Read the following passage and answer the question given below:
Life did change for Tom and Maggie; and yet they were not wrong in believing that the thoughts and loves of these first years would always make part of their lives. We could never have loved the earth so well if we had no childhood in it, - if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass - the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows - the same redbreasts that we used to call 'God's birds', because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?
The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star flowers and the blue-eyed speedwell and the ground ivy at my feet - what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky, with its fitful brightness, these furrowed grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows - such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day, might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.
'Wood' here means -
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → jungle
- Wood (often "woods") here means an area of land covered with trees, a small forest: a place the narrator walks in, not a material.
Example: We went for a long walk in the wood behind the village. - Jungle means land thickly covered with trees and plants. Of the options, it is the only one that names a stretch of land covered with trees, so it comes nearest to "wood" in this sense.
Example: Tigers still roam the jungle of the Sundarbans.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: wood of tree — Incorrect. This is wood as a material, the hard substance of a tree trunk used for timber and fuel. One cannot walk "in" it.
Example: The table is made of teak wood.
Option 3: oaks — Incorrect. Oaks are one kind of tree growing in the wood; they are a part of it, not the wood itself.
Example: Tall oaks lined the road to the castle.
Option 4: grass — Incorrect. Grass is the low green plant covering the ground; the passage mentions it separately ("grassy fields", "deep-bladed grass").
Example: The children sat on the grass to eat their lunch.