Directions: Read the extract given below and answer the questions that follow…
2019
Directions: Read the extract given below and answer the questions that follow by selecting the correct/most appropriate options :
Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful world,
With the wonderful water around 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 cities, gardens, cliffs and isles show that the Earth is :
- A.
huge
- B.
friendly
- C.
small
- D.
well populated
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: A
Concept: In descriptive or comprehension poetry, when several concrete details are listed together inside one sentence, the specific quality that list is meant to establish is signalled by the sentence's own governing phrase (its verb, question, or qualifier) — not by an unrelated epithet used elsewhere in the same passage. To answer 'what does this list show', find the phrase that frames the list and read the quality being tested from that frame.
Application: Here the features — wheat-fields, cities, gardens, cliffs and isles — sit inside one long rhetorical question: 'You friendly Earth, how far do you go … with cities and gardens, and cliffs and isles, and people upon you for thousands of miles?' The framing phrase is 'how far do you go … for thousands of miles' — a question about distance and extent. Read against that frame, the cities, gardens, cliffs and isles are being used to measure how vast the Earth's spread is, so together they show that the Earth is huge.
Cross-check: Testing each remaining option against its own textual anchor confirms the reading:
'Friendly' is the poet's direct address to Earth at the start of the same line ('You friendly Earth') — it is not a quality this particular list of four items was assembled to demonstrate.
'Small' is never applied to Earth in this stanza — it appears in the next stanza describing the speaker's own reaction ('I am so small'), not a trait assigned to Earth here.
'Well populated' captures 'people', and cities also suggest habitation — but gardens, cliffs and isles are natural or cultivated features unconnected to population, so the list as a whole is not governed by population density; it is governed instead by the stanza's distance framing ('how far ... for thousands of miles').
The list of cities, gardens, cliffs and isles — framed by 'how far … for thousands of miles' — therefore shows that the Earth is huge.