Directions : Read the given passage carefully and answer the questions that…

Directions : Read the given passage carefully and answer the questions that follow by selecting the most appropriate option.

Among these adventures, in the year 1887, was a youth called Jacob who was then twenty-one years old. Although so young he had already lived a risky and dangerous life. He had been a seaman and crossed the Pacific, and been a pirate and a river patrol-man, a coal shoveller at a power plant, a landless man and a 'hobo'. He had tramped the United States and Canada, switch rides on freight trains, and dodging and fighting railway men and police and knew all about cold and hunger, and poverty and danger, and he had served a prison-sentence of thirty days.

Though he did little else, he had a great love for books and words, and though he had found no gold in the Klondike, these things were soon to earn him a fortune. He came back from Alaska after a year, suffering from scurvy and without a penny in his pocket. He had, however, a great wealth of experience and he began to write stories about places he had seen and the people he had met. After months of hard work and hunger, he found success. Magazines began to accept his Alaskan stories. Soon, he was famous. In the next sixteen years he published fifty books, and made and spent a million dollars. He died in 1916.

‘Scurvy’ means