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!'
The wind in the poem talks to:
- A.
itself
- B.
trees
- C.
clouds
- D.
hills
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: A
In a literal/direct-comprehension question, the answer is whatever word or phrase grammatically completes the verb asked about, exactly as it appears in the passage — not something inferred beyond the sentence.
The relevant stanza reads: “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 verb in the stem is “talks to”, and its grammatical object in that same clause — the word telling us whom it talks to — is “itself” — the poem describes the wind as talking to itself.
“trees” is the object of the earlier verb “is shaking”, not of “talks to” — shaking and talking are two separate actions named in the same stanza.
“clouds” does not appear anywhere in this stanza's description of the wind's actions.
“the tops of the hills” is a place phrase telling WHERE the wind talks, not WHOM it talks to.