The term 'adolescence' means :

Concept

When a comprehension question asks what a term means, the meaning is settled by the passage itself — by the derivation, definition or gloss the writer supplies — and not by the associations the word carries in ordinary use. The method is to find the sentence in which the writer explains the term, and read the meaning directly off that explanation.

Applying it to this passage

1. The passage traces the word back to the Greek root 'adolescere' and glosses that root as 'to grow to maturity'. This is the writer's own explicit statement of what the term means.

2. The passage then describes the span as a transitional period that runs between childhood and adulthood — something a person passes through over a stretch of years, not a fixed condition.

3. The definition quoted from A. T. Jersild says the same thing in other words: it is the span of years during which boys and girls move from childhood to adulthood, mentally, emotionally, socially and physically.

4. The etymology and the quoted definition agree: both describe motion from an earlier stage of development towards a more mature one. Read off the passage, the term therefore means moving towards maturity.

Comparing the alternatives

• Reading the term as a state of bliss would make it name a feeling. The passage reports that poets have called adolescence the spring of life, but it never defines the word by an emotional condition.

• Reading it as the innocence of childhood would place the term inside childhood. The passage places the period after childhood, running between childhood and adulthood.

• Reading it as detachment from the materialistic world would make it an attitude of renunciation. Nothing in the passage links adolescence to withdrawal from worldly concerns.

The term therefore means moving towards maturity — the process of growing from childhood towards adult maturity.