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Jayatee Bhattacharya, Lovely Professional University Unit 7: Comprehension Passages

Unit 7: Comprehension Passages Notes

CONTENTS

Objectives
Introduction
7.1 Comprehension Passage 1: The Bet
7.2 Comprehension 2: Good Manners
7.3 Comprehension Passage 3: ‘Of Studies’

7.4 Comprehension Passage 4: Pt. Nehru’s Speech

Objectives

After studying this unit, you will be able to:
z Realise what are comprehension passages

z Describe the use of reading comprehension passages
Introduction

Comprehension means the capacity of the mind to perceive and understand. Reading
comprehension would be the capacity to perceive and understand the meanings communicated
by texts. The comprehension passages have academic content and style and include topics from
a variety of fi elds including arts, sciences, social sciences, etc. You do not need to have specifi c
knowledge of the topic to answer the comprehension questions. You are required to read the text
carefully and look for the answers or hints from within the text.

In this unit includes five general comprehension passages. You are required to read them carefully
and then do the exercises that follow.

7.1 Comprehension Passage 1: The Bet

It was a dark autumn night. The old banker was walking up and down his study and remembering
how, fifteen years before, he had given a party one autumn evening. There had been many clever

men there, and there had been interesting conversations. Among other things they had talked
of capital punishment. The majority of the guests, among whom were many journalists and
intellectual men, disapproved of the death penalty. They considered that form of punishment out
of date, immoral, and unsuitable for Christian States. In the opinion of some of them the death
penalty ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life. “I don’t agree with you,” said
their host the banker. “I have not tried either the death penalty or imprisonment for life, but if one
may judge a priori, the death penalty is more moral and more humane than imprisonment for
life. Capital punishment kills a man at once, but lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly. Which
executioner is the more humane, he who kills you in a few minutes or he who drags the life out
of you in the course of many years?”
“Both are equally immoral,” observed one of the guests, “for they both have the same object - to
take away life. The State is not God. It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when
it wants to.”

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