Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow : Every now…
2024
Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow :
Every now and then we would speed through a village lined with waving Tibetan children. Their villages looked wonderful and so inviting that Dorje was not showing any signs of slowing down. Small clusters of single and double storey buildings with walk-in courtyards jostled together in the foothills to gain maximum exposure to the sun. The houses looked solid, built for the harsh environment. Walls are made up of stone to waist height and finished off with mud bricks to the roof. Tin cans lined the window ledges, with the bright orange of marigolds in full bloom livening up the black-and-white of the houses.
Branches of trees adorned with colourful prayer flags stood high into the wind from the top of the flat roofs. The auspicious blue, white, red, green and yellow colours of the fabrics stood out against the rich blue of the Tibetan sky. Each prayer flag carries a picture of Lungta, the jewelled dragon horse, who carries the owner’s prayers up to the divine every time the flag flaps in the wind.
The larger villages have healthy trees, usually willows or poplars which look quite out of place in the generally treeless landscape. Wood is a precious commodity in the highland areas of Tibet and is never wasted. The few shrubs which grow wild on the hillsides are harvested for use as brushwood and each courtyard wall is piled high with sticks gathered from the mountains to get a fire started. The lack of solid fuel in the shape of wood is not a problem for the Tibetans, who have an ingenious wood substitute : yak dung.
Identify the underlined words in the given sentence :
The lack of solid fuel in the shape of wood is not a problem for the Tibetans.
- A.
noun, adjective
- B.
adjective, noun
- C.
noun, noun
- D.
verb, noun
Attempted by 12 students.
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: C
Concept: A word's part of speech is decided by the grammatical slot it fills in a specific sentence, not by its most common dictionary category. A determiner such as 'the' introduces a noun phrase whose head word is a noun (a modifier may sit in between); a preposition such as 'in' takes a noun (or noun phrase) as its object. The same word can therefore function as a noun in one sentence and as a verb or an adjective in another.
Application: In "The lack of solid fuel in the shape of wood is not a problem for the Tibetans," the determiner 'the' directly introduces 'lack' (with no modifier in between) as the head noun of that phrase, and 'lack' is also the subject of the verb 'is' — both mark 'lack' as a noun here, naming an absence. The preposition 'in' introduces 'the shape of wood', and 'shape' is the head noun of that phrase — the object of 'in' — naming a form. Both underlined words therefore function as nouns in this sentence.
Cross-check: Substituting each word with an unambiguous noun keeps the sentence grammatical — "The absence of solid fuel in the form of wood is not a problem" reads identically — while substituting a verb or an adjective in either slot breaks the sentence, confirming the noun reading for both words.
Contrast (why the other combinations fail):
In this position, an adjective would need to modify a noun placed immediately after it; here nothing follows 'lack' except the prepositional phrase 'of solid fuel', so 'lack' is the head word introduced by 'the', not a modifier before a noun.
The same reasoning rules out reading 'shape' as an adjective: there is no noun directly after 'shape' for it to modify; 'shape' is the head word of the phrase introduced by the preposition 'in'.
Reading 'lack' as a verb fails because 'the lack' is a determiner-plus-noun-phrase unit here — 'the' directly introduces 'lack' as its head noun, leaving no separate subject for a verb to act on in that slot, so 'lack' functions as a noun rather than an action word.
Hence, both underlined words — 'lack' and 'shape' — function as nouns in this sentence.