Practicing Success

Target Exam

CUET

Subject

English

Chapter

Comprehension - (Narrative / Factual)

Question:

Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

I have good memories of St Cyprian's, among a horde of bad ones. Sometimes on summer afternoons there were wonderful expeditions across the Downs to a village called Birling Gap, or to Beachy Head, where one bathed dangerously among the boulders and came home covered with cuts. And there were still more wonderful midsummer evenings when, as a special treat, we were not driven off to bed as usual but allowed to wander about the grounds in the long twilight, ending up with a plunge into the swimming bathe at about nine o'clock. There was the joy of waking early on summer mornings and getting in an hour's undisturbed reading (Ian Hay, Thackeray, Kipling and H. G. Wells were the favourite authors of my boyhood) in the sunlit, sleeping dormitory. There was also cricket, which I was no good at but with which I conducted a sort of hopeless love affair up to the age of about eighteen. And there was the pleasure of keeping caterpillars — the silky green and purple pussmoth, the ghostly green poplar-hawk, the privet-hawk, large as one's third finger, specimens of which could be illicitly purchased for sixpence at a shop in the town — and, when one could escape long enough from the master who was ‘taking the walk’, there was the excitement of dredging the dew-ponds on the Downs for enormous newts with orange-coloured bellies. This business of being out for a walk, coming across something of fascinating interest and then being dragged away from it by a yell from the master, like a dog jerked onwards by the leash, is an important feature of school life, and helps to build up the conviction, so strong in many children, that the things you most want to do are always unattainable.

What is the ‘moral’ the boy draws from his childhood experiences?

Options:

Do not collect insects like caterpillars

Only do the things your masters tell you to.

Do not walk alone in the grounds.

Things you enjoy doing are always unreachable

Correct Answer:

Things you enjoy doing are always unreachable

Explanation:

The correct answer is OPTION 4 - Things you enjoy doing are always unreachable.

The ‘moral’ the boy draws from his childhood experiences is: Things you enjoy doing are always unreachable

The passage reflects on the writer's childhood experiences of engaging in activities that were often interrupted by authority figures, creating a sense that the things he most wanted to do were always unattainable. This recurring theme suggests the writer's realization that enjoyable activities often felt just out of reach, reinforcing the idea that desired experiences are frequently elusive.