Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
The power went at four, and by six the monsoon rain had settled into the slow, sullen kind that would not stop before morning. Unni carried his father’s radio to the table beside the emergency lamp.
It was a heavy set in a wooden case, its cloth front faded to the colour of weak coffee. Nobody had switched it on in the eleven months since the funeral.
“It was always temperamental,” his mother said from her low stool, scraping coconut. “Your Achan had to slap it and call it names before it would play.”
Unni unscrewed the back panel. Dust lay thick over a nest of wires. He propped his phone against a steel tumbler and played a repair video, pausing it every few seconds, until the battery fell to nine per cent and he had to choose. He switched the phone off.
After that he worked by the lamp and by guesswork. He found a loose wire and pressed it back with a screwdriver heated on the gas stove. The room smelt of burning. His mother did not ask him what time he meant to sleep.
Near ten he turned the knob. There was a hiss, a whistle, then, faint and far off, a woman’s voice reading the warning for fishermen: strong winds, rough sea, boats must not venture out. Unni sat back. He did not know what he had expected. Not this, a stranger reading wind speeds to boats that were not his.
His mother had stopped scraping. “He listened to this every night,” she said. “He never went near the sea in his life.”
Unni turned the volume up a little. Outside, the rain kept on. Neither of them reached across to turn the radio off.
Which of the following best describes Unni as he works on the radio?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → Earnest: he keeps patiently at the repair, though unsure what he hopes to hear from it
Earnest means serious and sincere. Unni works at the radio with great care for hours, but he cannot say what he wants from it.
- He pauses the video “every few seconds”. Then he works on by lamplight from evening till about ten.
- When the voice comes, the passage says, “He did not know what he had expected.” So he was not sure what he hoped to hear.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: Skilled: he mends the set with ease, having learnt the work from his father — Incorrect. Contradicted: He needs a video to start with. After that he works “by guesswork”, which is not ease.
Option 3: Defiant: he mends the set to prove his mother wrong about its moods — Incorrect. Wrong reason: Defiant means openly refusing to obey or agree. The mother only makes a fond joke about the radio. Unni does not argue or try to prove anything.
Option 4: Restless: he hurries through the job, afraid the lamp will fail before he is done — Incorrect. Misread: It is the phone battery that runs low, not the lamp. He works slowly and keeps at it for hours.