Directions: Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow. Certain words are given in quoted form to help you locate them.
For forty years Raghav had carried passengers across the river in a wooden boat that he repainted every monsoon. He knew the current the way other men knew the roads of their village: where it ran fast after the rains, where sandbanks rose in the dry months, and where a careless boatman could be swept towards the rocks below the temple. When the government announced that a bridge would be built a kilometre upstream, his neighbours came to commiserate. They assumed he would be ruined, and some of them, he suspected, were not entirely sorry.
Raghav surprised them by attending every public meeting about the bridge. He did not protest. Instead, he asked questions that the engineers had not expected from a man who had never finished school. How deep would the pillars go? Had they measured the river in August, when it carried whole trees, or only in March, when a child could wade across? The engineers answered politely at first and impatiently later. One of them told him that the designs had been checked by experts in the capital and that the river held no secrets from modern instruments.
The bridge opened two years later, and for a while Raghav's boat sat 'idle'. He took to mending nets for fishermen and sitting on the steps of the ghat in the evenings, watching lorries cross where his passengers once had. Then, in the third monsoon, the river rose higher than anyone had seen in a generation. The water 'undermined' the soil around two of the pillars, and the bridge was closed while inspectors argued about whether it was safe.
For six weeks, Raghav's boat was the only way across. He refused to raise his fare, though he could easily have doubled it, and he worked from dawn until the light failed. When a young engineer came to the ghat to ask how the old ferry had managed to keep running through such a flood, Raghav took him out on the water and showed him the line of calm water that formed each year behind the sandbank, a channel that no chart recorded.
The bridge was eventually repaired, with deeper foundations than before. The engineer's report thanked 'local river users' for information about seasonal flow. Raghav, who could read only slowly, asked a neighbour to read it aloud to him twice. Then he went back to mending nets, and the following monsoon, he repainted his boat as usual.
Q1.Why did Raghav's neighbours come to 'commiserate' with him?
- They assumed that the new bridge would destroy his livelihood as a ferryman
- They had learnt that he had been injured near the rocks below the temple
- They had heard that his boat had been damaged in the monsoon
- They believed the engineers had insulted him at a public meeting
- They wanted him to lead a protest against the bridge
Q2.What does the remark that some neighbours 'were not entirely sorry' suggest?
- Some of them were planning to buy his boat cheaply
- Some of them had secretly asked the government to build the bridge
- Some of them believed the bridge would never actually be built
- Some of them took a quiet satisfaction in the misfortune they expected him to suffer
- Some of them were sorry only because they would lose a cheap ferry
Q3.Raghav's questions at the public meetings were mainly concerned with which of the following?
- How long it would take to complete the bridge
- How much compensation he would receive for losing his trade
- Whether boatmen would be employed to build the bridge
- Why the bridge was being built upstream instead of near the temple
- Whether the design took into account the river's behaviour at its fiercest, during the monsoon