Comprehension: Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.
Comprehension:
Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.
When I was very little, I caught the travel bug. It started after my grandparents first brought
me to their home in France and I have now been to twenty-nine different countries. Each has
given me a unique learning experience.
At five, I marvelled at the Eiffel Tower in the City of Lights. When I was eight, I stood in the
heart of Piazza San Marco feeding hordes of pigeons, then glided down Venetian waterways
on sleek gondolas. At thirteen, I saw the ancient, megalithic structure of Stonehenge and
walked along the Great Wall of China, amazed that the thousand-year-old stones were still in
place.
It was through exploring cultures around the world that I first became interested in language.
It began with French, which taught me the importance of pronunciation. I remember once
asking a store owner in Paris where Rue des Pyramides was. But when I pronounced it PYR–
a–mides instead of pyr–A–mides, with more accent on the A, she looked at me bewildered.
In the eighth grade, I became fascinated with Spanish and aware of its similarities with
English through cognates. Baseball in Spanish, for example, is béisbol, which looks different
but sounds nearly the same. This was incredible to me as it made speech and comprehension
more fluid, and even today I find that cognates come to the rescue when I forget how to say
something in Spanish.
Then, in high school, I developed an enthusiasm for Chinese. As I studied Chinese at my
school, I marvelled how if just one stroke was missing from a character, the meaning is lost. I
loved how long words were formed by combining simpler characters, so Huǒ meaning fire
and Shān meaning mountain can be joined to create Huǒshān, which means volcano. I love
spending hours at a time practicing the characters and I can feel the beauty and rhythm as I
form them.
Identify the tone of the given passage.
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Correct answer: (C) Narrative and descriptive
Explanation
The author narrates personal travel and language-learning experiences in order and describes places vividly, so the tone is narrative and descriptive.