Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
The first town my Class 8 students built in Minecraft was a mess. I had asked for a model of a Harappan city, and within twenty minutes the screen held three towers, a lava moat and one ambitious pig farm. Nobody had drawn a plan. Nobody thought one was needed, because in a game where any block can be broken and put back, a mistake seems to cost nothing.
That turned out to be the useful part. In the third lesson, the group in charge of the drains found that their streets sloped the wrong way and the water had nowhere to go. Fixing it meant tearing up two days of work. They argued, sulked, and then, for the first time, took out paper and sketched a grid before placing a single block.
I am wary of the claims made for games in schools. Much of the enthusiasm is really relief that the children are quiet, and a class can spend an hour in Minecraft and learn mainly how to make a roof look good. The game does not teach planning by itself. If anything, its endless freedom to break and rebuild invites the opposite habit.
What a shared build offers is a slow kind of consequence. A mistake on a worksheet is corrected in red ink and forgotten by Friday. A mistake in a shared world stays on the screen, in everyone’s way, until someone repairs it. My students learnt patience less from the game than from living with their own careless foundations for a fortnight. Whether any of this counts as history, I still cannot say. The inspector who visited last month mainly wanted to know why Mohenjo-daro had a pig farm.
What can be inferred about why the drains group finally sketched a grid on paper?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 1
The correct answer is Option (1) → Losing two days of work showed them that a mistake in the game could cost something after all.
The first paragraph says why nobody planned, and the second shows what changed their minds.
- At first, nobody drew a plan, because in the game “a mistake seems to cost nothing”.
- Then the drains were found to slope the wrong way. “Fixing it meant tearing up two days of work.”
- Right after this, they sketched a grid “for the first time”. The lost work showed them that a mistake did cost something.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 2: The teacher had warned them that the model would not be marked without a written plan. — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The passage says nothing about marks or any warning from the teacher. The students chose to plan after their own loss.
Option 3: They wanted their part of the city to look neater than the towers built by the others. — Incorrect. Wrong reason: Their problem was that the water “had nowhere to go”. It was about the drains working, not about looks.
Option 4: They found that the game would not let them change a street once it had been laid. — Incorrect. Contradicted: In the game “any block can be broken and put back”. The students did change the streets, by tearing up their work.