Question

9. Read the following sentences from “The Destructors”: The new recruit had been with the gang since the beginning of the summer holidays, and there were possibilities about his brooding silence that all recognized. He never wasted a word even to tell his name until that was required of him by the rules. When he said “Trevor” it was a statement of a fact, not as it would have been with the others a statement of shame or defiance. Question: Which word best describes Trevor? A) cautious b) introspective c) peculiar d) threatening

Answer 1

Answer:

CORRECT OPTION IS: B) Introspective.

Explanation:

The destructors is a short text published in 1954 by the English novelist Graham Greene. Nowadays the piece could be found as a part of Twenty-One stories, a book that collects different stories made by the same author. Trevor is the protagonist of the mini-story; he is also called just “T” and when his crew (“Wormsley Common Gang” he had a lot of adventures.

It is always important, when we are reading, to imagine the characters that appear in a fictional story; the characterization we have to do is not only physical, instead, we have to think and take also in account all the little cues that allow us to give them personality’s qualities. The little excerpt that we have here helps us to do it and, following what the lines are saying we can affirm that the correct option is B: INTROSPECTIVE because an introspective person don’t talk a lot, in fact, the introspective prefer to just act, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not interested in what are they doing; this, as we can read, is the case of “T”, who is the protagonist of the novel. He is silently and this is why he never wastes a word, but we know that he always follows the rules: “He never wasted a word even to tell his name until that was required of him by the rules”.

Option A, cautious cannot be the one because in these lines we don’t find evidence to characterize him as cautious or incautious; option C, Peculiar neither can’t be true because the word “peculiar” includes a lot of meanings that are not specified here, making it such general that we can’t affirm that; and finally option D, Threatening is not successful due to we don’t find any information that leads us to think that Trevor is threatening.

Answer 2

According to the sentences shared from The Destructors, the word that best describes Trevor is peculiar.

From those sentences we can't tell that Trevor's silence is because he is cautious or introspective. Nothing in those lines tells us any other thing for us to understand that he is one of those two things.

On the other hand, we can know from the sentence "When he said 'Trevor' it was a statement of a fact, not as it would have been with the others a statement of shame or defiance" that he didn't mean to be threatening, so the choice left is C.

Peculiar, as an adjective, means that someone clearly distinguishes from the rest for some personal characteristic. Trevor's attitude is clearly different from the rest of the gang and it is something that distinguishes him.