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.
The writer’s remark that ‘much of the enthusiasm is really relief that the children are quiet’ implies that
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 3
The correct answer is Option (3) → part of the praise for classroom games reflects what they do for teachers, not what students learn
The enthusiasm (strong liking and praise) is for using games in schools. The writer says much of it is really “relief that the children are quiet”.
- Relief that children are quiet is felt by the adults who manage the class. It says nothing about what the children have learnt.
- The writer adds that a class can spend an hour in the game and learn “mainly how to make a roof look good”.
- So the remark implies that some of the praise comes from the comfort games give teachers, not from real learning.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: students learn more in a silent classroom than in one where they talk to each other — Incorrect. Contradicted: The writer doubts that quiet means learning. The real lesson in the passage came while the group “argued”.
Option 2: teachers bring games into class mainly to avoid the hard work of preparing their own lessons — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The remark is about why games are praised. The passage says nothing about teachers avoiding lesson preparation.
Option 4: Minecraft keeps students so absorbed that they hardly speak to their own group — Incorrect. Contradicted: The drains group “argued, sulked” over their mistake. They did speak to one another.