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.
Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?
(A) The students began building without a plan because they believed errors in the game would be easy to undo.
(B) The writer believes that the freedom to break and rebuild is what trains students to plan.
(C) The writer suggests that errors a teacher corrects are less likely to stay with students than errors they must repair themselves.
(D) The inspector was pleased by how closely the class model followed the real Mohenjo-daro.
Choose the correct answer from the options given below:
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → (A) and (C) only
Each statement is checked against the passage.
(A) The students began building without a plan because they believed errors in the game would be easy to undo. — Correct.
- “Nobody thought one was needed”, because any block “can be broken and put back”.
- A mistake “seems to cost nothing”.
(B) The writer believes that the freedom to break and rebuild is what trains students to plan. — Incorrect.
- The writer says the opposite.
- This freedom “invites the opposite habit”.
(C) The writer suggests that errors a teacher corrects are less likely to stay with students than errors they must repair themselves. — Correct.
- A worksheet mistake is corrected in red and “forgotten by Friday”.
- The students learnt patience from “living with their own careless foundations”.
(D) The inspector was pleased by how closely the class model followed the real Mohenjo-daro. — Incorrect.
- The inspector “mainly wanted to know why Mohenjo-daro had a pig farm”.
- That is a puzzled question, not praise for the model.