Read the following passage and answer the questions.
Conveying bravery and awe, lions have been appropriated since the earliest times as gods and symbols of leadership. They have also been co-opted into the service of commerce and subjected to numerous affronts to their stateliness.
Lions in the Ancient World
To the ancient Mesopotamians, Gilgamesh was a powerful figure who may have been a king. In an epic poem about his reign, he strangled a magical lion with his bare hands. The god Lamassu was shown as a winged lion, while the goddess of love, Inanna-Ishtar, had a lion as one of her symbols.
One of the twelve labours of the Greek hero Heracles (Hercules to the Romans) was to kill the Nemean lion, a creature of incredible ferocity. Its fur was so strong that no knife or spear could pierce it, but Heracles, like Gilgamesh before him, dispatched the beast by strangling it. The Greeks also pictured lions drawing the chariots of their gods and guarding homes.
The ancient Egyptians venerated the lion too. The Sphinx at Giza has the head of a man and the body of a lion. The goddess Sekhmet was shown as a lioness whose task was to destroy the wicked and protect the good.
The Bible tells of Daniel in the lions’ den, and of Samson, who, like Gilgamesh and Heracles, killed a lion with his hands.
The Lion as a Marketing Tool
Manufacturers have shamelessly recruited lions as a sales tool. Well, they’re not going to use snakes, spiders or rats, are they?
The Lion Motor Car Company of Adrian, Michigan, was a short-lived venture (1909–1912) into the growing automobile business. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) has used a roaring lion as its trademark since the 1920s. And C.S. Lewis gave us Aslan, the great lion of his Narnia books.
The word dispatched, as used in the passage, means
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → killed
The passage says that Heracles “dispatched the beast by strangling it”.
- To strangle means to kill by pressing hard on the throat.
- So here dispatched means killed. Example: The guard dispatched the snake with one blow of his stick.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: sent away — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: “Sent away” is the everyday sense of dispatch, as with a letter or a parcel. Here the words “by strangling it” show that the lion was killed, not sent anywhere. Example: The shop sent away the parcel this morning.
Option 3: captured — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: To capture means to catch and hold. Strangling does more than catch the animal. It kills it. Example: The forest staff captured the leopard in a cage.
Option 4: tamed — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: To tame means to train a wild animal to be gentle. Heracles did not train the lion. He strangled it. Example: The circus man tamed the young elephant over many months.