Grammar Based Questions - 1 | English for CLAT PDF Download

Directions: Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow

Passage 1

Monseigneur, one of the great lords in power at the Court, held his fortnightly reception in his grand hotel in Paris. Monseigneur was in his inner room, his sanctuary of sanctuaries, the Holiest of Holiests to the crowd of worshippers in the suite of rooms without. Monseigneur was about to take his chocolate. Monseigneur could swallow a great many things with ease, and was by some few sullen minds supposed to be rather rapidly swallowing France; but, his morning's chocolate could not so much as get into the throat of Monseigneur, without the aid of four strong men besides the Cook.
Yes. It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decoration, and the Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur's lips. One lacquey carried the chocolate-pot into the sacred presence; a second, milled and frothed the chocolate with the little instrument he bore for that function; a third, presented the favoured napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold watches), poured the chocolate out.
It was impossible for Monseigneur to dispense with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold his high place under the admiring Heavens. Deep would have been the blot upon his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three men; he must have died of two. Monseigneur had been out at a little supper last night, where the Comedy and the Grand Opera were charmingly represented. Monseigneur was out at a little supper most nights, with fascinating company. So polite and so impressible was Monseigneur, that the Comedy and the Grand Opera had far more influence with him in the tiresome articles of state affairs and state secrets, than the needs of all France.
A happy circumstance for France, as the like always is for all countries similarly favoured! always was for England (by way of example), in the regretted days of the merry Stuart who sold it. Monseigneur had one truly noble idea of general public business, which was, to let everything go on in its own way; of particular public business, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea that it must all go his way tend to his own power and pocket.
Of his pleasures, general and particular, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea, that the world was made for them. The text of his order (altered from the original by only a pronoun, which is not much) ran: "The earth and the fulness thereof are mine, saith Monseigneur." Yet, Monseigneur had slowly found that vulgar embarrassments crept into his affairs, both private and public; and he had, as to both classes of affairs, allied himself perforce with a Farmer-General.
Q1: Identify the type of the underlined pronoun in the following sentence from the paragraph: "Monseigneur was about to take his chocolate."
(a) Personal pronoun
(b) Reflexive pronoun
(c) Demonstrative pronoun
(d) Possessive pronoun

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Q2: Choose the sentence from the paragraph that uses a modal verb.
(a) Monseigneur had been out at a little supper last night.
(b) It was impossible for Monseigneur to dispense with one of these attendants.
(c) One lacquey carried the chocolate-pot into the sacred presence.
(d) Monseigneur was out at a little supper most nights.

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Q3: Find the sentence in the paragraph that exemplifies the use of a past perfect tense.
(a) Monseigneur had been out at a little supper last night.
(b) It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decoration.
(c) Monseigneur could swallow a great many things with ease.
(d) The Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his pocket.

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Q4: Which sentence from the paragraph contains a prepositional phrase?
(a) Monseigneur was in his inner room, his sanctuary of sanctuaries.
(b) Monseigneur could swallow a great many things with ease.
(c) Yes. It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decoration.
(d) The earth and the fulness thereof are mine, saith Monseigneur.

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Q5: Identify the sentence in the paragraph that demonstrates the use of a compound adjective.
(a) Monseigneur was in his inner room, his sanctuary of sanctuaries.
(b) It was impossible for Monseigneur to dispense with one of these attendants.
(c) One lacquey carried the chocolate-pot into the sacred presence.
(d) All four ablaze with gorgeous decoration.

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Passage 2

I grew up in a small town not far from Kalimpong. In pre-liberalization India, everything arrived late: not just material things but also ideas. Magazines — old copies of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic — arrived late too, after the news had become stale by months or, often, years. This temporal gap turned journalism into literature, news into legend, and historical events into something akin to plotless stories. But like those who knew no other life, we accepted this as the norm. The dearth of reading material in towns and villages in socialist India is hard to imagine, and it produced two categories of people: those who stopped reading after school or college, and those — including children — who read anything they could find. I read road signs with the enthusiasm that attaches to reading thrillers. When the iterant kabadiwala, collector of papers, magazines, and rejected things, visited our neighbourhood, I rushed to the house where he was doing business. He bought things at unimaginably low prices from those who’d stopped having any use for them, and I rummaged through his sacks of old magazines. Sometimes, on days when business was good, he allowed me a couple of copies of Sportsworld magazine for free. I’d run home and, ignoring my mother’s scolding, plunge right in — consuming news about India’s victory in the Benson and Hedges Cup....
Two takeaways from these experiences have marked my understanding of the provincial reader’s life: the sense of belatedness, of everything coming late, and the desire for pleasure in language. .... Speaking of belatedness, the awareness of having been born at the wrong time in history, o f inventing things that had already been discovered elsewhere, far away, without our knowledge or cooperation, is a moment of epiphany and deep sadness. I remember a professor’s choked voice, narrating to me how all the arguments he’d made in his doctoral dissertation, written over many, many years of hard work (for there indeed was a time when PhDs were written over decades), had suddenly come to naught after he’d discovered the work of C.W.E. Bigsby. This, I realised as I grew older, was one of the characteristics of provincial life: that they (usually males) were saying trite things with the confidence of someone declaring them for the first time. I, therefore, grew up surrounded by would-be Newtons who claimed to have discovered gravity (again). There’s a deep sense of tragedy attending this sort of thing — the sad embarrassment of always arriving after the party is over. And there’s a harsh word for that sense of belatedness: “dated.” What rescues it is the unpredictability of these anachronistic “discoveries” — the randomness and haphazardness involved in mapping connections among thoughts and ideas, in a way that hasn’t yet been professionalised.
[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “The Provincial Reader”, by Sumana Roy, Los Angeles Review of Books]

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Passage 3

The call of self-expression turned the village of the internet into a city, which expanded at time-lapse speed, social connections bristling like neurons in every direction. At twelve, I was writing five hundred words a day on a public LiveJournal. By twenty-five, my job was to write things that would attract, ideally, a hundred thousand strangers per post. 
Now I’m thirty, and most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and its mazes of incessant forced connection —this feverish, electric, unliveable hell. The curdling of the social internet happened slowly and then all at once. The tipping point, I’d guess, was around 2012. People were losing excitement about the internet, starting to articulate a set of new truisms. 
Facebook had become tedious, trivial, exhausting. Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying function as a three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and success. Twitter, for all its discursive promise, was where everyone tweeted complaints at airlines and moaned about articles that had been commissioned to make people moan. The dream of a better, truer self on the internet was slipping away. Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation. 
The freedom promised by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest potential lay in the realm of misuse. Even as we became increasingly sad and ugly on the internet, the mirage of the better online self continued to glimmer. As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act. You have to communicate in order to maintain an internet presence. And, because the internet’s central platforms are built around personal profiles, it can seem—first at a mechanical level, and later on as an encoded instinct —like the main purpose of this communication is to make yourself look good. Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones, and then overtake them. 
This is why everyone tries to look so hot and well-travelled on Instagram; why everyone seems so smug and triumphant on Facebook; and why, on Twitter, making a righteous political statement has come to seem, for many people, like a political good in itself. The everyday madness perpetuated by the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions personal identity as the centre of the universe. It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection. 
[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, by Jia Tolentino, Random House, 2019.]

Q1: Identify the type of the underlined pronoun in the following sentence from the paragraph: "The call of self-expression turned the village of the internet into a city, which expanded at time-lapse speed..." (a) Personal pronoun
(b) Reflexive pronoun
(c) Demonstrative pronoun
(d) Relative pronoun

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Q2: Choose the sentence from the paragraph that uses a modal verb.
(a) Facebook had become tedious, trivial, exhausting.
(b) The tipping point, I’d guess, was around 2012.
(c) Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying function...
(d) Even as we became increasingly sad and ugly on the internet...

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Q3: Find the sentence in the paragraph that exemplifies the use of a past continuous tense.
(a) The curdling of the social internet happened slowly and then all at once.
(b) The freedom promised by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest potential lay in the realm of misuse.
(c) Even as we became increasingly sad and ugly on the internet...
(d) Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation.

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Q4: Which sentence from the paragraph contains a prepositional phrase?
(a) The freedom promised by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest potential lay in the realm of misuse.
(b) The tipping point, I’d guess, was around 2012.
(c) In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people.
(d) Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation.

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Q5: Identify the sentence in the paragraph that demonstrates the use of a compound adjective.
(a) The curdling of the social internet happened slowly and then all at once.
(b) Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying function as a three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and success.
(c) On Twitter, making a righteous political statement has come to seem, for many people, like a political good in itself.
(d) This is why everyone tries to look so hot and well-travelled on Instagram.

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