Vocabulary - Synonyms Antonyms One Word Substitution Idioms question bank (Language I (English))

Lata stood outside the hall for a minute. Sunlight poured onto the stone steps. The edge of her middle finger was smeared with dark blue ink, and she looked at it, frowning. She was close to tears. Other English students stood on the steps and chatted. A post-mortem of the paper was being held, and it was dominated by an optimistic and chubby girl who was ticking off on her fingers the various points she had answered correctly. 'This is one paper I know I have done really well,” she said. ‘Especially the ‘King Lear' question. I think that the answer was ‘Yes'.” Others were looking excited or depressed. Everyone agreed that several of the questions were far harder than they had needed to be. A knot of history students stood not far away, discussing their paper, which had been held simultaneously in the same building. One of them was the young man who had brought himself to Lata's attention in the Imperial Book Depot, and he was looking a little worried. He had spent a great deal of time these last few months in extra-curricular activities — particularly cricket — and this had taken its toll upon his performance. Lata walked to a bench beneath the gulmohar tree and sat down to collect herself. When she got home for lunch, she would be pestered with a hundred questions about how well she had done. She looked down at the red flowers that lay scattered at her feet. In her head, she could still hear the buzzing of the fly. The young man, though he had been talking to his classmates, had noticed her walking down the steps. When she sat down on the far bench under the tree, he decided to have a word with her. He told his friends that he had to go home for lunch — that his father would be waiting for him — and hurried along the path past the gulmohar. As he came to the bench, he uttered an exclamation of surprise and stopped.

Directions: Read the extract given below and answer the questions follow by selecting the correct / most appropriate options: Language 2
Field Studies Loss of Learning During the Pandemic (extract)
Studies across the world have clearly indicated that school closures have significant negative impact on learning levels of children, with children from disadvantaged backgrounds being affected more severely. The loss of learning is not simply the curricular learning that children would have acquired if schools had remained open. It includes the ability that children have forgotten due to lack of usage, for example the ability to read with understanding, the ability to write, and the ability to perform basic mathematical operations like addition and multiplication. This regression further compromises new learning since these abilities are foundational to all further learning. This situation must be juxtaposed with the fact that we are already facing a crisis in learning, particularly with respect to foundational literacy and numeracy. At the time of writing this report, schools have been closed for almost an entire academic year. A child who was in class 1 in March 2020 will move to class 3 in 2021 without having engaged with the curriculum of class 2, except through sporadic online or community-based engagements. Thus, the loss of learning during the pandemic comprises the 'forgetting/ regression' of a proportion of abilities children already knew, including the loss of foundational abilities that make it possible for children to take up further learning, and the absence of curricular learning for an entire academic year. Examples of foundational abilities would be the ability to read numbers up to 99 in class 2 that forms the basis of performing more complex mathematical operations in higher classes. Similarly, for children in class 2, the ability to respond to comprehension questions based on a story forms the basis for acquiring higher order abilities related to reading and writing. The absence of any one of these foundational abilities manifests not only in the inability to acquire more complex abilities, but also in a disconnect from learning, peers and schooling, often causing children to drop out of school altogether.