Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
The homework diary is the thinnest book in a Class 3 bag, and in my twelve years of teaching it has caused more trouble than all the others put together. Every evening it carries home a worksheet, a page of sums, sometimes a project on the solar system that no eight-year-old could finish alone. Every morning it comes back with the answers filled in, often in handwriting that is clearly not the child’s.
So I understand the schools that have dropped homework for their junior classes. Children of seven or eight already spend six hours a day at school. Research on homework for young children is mixed, and most of the gains seem to come later, in the senior classes. A tired child copying sums at nine at night is not learning arithmetic. Much of what we send home only keeps the pencil moving.
Yet I would not stop it altogether. Some things grow only with a little practice every day, and reading is the clearest of them. A child who reads aloud for ten minutes each evening comes back after the winter break a different reader. For children whose homes have few books, the school bag may be the only place a story comes from.
What needs to go is the heap of worksheets, not the habit. This year my class takes home one short task a night, and on Fridays nothing at all. Last Friday a boy asked if he could take a storybook home anyway. I let him, and did not write it in the diary.
The writer’s remark that for some children ‘the school bag may be the only place a story comes from’ suggests that stopping homework altogether could
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → leave these children with very little to read at home
The remark is the writer’s reason for keeping a reading task.
- It is about children “whose homes have few books”. For them, the book sent home from school may be the only story they get.
- If homework stopped altogether, no book would come home in the bag. So these children would have very little to read at home.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: make these children lose interest in coming to school — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The remark is about books at home. The passage says nothing about children losing interest in school.
Option 2: give these children more time to rest and play after school — Incorrect. Wrong focus: Tired children are part of the case for less homework in the second paragraph. This remark points the other way, to what these children would lose.
Option 3: push the parents of these children to buy more books — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The passage does not say what parents would do. It only says these homes have few books.