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.
There was no garret at all.
The underlined word nearly means the same as a __________ .
- A.
pantry
- B.
loft
- C.
study
- D.
toilet
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: B
A vocabulary-in-context question asks for the option that carries the same core meaning as a marked word, judged both from its dictionary sense and from how the surrounding passage uses it. "Garret" is a noun for a small, bare room built directly under the roof of a house — an attic — traditionally used as extra living or storage space beyond a house’s main rooms.
In the passage, the narrator lists the garret alongside the cellar as one of the extra spaces the house lacked: "There was no garret at all, and no cellar — except a small hole dug in the ground...". This places the garret as an upper-level space reached from inside the house, directly under its roof — exactly what "loft" names in English: an attic-level space built under a roof, at the top of a house.
pantry — a small room or cupboard kept for storing food, dishes, and provisions; the word is defined by its storage FUNCTION, not by sitting under the roof, so it carries a different sense.
study — a room set aside for reading, writing, or work; again defined by its USE rather than by its position in the house, with no link to a roof-level sense.
toilet — a bathroom facility; an entirely different category of room, unconnected to the "space under the roof" meaning.
Among the four options, only "loft" names an attic-level space under the roof, matching the core meaning that "garret" carries in the passage.