Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow : Every now…
2024
Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow :
Every now and then we would speed through a village lined with waving Tibetan children. Their villages looked wonderful and so inviting that Dorje was not showing any signs of slowing down. Small clusters of single and double storey buildings with walk-in courtyards jostled together in the foothills to gain maximum exposure to the sun. The houses looked solid, built for the harsh environment. Walls are made up of stone to waist height and finished off with mud bricks to the roof. Tin cans lined the window ledges, with the bright orange of marigolds in full bloom livening up the black-and-white of the houses.
Branches of trees adorned with colourful prayer flags stood high into the wind from the top of the flat roofs. The auspicious blue, white, red, green and yellow colours of the fabrics stood out against the rich blue of the Tibetan sky. Each prayer flag carries a picture of Lungta, the jewelled dragon horse, who carries the owner’s prayers up to the divine every time the flag flaps in the wind.
The larger villages have healthy trees, usually willows or poplars which look quite out of place in the generally treeless landscape. Wood is a precious commodity in the highland areas of Tibet and is never wasted. The few shrubs which grow wild on the hillsides are harvested for use as brushwood and each courtyard wall is piled high with sticks gathered from the mountains to get a fire started. The lack of solid fuel in the shape of wood is not a problem for the Tibetans, who have an ingenious wood substitute : yak dung.
Yak dung is used by the Tibetans as a substitute for :
- A.
buildings
- B.
marigolds
- C.
fire
- D.
wood
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: D
Concept: In a literal-comprehension question, the correct answer is the exact fact the passage states — not an inference and not merely a nearby detail on the same topic. When a passage links a scarce resource to the way it is used, the question usually asks the reader to identify the specific item explicitly labelled a “substitute”, rather than a related but different detail mentioned close to it.
Application: Paragraph 3 states that “Wood is a precious commodity in the highland areas of Tibet and is never wasted” and that villagers pile up sticks “to get a fire started.” It then adds: “The lack of solid fuel in the shape of wood is not a problem for the Tibetans, who have an ingenious wood substitute: yak dung.” This sentence directly names what yak dung replaces — wood, the scarce solid fuel.
Cross-check — why the other options don't fit:
The construction material the passage describes for houses is stone (to waist height) finished with mud bricks; yak dung is discussed only in the fuel paragraph, never in connection with building houses.
Marigolds appear only as the bright flowers livening up window ledges in paragraph 1; the passage never links them to fuel or to yak dung at all.
Getting a fire started is the purpose the fuel serves, not the material being replaced — the passage names the scarce raw material itself, immediately after describing how sticks are gathered to start fires, as the thing yak dung substitutes for.
So the passage's own wording identifies wood as what yak dung substitutes for.