Read the given passage and answer the four questions that follow:-
Just as he was about to enter the laboratory, Farley noticed that a great deal of activity was taking place in a nearby anteroom. The assistant tried to hurry him past but by dint of dragging his feet Farley managed to steal a quick glance into the room. The sight that met his eyes was so bewildering that he uttered no protest when his guide maneuvered him through the laboratory door. What he saw was this: the woman, Mangala was seated at the far end of the room, on a low divan, but alone and in an attitude of command, as though enthroned. By her side were several small bamboo cages, each containing a pigeon. On the floor, clustered around the woman's feet, were some half-dozen people in various attitudes of supplication. Two or three others were huddled against the wall, wrapped in blankets. Although Farley had glanced into their scarred, unseeing faces for more than an instant, he recognized at once that they, like the man he had seen in the bamboo thicket, were syphilitics, in the final stages of the terrible disease.
Now the young assistant began once again to perform the charade of the previous day, fetching slides, and hurrying back and forth across the room as though egging him on towards some extraordinary discovery. Farley went mechanically about the business of examining the slides they presented him.
His conscience called out to him to go outside and tell them not to waste their hopes on whatever quackery it was that this woman offered; to expose the falsehoods that she and her minions had concocted to deceive those simple people. It was his duty, he knew, to tell them that mankind knew no cure for their condition; that this false prophetess was cheating them of money they could ill afford.
Farley's prognosis about the huddled people in the anteroom was that-
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → they were suffering from an incurable disease.
A prognosis is a doctor's judgement about how a disease will develop. Farley, a doctor, recognised at once that the huddled people were in the final stages of the terrible disease, and later the passage says that mankind knew no cure for their condition. So his judgement was that they had an incurable disease.
Example: After the tests, the doctor gave a hopeful prognosis for the patient's recovery.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: they were criminals trying to hide — Incorrect. Wrong cause: they were huddled and wrapped in blankets because they were sick; nothing suggests they were criminals.
Option 2: their scarred faces indicated burnt or bruised cases — Incorrect. Misread: Farley read the scars as signs of the disease, not of burns or injuries.
Option 3: they were waiting for him to cure them — Incorrect. Contradicted: they had come to the woman Mangala, gathered around her feet; Farley knew he could not cure them.