Question 132
MediumOriginal questionNobody in the village could remember exactly when Hari Prasad started planting trees along the highway. Some said it was the year his son left for the city; others said it was after the long , when the bare road so fiercely in the heat that the buses would not stop.
What everybody remembered was the watering. Every evening for thirty years, he walked the four kilometres to the last with two buckets on a pole across his shoulders, and walked back in the dark. People laughed at first. Then they stopped laughing and started giving him directions to places where a tree would grow.
The trees grew slowly, as trees do. A tree planted by a man of forty gives its best shade to a man of seventy. By the time Hari Prasad's neem and peepal trees had met over the road, he walked with a stick, and a boy from the school carried the buckets.
Last summer a came from the city to ask him why he had done it. He thought about the question for a long time.
"I was hot," he said at last. "The road was hot. I thought, somebody should do something."
"But why you?"
He looked up at the green roof over the road, where a lorry had stopped in the shade and its driver was asleep in the cab.
"I was the somebody who was there," he said.
What does the change from "People laughed at first" to "started giving him directions" show?
Show the answer and explanation
Correct answer: C
Explanation
At first the villagers laughed at him. Later they "stopped laughing" and suggested places where trees would grow.
Mockery turned into support as they saw what he was doing.
Worth noting
"Giving him directions" means telling him where to plant, not that he was lost.
- Concept
- Interpreting a change in how characters behave
- Typical timeTypical
- 45 s
- Your timeYours
- —
Ten questions from Narrative passages, at your own pace.