to any harm due to his insolence or false pride
(d) The poet wants a friend who :
(i) can sympathise with him in his hour of agony
(ii) scolds him when he makes a mistake
(iii) understands him and does not become judgmental
(iv) can transform his habits
(e) The poet's best friend is :
(i) from amongst the many people he comes across in life
(ii) his reader
(iii) a priest of the church
(iv) a poor helpless man in the street.
Q3. Read the passage given below carefully :
ADORATION BY MAN
(1) We can imagine many reasons. If an exceptionally strong or brave man succeeded in killing an exceptionally large bear , might he not get the idea of boring a hole through one of its teeth with a sharp flint and tying the tooth round his neck in order to remind himself of his great achievement and to show his friends what a great man he was ? Gradually it might have become the custom in that tribe for all strong and brave hunters to wear a bear's tooth, and it might be regarded as a disgrace not to wear one and a sign that one was weak or very young.
(2) Another man might make an ornament of a coloured shell or stone simply because he liked it or because its shape reminded him of something. Then if he happened to escape from some danger when he was wearing it he might think the ornament had something to do with it – that it had magic qualities. And his friends and relations would not be satisfied until they had an ornament of the same kind.
(3) People who wear ornaments would soon learn to arrange them in different ways according to their size and colour in order to make them more decorative and impressive. A necklace found in Italy with the skeleton of a young man of the Stone Age was quite elaborate. It consisted of stag's teeth arranged at intervals with, between them, two upper rows made up of the vertebrae of a fish and one row of shells.
(4) Another reason why men might tie feathers, horns, skins and all kinds of other things to themselves would be in order to make themselves look fierce and more terrifying to animals or to the men of other tribes.
(5) Objects – such as sea- shells that came from a distance and were therefore scarce for people living far inland – would come in time to have a special value , and might be worn only by chiefs and their families in order to show that they were particularly important people.
(6) Primitive tribes living today often associate themselves with some particular animal or bird , such as an eagle or lion , or with a particular place, such as a mountain or river. Man may have started doing this kind of thing very early in his history Then, every member of a group or family may have worn something such as feathers, claws or even a stone or wooden object of a certain shape or colour, to represent the animal or mountain or whatever it might be that they believed themselves to be connected with.
(7) So, as we have seen , clothing may have started as ornament or to distinguish one tribe from another or to show rank or because certain things were believed to have magical qualities. But in some places a time came when men and women began to wear clothes for other reasons. During the Ice Age, when the polar ice spread over far more of the world than it does today, some of the districts in which human beings were living became very cold and bleak indeed. Man must have learnt that he would be more comfortable and more likely to survive, if he covered his body with the skins of animals . At first perhaps, he would simply tie a skin round his waist or over his shoulders but as time passed he learnt how to treat skin in order to make them softer and more supple and how to join them together in order to make better garments.
(8) Flint tools have been found buried deep under the earth floors of caves in which prehistoric men sheltered when the weather became colder. Some of the tools were probably used to scrape the inner side of skins to make them soft. Stone Age people may also have softened skins in the same way that Eskimo women do today, by chewing them. The teeth of Eskimo women are often worn down to stumps by the constant chewing of seal skins.
(9) Among the wonderful flint and bone tools and implements that later cave men made have been found some beautiful bone needles, some not bigger than those we use today : Although the people who made them had only flint tools to work with, some of the needles are finer and more beautifully shaped than those of Roman times.
1.1 On the basis of your reading of the above passage , complete the following statements briefly.
(i) Man started to adorn himself ---------------
(ii) The speciality about the necklace found in Italy was that --------
(iii) Man tied feather and skin to himself --------------
(iv) During the Ice age , man realized that -------------
(v) Due to chewing of seal skins the teeth of ------------
(vi) In spite of having just flint tools to work, ------------
1.2 (i) Why did man begin to clothe himself ? Give two reasons.
(ii) What tools did the early man make use of ?
1.3 Find the words from the above passage which mean the same as the following :
(i) decorative object ( para 2)
(ii) in detail ( para 3)
Answer Key is available for download below.
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