Poets have compared adolescence to the following phase of life:

Concept

A detail-retrieval comprehension question is settled by the passage, not by general knowledge: the stem names the source of a statement, and the answer is whatever that named source is reported in the text to have said.

So the method is to take the attribution given in the stem, find the sentence in the passage carrying that same attribution, and read the required detail straight out of that sentence.

Application

Applying that method to this item:

1. The stem credits the comparison to poets, so the attribution to look for is the word “Poets”.

2. The second sentence of the passage carries exactly that attribution: “Poets have described it as the spring of life of human being and an important era in the total life span.”

3. The phase of life named in the predicate of that sentence is the spring of life — that is, spring.

Cross-check

Cross-check against the passage and against the metaphor itself. No season other than spring is mentioned anywhere in the text, so no rival reading is available from the passage. The conventional seasons-of-life mapping also agrees:

• Spring — the opening season of budding and fresh growth; it matches the passage's own gloss of ‘adolescere’ as ‘to grow to maturity’, a stage still moving towards maturity rather than at it.

• Summer — full adult vigour, after growing up is complete.

• Fall (autumn) — the harvest stage of later middle age.

• Winter — old age, at the close of the life span.

Hence the phase of life to which poets have compared adolescence, as stated in the passage, is spring.