Read the poem given below and answer the questions that follow: Great, wide,…
2024
Read the poem given below and answer the questions that follow:
Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful world,
With the wonderful water round you curled.
And the wonderful grass upon your breast
World, you are beautifully drest.
The wonderful air is over me,
And the wonderful wind is shaking the tree,
It walks on the water, and whirls the mills,
And talks to itself on the tops of the hills.
You friendly Earth! How far do you go,
With the wheat-fields that nod and the rivers that flow.
With cities and gardens, and cliffs, and isles,
And people upon you for thousands of miles ?
Ah, you are so great, and I am so small,
I tremble to think of you, World, at all;
And yet, when I said my prayers today,
A whisper inside me seemed to say,
‘You are more than the Earth, though you are such a dot,
You can love and think, and the Earth cannot!'
What does the underlined word refer to?
'It walks on the water, ....'
- A.
river
- B.
grass
- C.
wind
- D.
Earth
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: C
Concept: In a passage, a pronoun such as it, he, or they stands in for a noun already introduced — its antecedent. A strong contextual clue is the noun made the subject of the clause immediately before the pronoun, since a pronoun subject commonly continues describing the subject just introduced (though a pronoun can, in general, also point back to a noun that was an object rather than a subject).
Application: The lines around the underlined word read: "And the wonderful wind is shaking the tree, It walks on the water, and whirls the mills, And talks to itself on the tops of the hills." The clause right before "it" makes "the wonderful wind" its subject, and the pronoun continues as the subject of the verbs that follow — walks, whirls, talks — a personified but consistent description of what moving air does.
river — the noun inside the phrase "the rivers that flow," one item in a list of the Earth's features (wheat-fields, rivers, cities, gardens, cliffs, isles), not the subject of a clause of its own.
grass — named once, as the object of "upon" in "the wonderful grass upon your breast," part of a description of the Earth's surface, not the subject of a clause of its own.
Earth / World — the poem's overall addressee across the surrounding stanzas ("You friendly Earth," "I tremble to think of you, World"), a role set up outside the specific stanza the underlined pronoun belongs to, which does not name Earth or World at all.
The noun made the subject of the clause immediately before the underlined pronoun is wind — the strongest contextual match for its antecedent.