Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow by selecting…
2023
Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow by selecting the correct/most appropriate option.
Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies (grasslands) with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon from many miles afar. There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking cooking stove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds.
Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed in one corner, and Dorothy a little bed in another corner. There was no garret at all, and no cellar — except a small hole dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any building in its path. It was reached by a trapdoor in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder led down into the small, dark hole.
When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the ploughed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of long blades until they were the same gray colour to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.
Study the following statements :
A In the vast grassland, Uncle Henry’s was the only house.
B. There was sun-baked gray grass all around.
C. In the middle of the prairies was a green field ploughed by Uncle Henry.
Choose the correct option :
- A.
A and B are wrong, but C is right.
- B.
A and B are right, but C is wrong.
- C.
B and C are right, but A is wrong.
- D.
A and C are right, but B is wrong.
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: B
Concept: In a statement-verification (true/false) reading-comprehension question, each statement is checked strictly against what the passage explicitly states. A statement is "right" only when the text directly supports it, and "wrong" when the text contradicts it or the claim goes beyond what is written — assumptions the passage never makes cannot be treated as true.
Application: Checking each statement against the passage in turn:
Statement A (only house in the vast grassland): the passage says, “Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions.” Since no other house or tree is visible anywhere on the horizon, Uncle Henry’s house is the only one in that stretch of prairie — this statement is supported.
Statement B (sun-baked gray grass all around): the passage says, “Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of long blades until they were the same gray colour to be seen everywhere.” This is a direct, explicit match — this statement is supported.
Statement C (a green ploughed field in the middle of the prairies): the passage says, “The sun had baked the ploughed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it.” The ploughed land is explicitly gray, never described as green — this statement contradicts the text and is not supported.
Cross-check: An independent check confirms this without even re-reading A and B — the passage calls the ploughed land a “gray mass,” so any reading that treats the ploughed field as green can be discarded immediately. That alone rules out every option that keeps the green-field statement true, leaving only the reading where the isolated-house and gray-grass statements hold and the green-field statement does not.
Contrast: Each other reading breaks down against the same textual evidence:
The reading that treats the isolated-house and gray-grass statements as both wrong while calling the ploughed field green inverts the passage twice over — it ignores the explicit “not a tree nor a house” line and the explicit “gray colour” description of the grass, while accepting the one detail (a green field) the passage directly denies.
The reading that keeps the gray-grass statement and the green-field statement true while rejecting the isolated-house statement correctly notices the gray grass but wrongly turns the explicitly gray ploughed land green, and misreads the empty-horizon line as not establishing Uncle Henry’s house as the only one.
The reading that keeps the isolated-house statement and the green-field statement true while rejecting the gray-grass statement accepts the same green-field error and additionally denies the passage’s explicit line that the grass had been burned to “the same gray colour to be seen everywhere.”
Result: The only reading consistent with every explicit detail in the passage is the one where the isolated-house and gray-grass statements are right and the green-field statement is wrong.