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.
As used in the passage, the word ‘temperamental’ in the mother’s words about the radio means
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → working at some times and failing at others, for no clear reason
Used for a machine, temperamental means not reliable: it works only when it feels like it.
- The mother says Achan had to “slap it and call it names before it would play”. So the radio did not always start on its own.
- This fits a set that works one day and fails the next. Example: Our old scooter is temperamental and will not start on cold mornings.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: easily upset and given to sudden changes of mood — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: This is the meaning of the word for a person. A radio has no moods. Example: The temperamental singer walked off the stage over a small mistake.
Option 2: old-fashioned, with parts that are hard to find — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The set is old, but the mother’s word is about how it worked. The passage says nothing about its parts being hard to find.
Option 3: delicate and likely to break if handled roughly — Incorrect. Contradicted: Achan slapped the radio to make it play. A set that breaks when handled roughly would not survive that.