Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
Every year, around the third week of July, a photograph arrives on our family WhatsApp group from my aunt in Hyderabad. It shows the lane outside her flat with water up to the door handles of the parked cars. The caption changes. The water does not.
The usual explanation is the rain, and the rain is easy to blame. It does fall in fewer and fiercer bursts now, and no drain built for an older climate can carry a month’s share in one afternoon. But this account leaves something out. The Deccan never had water to spare, and the kings and village councils who settled it learnt to hold on to what fell. They dug chains of tanks, each one spilling into the next one downhill, so that a heavy storm was handed on from tank to tank instead of being poured into a street. Hyderabad once had hundreds of them. Bengaluru’s old lakes worked the same way.
Many of those tanks, in both cities, now lie under bus stands, housing colonies and, in one case I know of, a stadium. Nobody plotted this. A dry lakebed in May looks like empty land, and a myopic kind of planning, the kind that reads a map only for the next five years, saw no reason to leave it empty. The tanks were not destroyed so much as forgotten, one plot at a time.
I do not think the answer is to dig them all out again; too many families live where the water used to sit. But I have noticed that the lanes which flood first often have names ending in ‘kunta’ or ‘cheruvu’, the Telugu words for a pond and a lake. The city has kept the names. It has only lost the reason for them.
Which of the following statements are NOT true according to the passage?
(A) Rain now tends to come in fewer but heavier bursts than before.
(B) Each old tank was built to store its water on its own, apart from the others.
(C) The writer wants the old tanks dug out again to put an end to the floods.
(D) The lanes that flood first often carry names that mean a pond or a lake.
Choose the correct answer from the options given below:
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → (B) and (C) only
We need the statements that the passage does NOT support. These are marked Not true below.
(A) Rain now tends to come in fewer but heavier bursts than before. — True.
- The passage says the rain falls “in fewer and fiercer bursts now”.
- Fiercer means stronger.
(B) Each old tank was built to store its water on its own, apart from the others. — Not true.
- The tanks were built in “chains”.
- Each one spilled into the next one downhill.
(C) The writer wants the old tanks dug out again to put an end to the floods. — Not true.
- The writer says, “I do not think the answer is to dig them all out again.”
(D) The lanes that flood first often carry names that mean a pond or a lake. — True.
- These lanes often have names ending in ‘kunta’ or ‘cheruvu’, the Telugu words for a pond and a lake.