Direction: You have two brief passages with 5 questions following each passage. Read the passages carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives.
PASSAGE
The Law is an ass, declared Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist, and it often seems he was right. For punishment does not always fit the crime and it rarely happens that a prison term reforms a criminal”. Consider the following two cases. The first one had happened in a village in Madurai District. One Gopal Yadhav, a hard-core criminal undergoing life sentence in the Madurai Prison came out on bail for two days to perform the last rites of his mother. But he was rearrested on the same evening on the charges of murdering his neighbour’s son to settle old scores. The second case too came to Madurai Court recently. Deserted by her husband a drunkard, his grief-stricken wife mixed rat poison in the food and gave it to her four children aged between 1 year 6 months and 9 years. Before she couldswallow the same food she was unable to bear the pitiable sight of her children writhing in pain. She rushed them to hospital where she disclosed everything. She was able to save the lives of the first three children, but the law of the country awarded her two years imprisonment (later commuted to one year) on the charges of plotting to kill her children. Would you say women like her are a danger to the society ? Would you call them criminals ? It is high time that we found other ways of registering our disapproval of wrong doing. To imprison the bad is expedient – when they are dangerous. To imprison the mad and the merely sad, as we do, is not only unnecessary, it is uncivilised.
SOME IMPORTANT WORDS
settle old scores : to hurt/punishsomebody/who has harmed/cheated you in the past.
writhing : suffering a lot.
expedient : an action that is useful/necessary for a particular purpose, but not always fair or right.
lifer : a person who has been sent to prison for whole life.
hard-core : stubbornly resistant to change/improvement
bail : security - release from prison by payment of money
last rites : a ceremony at which a dead person is buried
deserted : left by a person ; abandoned
grief-stricken : feeling extremely sad because of something that has happened
pitiable : deserving pity/causing you to feel pity
commuted : to replace one punishment with another that is less severe