Read the following extract and answer the questions that follow:  “Sleeping beside his granny again!” Father said. “No wonder he wanted to be asleep before I could return home – clever boy!” Mother lost her temper. “You let him sleep where he likes. You needn’t risk his life again…” Father mumbled as he went in to change, “All right, mollycoddle and spoil him as much as you like. Only don’t blame me afterwards…” (a) Who is the ‘clever boy’ being talked about here? (b) Why did the clever boy want to sleep before his father’s arrival?

10. After the story is finished, what does the boy ask his grandfather before he leaves?

The poet shares his feelings regarding the relationship with his son. The poet explains they he and his son have spent many years in the same house. However, in spite of spending so many years together, the father still doesn’t understand his son. Furthermore, the father doesn’t know anything about his son. He doesn’t know what his son likes or what he dislikes. The father made an effort to build up a relationship with his son since he was small. However, over the years, change has come in his son. As a grown-up man, his son certainly has changed.The father acknowledges his role in the communication gap between him and his son. He explains that despite his efforts, things are not turning to his side.  He says that his son was in a place that he could not access.  Furthermore, the father tells us that their communication is like the communication of strangers. It seems there is not much attachment between the two. Moreover, there has been no signs of understanding between the father and son. His child had a resemblance in appearance with his father. However, in spite of this resemblance in appearance, the father didn’t know what his son loved.There is a silence between the father and the son. As a child, his son was of a prodigal nature. His father had a desire for his son to return home, the one he knew. The father does not want his son to move around in the world and make his own world. The father was willing to express his forgiveness to his son. Furthermore, the father was willing to let go of the sorrows that he had inside of him due to the existing distance between them. The father certainly had a desire to love him again.Now, the son speaks for the first time and expresses his feelings. Furthermore, the son has a feeling of sadness about the distance between them. Furthermore, the son tells that he is at a point in his life where he does not understand himself. Moreover, the son explains that his anger is due to sadness. Hence, it becomes pretty clear that both the father and son feel the same frustration due to this gap in the relationship. Also, both the father and son are willing to forgive each other. However, they are failing to find a solution to their problem. Both of them put out an empty hand for each other but in futility.

“George, I wish you’d look at the nursery.”1“What’s wrong with it?”“I don’t know.”“Well, then.”[5]“I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist2 in to look at it.”“What would a psychologist want with a nursery?”“You know very well what he’d want.” His wife paused in the middle of the kitchen and watched the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four.“It’s just that the nursery is different now than it was.”“All right, let’s have a look.”[10]They walked down the hall of their soundproofed Happylife Home, which had cost them thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them. Their approach sensitized 3a switch somewhere and the nursery light flicked on when they came within ten feet of it. Similarly, behind them, in the halls, lights went on and off as they left them behind, with a soft automaticity.Q1“Well,” said George Hadley.They stood on the thatched floor of the nursery. It was forty feet across by forty feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as much as the rest of the house. “But nothing’s too good for our children,” George had said.The nursery was silent. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high noon. The walls were blank and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede4 into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt5 appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.George Hadley felt the perspiration6 start on his brow.[15]“Let’s get out of this sun,” he said. “This is a little too real. But I don’t see anything wrong.”“Wait a moment, you’ll see,” said his wife.Now the hidden odorophonics were beginning to blow a wind of odor at the two people in the middle of the baked veldtland.The hot straw smell of lion grass, the cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the great rusty smell of animals, the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air. And now the sounds: the thump of distant antelope feet on grassy sod, the papery rustling of vultures. A shadow passed through the sky. The shadow flickered on George Hadley’s upturned, sweating face.“Filthy creatures,” he heard his wife say.“The vultures.”[20]“You see, there are the lions, far over, that way. Now they’re on their way to the water hole. They’ve just been eating,” said Lydia. “I don’t know what.”“Some animal.” George Hadley put his hand up to shield off the burning light from his squinted eyes. “A zebra or a baby giraffe, maybe.”“Are you sure?” His wife sounded peculiarly tense.“No, it’s a little late to be sure,” he said, amused. “Nothing over there I can see but cleaned bone, and the vultures dropping for what’s left.”“Did you hear that scream?” she asked.[25]“No.”“About a minute ago?”“Sorry, no.”Q2The lions were coming. And again George Hadley was filled with admiration for the mechanical genius who had conceived this room. A miracle of efficiency selling for an absurdly low price. Every home should have one. Oh, occasionally they frightened you with their clinical accuracy, they startled you, gave you a twinge, but most of the time what fun for everyone, not only your own son and daughter, but for yourself when you felt like a quick jaunt7 to a foreign land, a quick change of scenery. Well, here it was!And here were the lions now, fifteen feet away, so real, so feverishly and startlingly real that you could feel the prickling fur on your hand, and your mouth was stuffed with the dusty upholstery smell of their heated pelts,8 and the yellow of them was in your eyes like the yellow of an exquisite French tapestry, 9the yellows of lions and summer grass, and the sound of the matted lion lungs exhaling on the silent noontide, and the smell of meat from the panting, dripping mouths.[30]The lions stood looking at George and Lydia Hadley

Neither the girls nor the boy___ to sleep.A. wantB. wantsC. pretendD. has pretend

A boy stood before the kitchen glass combing his hair. He combed slowly and painstakingly, arranging his brown hair in a smooth hillock over his forehead. He did not seem to pay any attention to the conversation. “Sammy, did you know father was goin' to build a new barn?” asked the girl. The boy combed assiduously. “Sammy!” He turned, and showed a face like his father's under his smooth crest of hair. “Yes, I s'pose I did,” he said, reluctantly. –“The Revolt of Mother,” Mary E. Wilkins Use context clues to figure out the meaning of the phrase "smooth hillock." Write one to three sentences explaining your definition and the context clue that helped you.