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 phrase ‘a slow kind of consequence’, as used in the last paragraph, refers to
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → the effect of an error that stays in view until the students deal with it
A consequence is the result or effect of something that was done. The writer calls it “slow” because the effect does not go away quickly.
- The next sentences explain the phrase. A worksheet mistake is “forgotten by Friday”. A mistake in a shared world “stays on the screen, in everyone’s way, until someone repairs it”.
- So the slow consequence is the effect of an error that stays in front of the students. They have to live with it and fix it themselves.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: a punishment that the teacher hands out only some days after the mistake — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The teacher gives no punishment in the passage. The effect comes from the mistake itself staying on the screen.
Option 3: the gradual rise in skill that comes from playing a game over many weeks — Incorrect. Wrong meaning: This reads “consequence” as a gain from practice. The writer uses it for the effect of a mistake.
Option 4: the long time it takes to build a large city one block at a time — Incorrect. Wrong link: The word “slow” here is about how long a mistake stays, not about the speed of building.